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I was struck by the comment that teaching kids young kids how to swim is uncommon in the US. I got my kids into swimming lessons on their first spring (was adv

I was struck by the comment that teaching kids young kids how to swim is uncommon in the US. I got my kids into swimming lessons on their first spring (was advised to avoid it during the winter). And it's part of primary education in my municipality, with the express purpose of reducing drownings: it's not sport, the curriculum is 100% geared towards familiarity and safety. Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern, and looking at Our World in Data, Portugal had far worse numbers for drownings than the US in the 80s, but are much better now. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drowning-death-rates https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drowning-death-rates

doug_durham 1y ago
I personally don't think it's uncommon. All of my kids and all of the kids of my peers were taught to swim from a very young age. I remember bringing my kids into the pool before they could walk. The US is a big place and I'm certain there are areas where it is less common.
kulahan 1y ago
The US is a vast, varied geographic landscape. On the coastlines, obviously learning to swim is going to be more common than in the Arizona desert. Most of the US isn’t near some enormous body of water, even if small lakes and streams are nearby. It just isn’t reasonable to teach when most people might go their whole lives not needing to swim.
- jarebear6expepj 1y ago
  You might not know, but many, many houses in AZ do have dug pools in their back yards. Fly over in an airplane sometime. More water access than I had growing up in the PNW when it wasn’t raining.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    Arizona was a stand in for "any place that doesn't have direct access to a large body of water." Even if Arizona has large retirement communities rich enough to have pools in most homes, my point stands.
    - mlhpdx 1y ago
      What’s large? I’m not sure the creeks and swimming holes I frequented in my youth would qualify. Also, the post isn’t about swimmable water—it’s a cautionary tale about how little it takes to drown. I can confirm that as one winter my neighbor drown in a shallow mud puddle off his back porch. He had a non-fatal heart attack and fell into it unconscious.
      - kulahan 1y ago
        Large is exactly 20910 liters or more per square foot, absolute cutoff, and if you go even one under it's no longer large.
    - disillusioned 1y ago
      Man, this is just not an accurate stand-in, though, _because_, well, Arizona has literally over 500,000 residential pools. It's actually one of (if not) _the_ highest pool-per-capita rates. And because of that, drowning is the leading cause of death for children 1 to 4 years old in Arizona. As a result, parents here are fairly fastidious about early childhood swim lessons. It's a _big_ deal for us. We've had both of our kids in lessons as early as a year, but a lot of folks start at 6-9 months. If anything, the distributed nature of the many many many many _small_ bodies of water makes the drowning problem more pervasive and dangerous. An ocean is... well, an ocean: its availability for extremely small children is limited by geography, and many areas where you might take small children are policed by professional lifeguards. Backyard swimming pools, on the other hand, can be a lurking danger literally over your neighbor's wall. My parents had a neighbor one house over who had a 4 year old drown in their pool... from one house further over. He had stacked chairs against the cinderblock wall and climbed over while his grandfather was watching him but dozed off. Even if you don't have a pool in your own backyard, it's a risk here in Arizona.
      - kulahan 1y ago
        I don’t care, I picked a hot place less likely to have large natural bodies of water. I don’t know why this is so difficult for you to grasp.
- jefftk 1y ago
  Now that pools are practical, I expect weather to be a larger factor: swimming is much more desirable in hot dry weather. I'd predict there are more swimming-hours per capita in Phoenix than Boston.
- kortilla 1y ago
  Arizona was the worst possible example. It has the lowest ratio of people per pool in the county. Additionally, pools are far more dangerous for children than the coasts because they are sitting right there at home ever present waiting for you to relax and lose track of the kids. Setting those aside, the canals for irrigation are more dangerous than rivers. The southern half is also filled with dry riverbeds that turn into raging rivers in storms. Finally, Phoenix itself has something like 4 lakes within an hour drive and the salt river that people float. The heat of Arizona makes water recreation a huge part of life.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    I don't care - you can figure out my point
    - kortilla 1y ago
      Your point is wrong. Everywhere in the US has access to some form of swimming. Whether or not someone learns to swim is dominated by what their parents raising them decide. It’s much more likely to follow an urban vs suburban/rural divide than any kind of geographic correlation.
      - kulahan 1y ago
        It’s not - there are tons of places with no access to swimming. It also has less to do with urban/suburban. If anything, urban is likely to get more, as they can potentially reach public pools. It’s about access to water. If you parents don’t take you, if there are none around to naturally discover, if there are none around which you personally have access to, you don’t learn to swim. If you do, you typically do. Simple as. I really do not understand why people seem to think everyone has a pool. You can tell many of the people in this sub grew up middle class at least!
- ryukoposting 1y ago
  There is also a tight correlation between swimming skills and economic class. Reasonable access to a pool or natural water body is not a given, as you point out. Even if you're reasonably close to one of those, sufficient regular time to teach your kid to swim is a luxury. That leaves swimming lessons, which cost money. Access is the main problem, particularly in urban areas.
  - kortilla 1y ago
    Not really access, but interest. The YMCA offers swimming lessons easily within reach of poor families that want them. A subset of the population just thinks it’s useless.
    - _dark_matter_ 1y ago
      I disagree, YMCA lessons are not accessible. First off, you don't know what level your child is, and I remember being stressed trying to read our Ys website to understand what the levels meant. This is important because 2, the classes fill very quickly. You have to know what you want and sign up as soon as they're available. And finally, the classes are at very specific times, which certainly do not work for all working parents schedules. For example, it will just be tue or Thur at 5:45pm. If you can't make that you are SOL.
      - kortilla 1y ago
        Put them at the lowest level if you don’t know. That’s easy. As far as schedule goes, who’s taking care of the kid? At age 3 or 4 when you do this, it’s not like they are in school so some adult has to be around at 5:45pm.
        _dark_matter_ 1y ago
        Look, I'm telling you this from my perspective as someone who tried to do the exact thing you're saying. If those things stressed me out as an adult who knows about swimming, and crucially prevented me from signing up my kids for swimming lessons at the Y, then it is going to be even more true for people who are low income and not knowledgeable. These are real barriers. Acting like they're not is just putting our collective head in the sand and letting the problem perpetuate.
- agent327 1y ago
  You seem to think swimming is only useful if you accidentally end up in a giant body of water. In reality swimming skills are damn useful as soon as you end up in any water that goes up to your head, and those bodies of water are everywhere across the globe. More so for children.
skeeter2020 1y ago
where & how exactly are poor, city kids supposed to learn how swim?
- firesteelrain 1y ago
  YMCA, Public pools, summer camps, churches, mosques, community groups, cheap private lessons
  - watwut 1y ago
    Those are not always available. As in, churche or mosque exists, but don't have pool and don't teach swimming. Private lesson exists, but is not cheap. Summer camps are expensive, like common.
    - firesteelrain 1y ago
      Churches will teach kids at community pools. I went to Christian school from elementary to 8th grade and we did all sorts of things in the summer for cheap
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  In my country swimming lessons are mandatory with everyone swimming 25m by aged 10. School takes them on a bus to the nearest community pool until they can swim.
- closewith 1y ago
  In civilised countries, governments provide accessible swimming lessons as it's core life skill.
- stef25 1y ago
  Parenting
yieldcrv 1y ago
Poor people in the US don’t teach kids how to swim because they are busy surviving and don’t prioritize extracurricular activities, don’t have funds to pay someone for the lessons and parallel parenting
- firesteelrain 1y ago
  Not true; grew up poor in a single wide trailer. Mom put us in swimming lessons at the local city pool. And we got more swimming lessons as we got older. I competitively surfed in the 2000s. Swimming lessons helped.
  - yieldcrv 1y ago
    Okay that disproves the prevailing observations about the whole socioeconomic bracket, thank you
    - safety1st 1y ago
      I grew up working class and also took swimming lessons at our local city pool. Just wondering, have you actually experienced "the socioeconomic bracket," or did you just take some classes in college about it and/or surf Reddit and get angry about class warfare?
      - decremental 1y ago
        [dead]
      - bjoli 1y ago
        There are statistics about swimming capabilities and socio economic status. They looks the same in just about every country; kids in poorer families are worse at swimming, even in countries with comprehensive swimming education in school. Better swimming ed in school makes the gap narrower. I don't know any recent statistics, but I have seen statistics from the 90s and back then the US was amazingly apalling in that regard. Edit: this is not comprehensive, but Jesus h Christ in a chicken basket: https://www.poolsafely.gov/2017/07/05/new-reports-fatal-drownings-decrease-by-17-percent-swimming-skills-improve/ https://www.poolsafely.gov/2017/07/05/new-reports-fatal-drow...
FabHK 1y ago
A friend of mine grew up in a town in Spain where many families had pools. All the kids were prepared at a very young age by a teacher who basically threw the kids in the water and then showed them how to survive. She was known as "la nazi".
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
I'm looking at the data for Greece (where I'm from) and I'm wondering whether the "deaths per 100,000 people" stats are taking into account the millions of tourists that visit each year, especially in the summer. Not just for Greece, of course. Every Mediterrannean country is going to be full of tourists in the summer and that's going to push numbers up for those countries. And that all the Western European countries have 0 deaths per 100,000 people must also be a distortion. A brief online search found this article according to which 4 million people where expected to visit Greece only from the UK in 2023: https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1209183/british-visitors-to-greece-expected-to-reach-4-million-this-year/ https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1209183/british-visitors-t... P.S. I can't find if the data is counting deaths of citizens of a country or deaths reported in a country or what.
- jorams 1y ago
  For what it's worth I checked for The Netherlands, and the data can be correct if they always round down. In 2021 The Netherlands had ~17.5 million inhabitants[1]. 99 people drowned[2], of which 19 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.56 or 0.45. In 2020 The Netherlands had ~17.4 million inhabitants[1]. 138 people drowned[2], of which 31 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.79 or 0.61. This is of course dependent on the per 100 000 being inhabitants. If it includes tourists the rates go way down, because millions of people visit. For 2020 and 2021 it adds 7.2 and 6.2 million people respectively, for non-pandemic years closer to 20 million[3]. [1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/bevolkingsteller https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/b... [2]: https://www.cbs.nl/item?sc_itemid=7491f794-6e63-4556-bdcc-d96913aa79b8&sc_lang=nl-nl https://www.cbs.nl/item?sc_itemid=7491f794-6e63-4556-bdcc-d9... [3]: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/82059NED/table?dl=C46FB https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/82059NED/table?dl=C...
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
>Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern That explains the discrepancy just fine to me. Most families in the US who expect to be around water a lot get swimming lessons for their kids, and most families who don't, don't. I had swimming lessons growing up and mostly they just reaffirmed my belief that I hate the beach more than life itself and will never, ever, ever step foot in nature's latrine. A ballpark estimate for Portugal is that it costs the government probably 50 euros-ish per pupil for basic swimming lessons? Given that they cut drowning deaths by almost an order of magnitude in children, that seems like pretty good ROI.
AngryData 1y ago
I think it very much depends on where they live. But part of the reason more people don't know how to swim is probably because many urbanites don't have good access to pools. Many public pools in urban areas were shut down in response to civil rights when black people were no longer allowed to be blocked from using them and racists would rather nobody has a pool than allow black people to swim with white people. And then in later generations, if a parent doesn't know how to swim, they aren't likely to take their own kids to go swimming. A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.

doug_durham 1y ago

I personally don't think it's uncommon. All of my kids and all of the kids of my peers were taught to swim from a very young age. I remember bringing my kids into the pool before they could walk. The US is a big place and I'm certain there are areas where it is less common.

kulahan 1y ago

The US is a vast, varied geographic landscape. On the coastlines, obviously learning to swim is going to be more common than in the Arizona desert. Most of the US isn’t near some enormous body of water, even if small lakes and streams are nearby. It just isn’t reasonable to teach when most people might go their whole lives not needing to swim.

jarebear6expepj 1y ago
You might not know, but many, many houses in AZ do have dug pools in their back yards. Fly over in an airplane sometime. More water access than I had growing up in the PNW when it wasn’t raining.
- kulahan 1y ago
  Arizona was a stand in for "any place that doesn't have direct access to a large body of water." Even if Arizona has large retirement communities rich enough to have pools in most homes, my point stands.
  - mlhpdx 1y ago
    What’s large? I’m not sure the creeks and swimming holes I frequented in my youth would qualify. Also, the post isn’t about swimmable water—it’s a cautionary tale about how little it takes to drown. I can confirm that as one winter my neighbor drown in a shallow mud puddle off his back porch. He had a non-fatal heart attack and fell into it unconscious.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      Large is exactly 20910 liters or more per square foot, absolute cutoff, and if you go even one under it's no longer large.
  - disillusioned 1y ago
    Man, this is just not an accurate stand-in, though, _because_, well, Arizona has literally over 500,000 residential pools. It's actually one of (if not) _the_ highest pool-per-capita rates. And because of that, drowning is the leading cause of death for children 1 to 4 years old in Arizona. As a result, parents here are fairly fastidious about early childhood swim lessons. It's a _big_ deal for us. We've had both of our kids in lessons as early as a year, but a lot of folks start at 6-9 months. If anything, the distributed nature of the many many many many _small_ bodies of water makes the drowning problem more pervasive and dangerous. An ocean is... well, an ocean: its availability for extremely small children is limited by geography, and many areas where you might take small children are policed by professional lifeguards. Backyard swimming pools, on the other hand, can be a lurking danger literally over your neighbor's wall. My parents had a neighbor one house over who had a 4 year old drown in their pool... from one house further over. He had stacked chairs against the cinderblock wall and climbed over while his grandfather was watching him but dozed off. Even if you don't have a pool in your own backyard, it's a risk here in Arizona.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      I don’t care, I picked a hot place less likely to have large natural bodies of water. I don’t know why this is so difficult for you to grasp.
jefftk 1y ago
Now that pools are practical, I expect weather to be a larger factor: swimming is much more desirable in hot dry weather. I'd predict there are more swimming-hours per capita in Phoenix than Boston.
kortilla 1y ago
Arizona was the worst possible example. It has the lowest ratio of people per pool in the county. Additionally, pools are far more dangerous for children than the coasts because they are sitting right there at home ever present waiting for you to relax and lose track of the kids. Setting those aside, the canals for irrigation are more dangerous than rivers. The southern half is also filled with dry riverbeds that turn into raging rivers in storms. Finally, Phoenix itself has something like 4 lakes within an hour drive and the salt river that people float. The heat of Arizona makes water recreation a huge part of life.
- kulahan 1y ago
  I don't care - you can figure out my point
  - kortilla 1y ago
    Your point is wrong. Everywhere in the US has access to some form of swimming. Whether or not someone learns to swim is dominated by what their parents raising them decide. It’s much more likely to follow an urban vs suburban/rural divide than any kind of geographic correlation.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      It’s not - there are tons of places with no access to swimming. It also has less to do with urban/suburban. If anything, urban is likely to get more, as they can potentially reach public pools. It’s about access to water. If you parents don’t take you, if there are none around to naturally discover, if there are none around which you personally have access to, you don’t learn to swim. If you do, you typically do. Simple as. I really do not understand why people seem to think everyone has a pool. You can tell many of the people in this sub grew up middle class at least!
ryukoposting 1y ago
There is also a tight correlation between swimming skills and economic class. Reasonable access to a pool or natural water body is not a given, as you point out. Even if you're reasonably close to one of those, sufficient regular time to teach your kid to swim is a luxury. That leaves swimming lessons, which cost money. Access is the main problem, particularly in urban areas.
- kortilla 1y ago
  Not really access, but interest. The YMCA offers swimming lessons easily within reach of poor families that want them. A subset of the population just thinks it’s useless.
  - _dark_matter_ 1y ago
    I disagree, YMCA lessons are not accessible. First off, you don't know what level your child is, and I remember being stressed trying to read our Ys website to understand what the levels meant. This is important because 2, the classes fill very quickly. You have to know what you want and sign up as soon as they're available. And finally, the classes are at very specific times, which certainly do not work for all working parents schedules. For example, it will just be tue or Thur at 5:45pm. If you can't make that you are SOL.
    - kortilla 1y ago
      Put them at the lowest level if you don’t know. That’s easy. As far as schedule goes, who’s taking care of the kid? At age 3 or 4 when you do this, it’s not like they are in school so some adult has to be around at 5:45pm.
      - _dark_matter_ 1y ago
        Look, I'm telling you this from my perspective as someone who tried to do the exact thing you're saying. If those things stressed me out as an adult who knows about swimming, and crucially prevented me from signing up my kids for swimming lessons at the Y, then it is going to be even more true for people who are low income and not knowledgeable. These are real barriers. Acting like they're not is just putting our collective head in the sand and letting the problem perpetuate.
agent327 1y ago
You seem to think swimming is only useful if you accidentally end up in a giant body of water. In reality swimming skills are damn useful as soon as you end up in any water that goes up to your head, and those bodies of water are everywhere across the globe. More so for children.

skeeter2020 1y ago

where & how exactly are poor, city kids supposed to learn how swim?

firesteelrain 1y ago
YMCA, Public pools, summer camps, churches, mosques, community groups, cheap private lessons
- watwut 1y ago
  Those are not always available. As in, churche or mosque exists, but don't have pool and don't teach swimming. Private lesson exists, but is not cheap. Summer camps are expensive, like common.
  - firesteelrain 1y ago
    Churches will teach kids at community pools. I went to Christian school from elementary to 8th grade and we did all sorts of things in the summer for cheap
hdgvhicv 1y ago
In my country swimming lessons are mandatory with everyone swimming 25m by aged 10. School takes them on a bus to the nearest community pool until they can swim.
closewith 1y ago
In civilised countries, governments provide accessible swimming lessons as it's core life skill.
stef25 1y ago
Parenting

yieldcrv 1y ago

Poor people in the US don’t teach kids how to swim because they are busy surviving and don’t prioritize extracurricular activities, don’t have funds to pay someone for the lessons and parallel parenting

firesteelrain 1y ago
Not true; grew up poor in a single wide trailer. Mom put us in swimming lessons at the local city pool. And we got more swimming lessons as we got older. I competitively surfed in the 2000s. Swimming lessons helped.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  Okay that disproves the prevailing observations about the whole socioeconomic bracket, thank you
  - safety1st 1y ago
    I grew up working class and also took swimming lessons at our local city pool. Just wondering, have you actually experienced "the socioeconomic bracket," or did you just take some classes in college about it and/or surf Reddit and get angry about class warfare?
    - decremental 1y ago
      [dead]
    - bjoli 1y ago
      There are statistics about swimming capabilities and socio economic status. They looks the same in just about every country; kids in poorer families are worse at swimming, even in countries with comprehensive swimming education in school. Better swimming ed in school makes the gap narrower. I don't know any recent statistics, but I have seen statistics from the 90s and back then the US was amazingly apalling in that regard. Edit: this is not comprehensive, but Jesus h Christ in a chicken basket: https://www.poolsafely.gov/2017/07/05/new-reports-fatal-drownings-decrease-by-17-percent-swimming-skills-improve/ https://www.poolsafely.gov/2017/07/05/new-reports-fatal-drow...

FabHK 1y ago

A friend of mine grew up in a town in Spain where many families had pools. All the kids were prepared at a very young age by a teacher who basically threw the kids in the water and then showed them how to survive. She was known as "la nazi".

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago

I'm looking at the data for Greece (where I'm from) and I'm wondering whether the "deaths per 100,000 people" stats are taking into account the millions of tourists that visit each year, especially in the summer. Not just for Greece, of course. Every Mediterrannean country is going to be full of tourists in the summer and that's going to push numbers up for those countries. And that all the Western European countries have 0 deaths per 100,000 people must also be a distortion. A brief online search found this article according to which 4 million people where expected to visit Greece only from the UK in 2023: https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1209183/british-visitors-to-greece-expected-to-reach-4-million-this-year/ https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1209183/british-visitors-t... P.S. I can't find if the data is counting deaths of citizens of a country or deaths reported in a country or what.

jorams 1y ago
For what it's worth I checked for The Netherlands, and the data can be correct if they always round down. In 2021 The Netherlands had ~17.5 million inhabitants[1]. 99 people drowned[2], of which 19 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.56 or 0.45. In 2020 The Netherlands had ~17.4 million inhabitants[1]. 138 people drowned[2], of which 31 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.79 or 0.61. This is of course dependent on the per 100 000 being inhabitants. If it includes tourists the rates go way down, because millions of people visit. For 2020 and 2021 it adds 7.2 and 6.2 million people respectively, for non-pandemic years closer to 20 million[3]. [1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/bevolkingsteller https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/b... [2]: https://www.cbs.nl/item?sc_itemid=7491f794-6e63-4556-bdcc-d96913aa79b8&sc_lang=nl-nl https://www.cbs.nl/item?sc_itemid=7491f794-6e63-4556-bdcc-d9... [3]: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/82059NED/table?dl=C46FB https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/82059NED/table?dl=C...

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago

>Everyone's holidays are at a beach, so water safety is a constant concern That explains the discrepancy just fine to me. Most families in the US who expect to be around water a lot get swimming lessons for their kids, and most families who don't, don't. I had swimming lessons growing up and mostly they just reaffirmed my belief that I hate the beach more than life itself and will never, ever, ever step foot in nature's latrine. A ballpark estimate for Portugal is that it costs the government probably 50 euros-ish per pupil for basic swimming lessons? Given that they cut drowning deaths by almost an order of magnitude in children, that seems like pretty good ROI.

AngryData 1y ago

I think it very much depends on where they live. But part of the reason more people don't know how to swim is probably because many urbanites don't have good access to pools. Many public pools in urban areas were shut down in response to civil rights when black people were no longer allowed to be blocked from using them and racists would rather nobody has a pool than allow black people to swim with white people. And then in later generations, if a parent doesn't know how to swim, they aren't likely to take their own kids to go swimming. A lot more rural people know how to swim because of all the natural bodies of water around, but our population overall has been consistently skewing urban for a number of generations now.