| ▲ | ncruces 5 days ago |
| 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 |
|
| ▲ | AngryData 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | disillusioned 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
| |
| ▲ | mlhpdx 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Large is exactly 20910 liters or more per square foot, absolute cutoff, and if you go even one under it's no longer large. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | kortilla 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't care - you can figure out my point | | |
| ▲ | kortilla 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | oftenwrong 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | A related aspect that I experienced was that public pools were typically cold enough that my kids did not enjoy them much. Private swimming schools keep their pools quite warm. | |
| ▲ | kortilla 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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_ 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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_ 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kortilla 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Your barrier sounds like some other anxiety issue unrelated to economic status. You know how important swimming lessons are and yet just gave up and skipped it entirely? Or are you actually privileged and had other swimming lesson options for your kid and just didn’t want to bother with the affordable system’s constraints? Lots of lower middle class/poor including me when I was growing up went to this without a problem. 25 cent public bus ride with mom was an adventure | | |
| ▲ | KittenInABox 4 days ago | parent [-] | | How long are you from being poor? Are you poor now? Did you raise a child while poor within the last 5 years? Public bus rides in my area are 9x your cost, and 4x that cost for elderly people. | | |
| ▲ | kortilla 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Public bus rides cost proportionately the same to min wage in California if that helps. The Y and the bus haven’t turned into upscale things if that’s the point you’re trying to make. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | jefftk 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | agent327 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
|
|
| ▲ | YeGoblynQueenne 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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-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. |
| |
|
| ▲ | hiAndrewQuinn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >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. |
|
| ▲ | FabHK 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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". |
|
| ▲ | yieldcrv 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | conductr 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | In America the racial cultures place different values on learning this skill. Black people not swimming has been a prevalent stereotype my entire life and I still hear jokes about it (primarily stand up comedians these days) I grew up poor in a trailer too but my mom made sure I swam. Never even had official lessons. We’d use public pools or visit a friends apartment pool, or sometimes just crash one. I just learned by exposure and playing with other kids. First in floaty then without. I’m better off now and have a pool in my yard but I also taught my kid early on, no lessons. It’s an important life skill and a huge hobby/activity that I feel most white peoples engage in across all economic cohorts | | |
| ▲ | defrost 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > In America the racial cultures place different values on learning this skill. The US once had many community swimming pools prior to the civil rights amendment. Black people were segregated and few pools were built for them from their taxes. Come the era of equal rights a great many pools were filled in rather than suffer the horror of mixed races in the same water. Private swimming pools and pools at clubs grew in number and it remained that few black people had access to community pools. That was the case for a few decades, now hopefully past - but for a long time pools were associated not with swimming but with harassment and exclusion. The forgotten history of segregated swimming pools and amusement parks https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-history-of-segrega... | | |
| ▲ | conductr 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I dislike how any conversation about this stuff immediately devolves into a decades ago history lesson about a thing as the singular root cause. Sure everyone is well aware of the history and you’re not wrong but it’s also history and not been the case in a very long time. Unless you were so poor you couldn’t take your kids on a day trip to a free pool, there’s been very little hindrances in quite a long time at this point. No reason black persons under 30 or so shouldn’t be swimming at much higher rates than their parent/grandparents. Meanwhile, the black people i know well and even just interacting with acquaintances and such treat non-swimming as a sort of badge of blackness. They scoff at the idea of learning later in life. They scoff at the idea of teaching their kids. As if it would make them “less black”. This is why I frame it as a current cultural phenomenon of values and identity. Sure a lot of the stuff you said made it that way, but that was generations ago at this point and it will not reverse unless some intention exists to buck the cultural norm. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 4 days ago | parent [-] | | It was your choice to introduce "In America the racial cultures place different values on learning this skill" and leave that hanging. Not everyone is "well aware of the history" despite your claim to the contrary so it's worth dragging events that occurred during my lifetime into the mix given they form the root of a particular part of why one American cultural group came to have values that became stereotypical.. Past actions leave shadows that by your own comment appear to still exist even if many have moved to the penumbra. > Meanwhile, the black people i know well Contrariwise the vast majority of black and not quite so black people I grew up with and know well swim like fish and a good number free dive toward the upper limit of human ability .. that's a whole other oyster shell of pearl though. > but that was generations ago at this point Perhaps for yourself, as mentioned above 1964 was within my lifetime. | | |
| ▲ | conductr 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's a fact that poverty and race are linked here, also because of the history. You'd have to be an idiot in America not to know of all the wrongs against POC throughout history. It's all but obvious to a majority but just for good measure it's taught in grade school and a heavy component of a lot of movies/pop-culture. If you've made it far enough to be reading comments on HN, you're likely aware and don't need to be further educated. Stats still show black people have very low rates of swimming skills. Who you know or who I know may differ, but stats are stats. > Perhaps for yourself, as mentioned above 1964 was within my lifetime. A generation is defined as 20-30 years, so this was 2-4 generations ago. My words hold true, you've seen a lot in your lifetime - despite all the issues we still have regarding race, I'd say you've seen blacks have a lot more mobility over your lifetime, but not a significant improvement of their swimming skills. |
|
| |
| ▲ | firesteelrain 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are still community pools all across Florida - many open for over 40-50 years. County or city ran too. For example, in Florida: Taylor County (rural) has approximately 25 total public pools and bathing places In Alabama: Birmingham’s Parks & Recreation currently operates around 10-11 city‑run outdoor public pools, including Crestwood, Memorial, E.O. Jackson, Grayson, Underwood, Roosevelt, McAlpine, East Thomas. Though not all open every summer due to staffing or budget issues in recent years |
|
| |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Similarly, I grew up poor (but on a farm, not in a trailer). My parents enrolled all of us in swimming lessons at the town community center every summer. It's true that poor people prioritize material survival, but they are people too and they want their kids to be able to do fun things in the summer. | |
| ▲ | yieldcrv 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Okay that disproves the prevailing observations about the whole socioeconomic bracket, thank you | | |
| ▲ | safety1st 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | bmacho 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It correlates with money, and logic can eliminate a lot of possibilities, like: it isn't money in the bank that makes people to be able to swim; also it is probably not race, ethnicity, religion, or location either. The most likely explanation is that poor people prioritize it lower (or rather: rich people prioritize it much much higher, it is a no-brainer for them). | |
| ▲ | yieldcrv 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | only thing I forgot to do was write “generally” “often” “disproportionately” when talking about an already well understood aspect of the socioeconomic class it doesn't really need to be explained again that some groups have more distractions and barriers than others, mostly by class its great that your parents prioritized your aquatic acumen and has nothing to do with the tax bracket as a whole | | |
| ▲ | safety1st a day ago | parent [-] | | No, it's great that they took me to do a cheap recreational activity. This is why I responded to you, you obviously didn't understand the dynamic at work. Us poor people weren't ALWAYS busy starving and surviving. Like other humans, we too had free time. And the local government subsidized both admission and lessons at the public pool. So because of good policy this was a cheap form of both recreation and physical education, as a result lots of us filthy poors in my neighborhood availed ourselves of it. What I object to here is the othering of the working class. They're not creatures that need to be placed behind glass and alternately studied or pandered to. America had the formula figured out a long time ago: invest in public schools, public pools and public libraries that everyone can use, and that serve as community centers for rich and poor alike. When there need to be user fees, sure subsidize those for people in the lowest income brackets, that's a great idea. But the bedrock of a healthy society is good public institutions where everyone's treated pretty equally. We screwed this up when we started privatizing or just straight up shutting down all those things. Then the rich built their own, the rest increasingly went without and some people seem to have forgotten that the other way of doing things even existed. |
| |
| ▲ | bjoli 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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-drow... | | |
| ▲ | ncruces 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | But that's also, IMO, why talking about it helps. I didn't start this thread to chastise anyone about it, but to express the idea that, in a country poorer than the US (on average), within 30 years, getting kids to swim early probably contributed significantly to close the gap in drowning mortality (and surpass the US). Also none of my kids knew how to swim by the time they were 4 (as in the article) but all of them had had “swimming” lessons, which basically amounted to us spending around an hour in a pool with them. All I can say from subsequent “close calls” is that, in my experience, even just a little familiarity helps a lot. | |
| ▲ | conductr 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It takes reps/practice so anyone with more access should be better. Wealthier people are taking more trips to beach, may have a lake house, or have a pool at home even if it’s just a condo/apartment. | | |
| ▲ | bjoli 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is where I believe in the compensatory nature of the state. Swimming is an important life skill. Someone drowning is expensive for society, and seeing how parents swimming ability is inherited (socially, obviously) you STILL see effects of segregation laws in the US. Pretty crazy. | | | |
| ▲ | firesteelrain 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Beach and water is free fun in Florida. Everyone does it regardless of socioeconomic bracket. I would assume it’s the same everywhere else that has close access to water. |
|
| |
| ▲ | decremental 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | closewith 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Time to reform the socio-economic landscape in the allegedly richest country in the world if it can't teach its children to swim. | |
| ▲ | forkeep 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
|
|
| ▲ | skeeter2020 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| where & how exactly are poor, city kids supposed to learn how swim? |
| |
| ▲ | hdgvhicv 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In civilised countries, governments provide accessible swimming lessons as it's core life skill. | |
| ▲ | firesteelrain 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | YMCA, Public pools, summer camps, churches, mosques, community groups, cheap private lessons | | |
| ▲ | watwut 5 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
|
| |
| ▲ | stef25 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Parenting |
|
