Your instructors at Little Otter Swim School share the importance of water safety with your children during their lessons. So you know that we believe that knowing these rules is something that is important for your children’s overall safety and well-being.
It’s always important for you and your children to be able to recall these rules, but there are sometimes that it might be more likely than others for knowledge of these water safety rules to be top-of-mind.
At crowded pools and beaches
Sometimes keeping up with just your own kids by the pool is hard enough, but add a few dozen energetic kids and adults and the difficulty in keeping up with your kids get exponentially more difficult. In a crowd, your children can get out of sight in a split second.
It’s critical to be knowledgeable of each person in your party’s abilities to swim and to make sure you know where those are at all times who do not know how to swim. The buddy system is very important in this situation and can help to ensure that everyone stays safe.
Open pools
Kids love pools and may forget that all pools are not alike. So being safe around each one may require different actions.
Fences should always be around pools so that kids cannot just jump into an unfamiliar pool, but it’s better to teach them this simple safety rule than taking a chance on their safety.
Unknown water
You may attend a party at a park, camp or farm where they may be a variety of water types – from manmade to natural – that requires that you’re on your water safety toes.
Unknown water can be deeper than it appears, hide dangers like rocks, plant life, or dock footing, or present the risk of strong currents or waves that could surprise you if you jump in.
The most important thing to remember about this sort of situation is that you shouldn’t get into any water that you are unfamiliar with. Always heed posted warnings and no lifeguard signs.
At parties
There is a lot going on parties besides water fun. The water fun is sort of secondary but water safety should never be secondary. It is easy for people to turn around “just for a second” and when they turn back around, they’ve lost sight of that child they were watching.
The best action to take at parties is designating an adult as the “water watcher” whose specific responsibility it is to supervise the kids. To make it fair for everyone, this can be a rotating duty. Stop by the customer service desk next time you are at Little Otter for your own Official Water Watcher tag.
Little Otter Swim School’s team members are passionate about teaching kids to swim and be safe as they enjoy the water. Learn more about what makes Little Otter different.
Conversations