Thirty years of progress in decreasing drowning deaths in the United States appears to have plateaued, and disparities in deaths among some racial groups have worsened.
Tag: Drownings
Quiz: From Sunburns to Tick Bites, Can You Survive Summer?
Quiz: From Sunburns to Tick Bites, Can You Survive Summer?
6 Ways to Stay Safe in the Summer Sun
6 Ways to Stay Safe in the Summer Sun
Melinda Wenner Moyer📍Staying in the shade in New York
3. Watch out for ticks.
Ticks are most active between April and September. And if you spend time camping, gardening, hiking or hunting, you could come across them.
When you are outdoors in a tick-infested area, apply an E.P.A.-approved bug spray regularly, and make sure it covers all exposed skin.
Once you’re home, throw the clothes you wore into the dryer on high heat for 10 minutes, then take a shower and do a thorough body check.
Teaching My Black Son to Swim
My son, Nasir, and I took our first “mommy and me” swim class just after he turned 1. He had always loved sticking his feet in the water at the beach or floating on my husband’s back, but this would be his first experience learning to immerse himself in a body of water. And although he was a bit distracted by the floaties, squeaky toys and attempting to drink the water, he had a natural inclination for swimming.
As the instructor gently focused on the mechanics of my son kicking his feet and navigating through the water on his belly, I thought of my first experience “learning to swim” in a pool. I was taught to swim by my father dropping me in the deep end of a hotel pool during a family reunion and telling me to meet him on the other side. I was around 4 years old at the time.
I wasn’t frightened by my dad’s unorthodox technique, but it was no substitute for formal lessons. Although I was comfortable traversing a pool after that trial by fire, I never felt that I knew enough to save my own life or someone else’s in an emergency. So when I was 28, I set out to challenge myself by earning a scuba diving certification. As a Black woman in America and the only one in the class who looked like me, it was a stretch.
The ease my son, who is now 4, and I feel in the water didn’t come by accident. When I was pregnant with him, I told my husband that I wanted our child not only to learn how to swim, but also to not fear the water. The countless stories I’d heard of Black American children drowning, including in the bathtub, focused my energy on making sure he understood the mechanics of swimming and that although water can be fun, it can also be deadly.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black children between the ages of 5 to 19 are 5.5 times more likely to die by drowning in swimming pools than white children are. Drowning is a leading cause of injury-related death for all children and toddlers, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. But those dismal statistics among Black children may be a result of intergenerational trauma surrounding Black people and swimming.
Throughout American history, Black people were not allowed to use public or private pools alongside white people, which meant many never learned how to swim. Victoria W. Wolcott, a professor of history at the University at Buffalo, has found in her research on the topic that municipal swimming pools’ popularity in the 20th century relied heavily on the exclusion of Black people.
“Swimming pools and beaches were among the most segregated and fought over public spaces in the North and the South,” Dr. Wolcott wrote in an article for The Conversation. “White stereotypes of Blacks as diseased and sexually threatening served as the foundation for this segregation. City leaders justifying segregation also pointed to fears of fights breaking out if whites and Blacks mingled. Racial separation for them equaled racial peace.”
Some of the more egregious instances of white people enacting violence toward Black people wanting to swim have included pouring bleach and acid in the water and throwing nails at the bottom of pools to force Black people out. Thus generations of Americans were robbed of learning this life-saving skill.
Water has represented life or death for Black Americans as far back as the Transatlantic Slave Trade. According to the Slave Voyages Database, which documents voyages from 1514 to 1866, of the more than 12 million African people put onto slave ships, nearly two million people did not survive the journey. Some chose death by drowning over enslavement, while others succumbed to conditions aboard and were tossed overboard. Water became synonymous with survival or perishing; in places like Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina, it was also a means for many enslaved people to try to navigate their way to freedom after escape.
According to Mark Wolynn, author of the book “It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle,” the complicated relationship between Black people and swimming could be a response to generational trauma. “Recent developments in the fields of cellular biology, neuroscience, epigenetics and developmental psychology underscore the importance of exploring at least three generations of family history in order to understand the mechanism behind patterns of trauma and suffering that repeat,” he writes. “This can explain the ‘fear’ of swimming for some African American children and adults.”
Mariel Buqué, a psychologist who focuses on intergenerational trauma, said that for Black people, water represents “one of the largest collective traumas we have experienced in the Western Hemisphere.”
Fortunately for me, both my mother and father learned how to swim, so they worked at dismantling that dangerous legacy; as a mother, I understood that it was my obligation to do it for my son, as well.
The rapper and business mogul Jay-Z recently said on an episode of LeBron James’s HBO Show, “The Shop,” that he didn’t learn how to swim until his oldest daughter, Blue, was born. “If she ever fell in the water and I couldn’t get her, I couldn’t even fathom that thought,” he said. Jay-Z would have been in his 40s at the time he learned how to swim.
Paulana Lamonier created Black People Will Swim to ensure that both children and adults are confident in the water. The group offers low-cost swim classes and private lessons in New York, and is based on an acronym: FACE, or fun, awareness, community and education. “BPWS aims to bring the number of Black kids who drown to zero,” Ms. Lamonier said.
When a fearful person is ready to learn, she recommends seeking out a private instructor if possible for undivided attention to “go from fearful to fearless” in the water. “In addition to private lessons, I encourage people to take group classes and ask a friend or family member to join them and start with your local community centers, YMCA, or the like,” she said.
I am elated that my family is breaking the stereotypes that are placed on Black people and swimming. I don’t just think about my son when he’s in the water; I think of other Black children and their parents, and how learning to brave the water is part of the fight to save our own lives.
How to Keep Children Safe Around Water and Prevent Drowning
It’s an important safety issue to review every summer, and this may be an especially good moment to brush up.
Two years ago, I wrote about strategies to prevent drowning deaths in young children, especially in the two age groups where those deaths spike, the toddlers and the adolescents. It’s a perennial topic for those who write about children’s health, because drowning is such a major risk for both those ages — the leading preventable cause of death in children from 1 to 4, and then again in adolescents, especially boys, where it’s the second-most-common cause of preventable deaths from 15 to 19, after car accidents.
That makes drowning a safety issue that’s crucial to review each and every summer, when beach and pool and swimming season comes around, though water safety activists would point out that most of those toddler deaths don’t actually take place while swimming, so there are year-round safety concerns as well. Still, the start of summer, especially after this strange lockdown year, makes for a good moment to review water safety.
When I wrote that column in 2019, I spoke with two mothers who had become water safety activists after losing children to drowning. One was Nicole Hughes, a writing teacher in Bristol, Tenn., whose son, Levi, had been 3 years old when he drowned in a swimming pool at a vacation home, and who has worked with the American Academy of Pediatrics on water safety. The other was Dana Gage, whose son, Connor, had drowned in a lake in Texas at the age of 15, and who founded the LV Project in Connor’s memory to focus on open water and life jackets.
Both of them, like experts across the country, call for a layered approach to water safety, including fences around pools; close, constant and capable adult supervision; swimming lessons; CPR training for parents and caregivers; and Coast-Guard-approved life vests.
I would urge you to read that original article and hear their stories in more detail, but I was also curious to hear their thoughts now, as we move into the summer of 2021, looking back at a year like no other.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet released data on drowning rates for the whole country for 2020, but there were concerns last summer that drowning rates in several states might be higher than usual. Ms. Hughes pointed to the many families who bought pools during the Covid-19 pandemic, but also to the additional stresses on parents who were trying to work from home, and to supervise older children who were learning remotely.
“Toddlers are slipping out unnoticed, reaching the pool more than ever now,” Ms. Hughes said. “The layers of protection really need to be in place.” She has heard stories, she said, about children who drowned the first time they ever climbed out of their cribs, or while families were unloading their groceries.
“It is during the non-swim time when everybody’s loading the car to start the vacation trip,” she said. “When everybody’s watching the kid, then nobody’s watching,” said Ms. Hughes, whose son escaped from a room that contained 12 adults, six of whom were physicians. “Without realizing it, subconsciously you’re letting your guard down when there’s a bunch of people around.”
The essential messages haven’t changed; parents need to be aware of the danger, and they need to understand that this can happen in any family; that small children can move very quickly, and that most home drownings — 70 percent — occur outside of “swim time.” So the layers of protection for toddlers and small children include that supervision, but also four-sided fences around pools, deadbolts on any door that leads to the water, latches placed up high that only an adult can reach.
As children get older, the patterns change, but drowning remains a major risk. And the most important messages for older children involve swimming lessons with water safety competence as an essential life skill to be taught to all children; there are notable disparities in access to swimming lessons, and drowning rates are higher in minority populations. Adult supervision and never swimming alone are still essential, as well as Coast-Guard-approved life jackets, even for strong swimmers. Anyone involved in activities on water where there is a current (tubing on a river, for example) should be wearing one of those life vests.
“So few people are aware that drowning is a big-kid problem too,” said Ms. Gage, who is a member of Families United to Prevent Drowning, which makes many family stories available. “When an older person drowns, it’s typically in open water, and typically there’s a lot of victim blaming.” People look for an explanation that involves reckless behavior, she said, or intoxication. In fact, she said, parents need to understand the importance of continuing to model safe behavior as their children get older. “Wear life vests, just as you don’t get into a car without a seatbelt,” she said. “Just because your child knows how to swim does not mean your child is drown-proof.”
The risk of drowning increases greatly among teenagers, especially boys, and remains elevated into adulthood, and may be tied to risk-taking behaviors. Ms. Gage said that the only laws that regulate life vests are connected to boating — so people tend to assume that there’s no need for life vests in other open water activities. And older children have also been affected by the circumstances of the Covid year, she said, with boat sales having increased and, again, with parents profoundly stressed and sometimes less able to supervise.
Ms. Hughes said that many parents who have been willing to take extreme precautions all year to avoid any chance of their children being exposed to Covid might not realize that statistically, drowning kills more young children — in 2019, 864 children 18 and under in the United States died by drowning, compared to about 300 pediatric deaths from Covid over the course of the pandemic.
Ms. Hughes said she worries that parents encourage children to believe that water is fun. And she said it is not enough to simply warn them about the risks. Since I spoke with her two years ago, she has become a strong believer in the value of swimming lessons for young children.
Some “swim classes” for kids may in fact rely on flotation devices, or on having children swim from one adult to another — which won’t necessarily help if no adult is there, Ms. Hughes said. And those lessons may convey only the message that water is fun, she said, without the attendant warning that it can also be deadly. In an email, she wrote, “When parents are trying to find a swim provider, especially for the age group most at risk (1 to 4), the most important question they should ask the swim instructor is: ‘Will these lessons teach my child how to get to the surface and get oxygen independently?’”
I also checked back with Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, who is the medical director of the Tom Sargent Safety Center at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Oregon, and who was one of the authors of the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on drowning prevention, asking, among other things, whether there was new research available on successful strategies for keeping children safe. He is looking forward to results from a study in Florida that will look at the effectiveness of classes for children from 3 to 7 years old that specifically teach water survival skills beyond standard swimming lessons, but this research is just getting underway.
With small children, he was worried about the proliferation of backyard pools over the past year, when many community pools were closed because of Covid-19 — and about all the children who missed what would have been a year of swimming lessons last summer. But it wasn’t only pools that were risky during the pandemic; in Oregon, he said, “families sought out lakes and rivers last summer,” where there weren’t lifeguards. This summer, he said, the protective layer of lifeguards may be back again.
“If you’re going to have standing water at home, have constant, close, capable adult supervision when kids are in the water,” and make sure they can’t get to the water when the supervision isn’t there, he said. “Coast Guard-approved life jackets are a good idea for anyone on or in open water,” he said. Kids who grew up swimming in pools may be unprepared for the unpredictable nature of swimming in rivers, lakes or oceans, he said.