Safety First Swim School

So sad. Twins are more likely to drown as they follow each other to the water. I have seen so many stories of twin drownings over the years. A sad reminder to be extra vigilant and ensure proper ADULT supervision.

🔗: bit.ly/4aOwsj0

Twin 5-year-old sisters died in an apparent drowning after they were found unresponsive in a Florida vacation home's swimming pool on Friday, June 12.

Summer session starts in a week along with warmer weather and more time best water. There is still time and a few spaces left, but they could go fast! First come, first serve for lesson times based on registration.

Self rescue swim lessons are the best layer of protection for any child to make them as safe as possible in and around the water.

Today is International Water Safety Day!🤩🌍

International Water Safety Day is dedicated to increasing global awareness about the critical issue of drowning and promoting the education of children and families on how to stay safe around water.

Here’s how you can participate:
🏊‍♂️ Embracing the 5 Layers of Protection to enhance safety around water.
📢 Raising awareness about water safety within your own community.
🤝 Supporting local aquatic centers through donations or volunteer work.
🎟️ Participating in an event near you.

Take an extra step towards water safety by downloading our water safety posters.

They’re a great resource for schools, community centers, or even for your home.

https://ndpa.org/toolkit/

This is why it’s so important to teach a safety float. And to practice getting into a safety float from a vertical position in the water.

Treading water takes a combination of strength, coordination, endurance and skills that children (ages 1–5) simply have not developed yet. Even strong adult swimmers can only tread water for so long before exhaustion sets in. For a child, if they can tread at all, it’s usually only a few seconds before they tire, lose coordination, and slip beneath the water.

There’s another major challenge..
A child’s body is built differently than an adult’s. Children have proportionally larger heads and smaller bodies, making it even harder for them to stay upright and balanced in water.
Instead of staying afloat, they often sink quickly, even if they are kicking or moving their arms.

Floating on their back is their best chance for survival! With proper training, toddlers can learn to float calmly on their backs for several minutes. Many have sustained this position for 5 minutes or more and we know of at least one child who stayed floating on his back for an hour, until his dad found him and saved him.

Floating allows them to breathe, conserve energy, stay calm, and survive longer until help arrives.

Treading = Burning energy quickly and going under fast.

Floating = Conserving energy and staying alive longer.

This is why survival swim lessons focus on teaching floating first. Floating isn’t just a swimming skill, it’s a life saving skill. Teach floating first!

When you understand how little one’s bodies work in water, you understand why floating is everything.

The single most common question we get when discussing the dangers of using flotation with young ones all the time in pools is, “ Well, what device will be safe for my child to use in the pool then?”

The answer is none. No matter what new device comes along and promises to save our kids, we have to stop reaching for easy solutions to the problem of drowning. The easy solutions are short cuts and there are no effective short cuts when it comes to keeping kids safer around water.

Flotation devices will all teach the same thing when used in pools. They will all teach them the vertical, drowning position in the water and they will all create a false reality that the child knows how to swim when they really don’t. That will make it more likely that your child will try to go back to water if they find a chance to do it without their device on, when you don’t know they are doing it. They simply believe they can swim. They don’t see that the device-any device-is what keeps them floating. They believe they are doing it themselves.

If you want your kids to not believe this, you will have to do the hard thing. You will have to help them understand what their own body can and cannot do in the water, so that they develop a healthy respect for it. They have to experience it without attached flotation.

You will need to teach them ways to survive if they find themselves in the water without you. They need to know how to reorient their own body from a fall into the water and to then get into a float on their back. They need to know where the exits to the pool are, how to get to them and how to use them to get out of the water.

If they can’t swim yet, they need you, in the water with them, helping them learn to navigate it.

You do not need to try the next new device to come on the market.

Your child doesn’t need a device.

Your child needs to learn skills in the water.