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.
>>Every day, there are nearly 10 accidental drownings in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s 3,500 people every year who die in water. Within these numbers is a startling fact: the fatal-drowning rate of Black/African-American children is three times higher than white children.
Careful, your source says that the rate, not the number, is 3x. There are some stats where it is actually 3x the raw number, in which case you know you have found a really crazy disparity given different group sizes.
Come the era of civil rights a good number of these pools were closed down and filled in rather than allow mixed race swimming.
"White flight", redlining, and other economic pressures worked to keep new community pools coming into place in black neighbourhoods.
https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2019/07/wolcott-segreg...
> and black families were generally less able to afford paid swimming lessons for their children.
Nearly everbody I know swims, black, white, etc. but I'm not sure very many had paid swimming lessons.
With accessable pools and beaches the swimming part comes along with people being in the water.
If their fear kept them away from water forever, it would serve them well enough I guess... the problem is, if you don't get kids swimming young then when they get older they will probably push through the fear on their own to fit in during social situation rather than in an instructional context where somebody is prepared to help them through the learning process safely. That's how you get teenagers jumping into pools during pool parties and immediately starting to drown.
At what age did the training start? I reckon training must have started far too late (read my comment about me getting used to the water about the same time I learned to walk).
I've not thought about it before because over here one just assumes someone can swim (with the caveat/possible exception of some tourists and migrants).
You'd think the first step in solving the problem would be to figure out why kids here take easily to water and the ones your way less so. Perhaps the answer is known and I've just not heard about it.
> The district counters that the old model of cohort schools for highly capable students is highly inequitable. For decades, highly capable programs across the country, like SPS’, served a small number of Black, Latino, Indigenous, Alaskan and Pacific Islander and low-income students and taught more white and Asian students. In the 2022-23 school year, 52% of highly capable students at SPS were white, 16% were Asian, and 3.4% were Black.
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-publi...
I understand how the lack of amenities, public pools etc., would seriously disadvantage kids and would set back their leaning to swim. What is less clear is why families would actually need to pay for swimming lessons. When I was growing up in Australia swimming was so ubiquitous that what we kids didn't learn from our parents we almost picked up by osmosis — immersion with other kids in the water, etc.
That's not to say kids weren't taught, they were but by that time most kids already had basic water skills, dog-paddling, treading water etc. Thus teaching was aimed at perfecting the correct stroke for the different swimming styles, the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, sidestroke, etc. and it was taught at school. The thought of paying for swimming lessons would have been completely foreign to most of us (professional swimming teachers would have been reserved for those in competition such as the Olympics).
Why isn't swimming a compulsory part of school sport? If it were then all kids would be taught at least the basics.
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.