Brought to you by Play It Safe By The Water.
Do you remember your first not-so-great incident in water? I do. I was at the beach with my family, and my cousins and we hit the surf. It was stupid really. I had no experience with waves, and I went out with just me and my cousin. We were both 7. I remember just tumbling over and over again and thinking that I was gone. I’ve been scared of the ocean ever since.
Living in Australia, we’re always around water. Whether it’s the local beach, a river, lake, pool or even the family bath. Water is everywhere.
Slowly, over the years I’ve made friends with the beach. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t get me near big waves. I just won’t do it. You see, I married a Surf Life Saver who lives and breathes for the ocean. Through him I’ve learnt to spot rips, and how to navigate small-ish waves {i.e. don’t turn your back on them!} and just how amazing it can be. The beach is pretty much my most favourite place in the world {as long as we pick the right one with the perfect amount of waves} but I still pretty cautious when it comes to the beach.
So, I have a love for water, and so does my family but there’s nothing more important than keeping safe. I want to do all that I can to make sure my kids love water, but continue to stay safe. Drowning can take just 20 seconds for a toddler {about as long as it takes you to refresh Facebook on your phone, if you think about it}.
So how can we play it safe around water? There are so many things that we can do, but the most important is to supervise. My mum lives in an apartment block which is 3 storeys high. A family with small children around 5 and 8 live on the top floor. The parents send their kids down to swim while they stay on the balcony. It just isn’t safe.
+ Supervise. Have a dedicated person in charge of supervising, so that everyone knows who is on ‘duty’. It might sound over-the-top but it’s so important to be safe. Sadly 70% of child drowning deaths occur because of inadequate parental supervision. Don’t just assume someone has it covered, have a conversation about it, “Judy, are you right to supervise the kids for 20 minutes and then I’ll take over?”
+ Be within arms reach. Sitting on a balcony just won’t cut it. You have to be in the pool/beach/water with the kids or within arms reach to help them if they get into trouble in the water.
+ Swim between the flags. It’s hard to figure out where the dangerous rips and currents are and often the most dangerous currents look the calmest. Swim between the flags when at the beach.
+ Be safe old{er} people. Last year, adults aged over 60 had the highest number of fatal drowning deaths in Victoria. Be aware of your surroundings {more than half of those drownings where when people slipped or fell in}, always read the safety signs and just be careful {please!}.
+ Learn to swim. Swimming is a fun and social activity to do with the kidlets. Luella and Lacey both go to swimming lessons, and I love the friends I’ve made in the classes. Luella already knows to hold her breath when going under water and Lacey is doing laps and gaining water confidence every week. And even adults can get lessons, my aunt has just learnt to swim and loves it.
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We realised the hard way that our toddler’s preferences for water and how he behaved around it could change within a day. When we visited my mum in her beachside town over Christmas, he was tentative for the first week. He’d run to the edge of the water at the creek and skitter away, plonk himself down in the sand and play there. The next day, we watched (from two metres away) as he ran to the water’s edge and just kept running. That day he decided he wasn’t afraid anymore. Now he’s as bold as anything wanting to throw himself deeper and deeper, with no regard for the swift current. Now he’s always within arm’s reach and even from there he can slip away in no time flat so we have to be super vigilant.
We were beach kids and my Dad a surfer, so we were left to play in the water by ourselves quite a bit. We had to pass a test at the start of each beach trip though, and point out the rips and safe spots before we were allowed in. If we failed the test we were towel bound (and we stayed there despite my Dad being far out in the water and completely unable to enforce it). Even with that kind of water sense, it’s easy to misjudge waves, especially when unusually large sets roll in. I’ve definitely had moment as a teenager and even as an adult when you’re in the washing machine and swim hard to the surface only to hit sand and have to head back the other way with lungs about bursting. And quite a lot of those experiences happened between the flags – because, depending on the beach, the flags are placed for optimal viewing from the clubhouse not necessarily the safest location on the beach.
I love that your dad educated you about the beach, at least that’s a start. 🙂
Its important to have someone supervising at all times – my little brother almost drowned and if it wasn’t for my dad being 10 metres away it could have ended very badly. 5th storey apartment is ridiculous – what are they going to do if their child needs them – jump off?
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x
I ask myself the same question. It’s crazy!
Oh, and thank goodness your brother survived it and your dad was so close. x
such an important post! I didn’t want our next house to have a pool because with so many little ones it is a big thing to worry about. Well our house has a pool and we’ve spent a small fortune on a pool safety net which adds another level of protection to the pool fence. nothing beats supervision but if there is one thing I’ve learnt when I Hear about accidents in pools it’s that someone left a gate open or the pool gate didn’t close properly or some how they got into the pool area. And the pool regulations are crazy for acreages as you don’t need to put a fence around a pool on certain property sizes so we were looking at houses with pools and no fences. thankfully ours has a fence, now a net and the neighbours pools are fenced!
I still won’t venture into the surf past my knees. At about 7 I was sitting on a foam board (it was the 70’s) & mum held it as I bobbed over the little waves, suddenly a big wave came knocking everyone over & mum lost her grip on the board. I still remember vividly the panic as I rolled around in water over my head & swirling sand. As the wave went out I managed to find which way was up but have never lost my fear of the surf even though I love the beach. My daughter is 11 now & can do a lap of the pool, swimming was at the top of my list of things she needed to learn.
As a coordinator of learn to swim program’s it still amazes me that parents see swim lessons as an extra cirricular activity like dance, footy etc. swimming is the only activity your child can learn that will potentially save their life one day.
I was always a water baby – loved it from a tiny thing. My brother not so much. Even though he was a year older than me, he was terrified of water. One summer we were staying at a condo with a pool (we couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8) and for some reason, all of the adults had gone back to the room for one reason or another. I think Grandpa had gone to get another pack of cigarettes or something. Of course, no lifeguards. No one was gone for more than 2 minutes. The entire week we were there, my brother had gone nowhere near the deep end of the pool, but he choose the moment all the adults were gone to go screaming off the diving board into the deep end, where I was playing. When he realized he couldn’t touch the bottom, he started panicking. I meant to give him my hand and pull him to the shallow end, but he climbed on top of me, pushing me under the water. He was screaming when his head was above water, and I was drowning because I couldn’t get him off of me. Both my Grandpa and my uncle jumped in the pool in their clothes and their cowboy boots to save us. God only knows how close we were to disaster; I don’t know how much longer we would have lasted.
I’m constantly amazed at how many people don’t know how to swim. I currently live along the Mississippi Gulf Coast – the beach is literally 6 blocks from my house. In the United States there are huge pushes to teach inner city children to swim because so many get into danger in the summer time at local pools and rivers. They go into the water and get into trouble before they know it. Here on the Coast, we’re fortunate that the water is shallow and placid – you can go 100 yards out and it not be deeper than your mid-thigh. There are little to no waves. But our bayous and rivers and the back bays are dangerous. There are tragedies there every year.