Children Swimming and Water

As the summer approaches, everyone looks forward to sunny days, blue skies, and for kids, long holidays & lazy afternoons swimming, with horizons that change as they grow, by month and by year.

You can’t protect your child from every hazard, seen, or unseen, but there is an insurance that you can take out and equip your child with, and that is having your child at swimming lessons, and teaching them to swim.

Today’s school curriculum includes swimming lessons, but due to staffing pressures and logistics, these may not happen in some cases. However most schools do, or can, organise swimming lessons after school, run either by themselves or appointed independent experts.

It is not possible to “drown proof” anyone, but kids will be kids, and making sure that they have the ability to swim, is a lifelong skill you can take out that policy for.

It is a sad, unfortunate fact, that statistics show that at the height of summer, some children, probably unsupervised, will seek out water, simply by its attraction, and statistically there will be serious and possibly tragic consequences.

Water, especially in the heat of summer, has an attraction to almost all of us, but particularly for children, and even the safest seeming, or innocent looking pieces of water carry potential dangers, particularly to non-swimmers.

The sea can look inviting, especially to kids, but it may hide different moods and snares. Shingle beaches lead to deeper water quite quickly, but in some cases, the shingle forms shelves and just stepping a few feet forward can take one over a shelf, and drop virtually straight down several feet at once, takin g a child, or even adult way out of their depth in just a few steps.

Currents and rip tides can occur unseen in the water, and although strong swimmers can usually ride the current and swim across it to find shore further down the beach, no-swimmers cannot.

Open waters inland can appear to most adults a pleasant scene to observe, but perhaps of dubious hygiene, and certainly nowhere to think of entering, but to children, it can be a whole new world of adventure and exploration.

Disused quarries can hide the fact that the sheer post-excavation walls that fall down to the surface of the water, can continue being sheer walls straight down for scores, if not hundreds of feet.

Canals and rivers can carry weirs and locks and more along their lengths, exciting places for adventures, potential scenes for tragedy.

You can’t “drown proof” your kids, but you can help big time with swimming lessons while you can.