Spot the Drowning Child (2015)

She was panicking next to me in the pool all of a sudden and climbed on top of me. She wasn't heavy but her human effort to grab and exert pressure to use me as a float to stay above water forced me under. It was hard to get back up for air, and very sudden to which I didn't have a ton of air to begin with.

I remembered training, which was to pull the victim down with you to short circuit their brain into letting go, and it worked. I was able to swim out from her area, surface, catch a breath, and go help her to the shallow end.

Maybe it is just that most have 4 legs and that helps, but I'd guess monkeys know how to swim too. Not sure. I mean even snakes know how to swim haha.

What makes people so bad at swimming? Our big heads?

You can ban all fun or tell parents to use common sense and have a backup for idiot parents.

In this specific pool I would also create a barrier/line between the shallow bit of the pool and the deep end. In some of the videos the kids end up in the deep end by just playing, even without the floating devices.

Also kids should be taught to swim at a young age. At least where I'm from there are many places where kids can fall into the water.

Floats in public pools are a Bad Thing, I completely agree.

Source: lifeguard through highschool and college.

Only exception is during swimming lessons, and those are with a swimming instructor right there with them in the water.

Even if your kid is capable, most people don’t hesitate to throw one on just in case.

I was brought up in Australia and I was taught to swim earlier than I can remember. My mother would take me to the beach grab hold of my swimming costume from behind and get me to dog-paddle around the age I learned to walk. This was not unusual when I was growing up, most of the kids at school were reasonably good swimmers by the age of eight.

Also, early on we were taught to recognize rip currents and told to keep well away from them—they looked seductively harmless but are in fact very dangerous.

When I was about seven we moved to a country town about 100 miles or so from the beach but it had a swimming pool. There too the kids were good swimmers, much better than I expected as they had grown up without access to a beach.

That background leads me to my point: whenever we hear of someone being drowned at our beaches and rivers it is so often either a vising tourist or some migrant who was born overseas and did not learn to swim at an early age. For local people of my generation who were brought up as I was this cultural difference is striking obvious.

We never let shirts into the pool, and then you made a mental note to watch for that person. Realistically, though, you spent much more time fishing out the confident , in-shape (or at least not fat) kids who bee-lined for the diving boards without any apparent plan for the time starting after they hit the water.

But lifeguards somehow find each other, and I knew several who worked at the local waterpark, and their jobs were way, way harder. No deaths during that time, but a lot of close calls. It's quite a thing to be 16-17 and have that pattern recognition stored, and it sticks with you.

Well worth the time to watch these videos. It's not quite the same, but it's close enough.

We have three kids and I struggle to watch videos of stuff like this.

No drownings in the family, thank $deity, but we've had a fairly lengthy string of medical incidents over the years.

Let's just say I could probably find my way to and around both our local hospital, and the big city hospital an hour away, while blindfolded.

This would be a lot more interesting if there were videos where the lifeguard did not need to jump in, or where you had to pick within 4 or 5 seconds who you thought would need rescuing - the site didn't support this, per the "2 second" style ones i was clicking the obvious child repeatedly before the "game" decided to score it.