The WATCHING Initiative

Today is a very exciting day.

Today is the day that the world will meet The WATCHING Initiative.

You may be asking “What is The WATCHING Initiative”?

The WATCHING Initiative is a NEW set of 9 strategies that parents everywhere will use to keep their children safe around ALL water environments. From ponds to hotel pools or apartment complex pools, from oceans, lakes and rivers to community pools or waterparks, backyard pools and BATHTUBS.

This NEW set of strategies will educate and empower parents with information that they can immediately begin to use to implement rules and create safe boundaries around water for their children, starting at birth.

This NEW set of strategies will provide powerful resources, hands on tools, visual aids and fun, interactive projects that a family can work on together to reinforce water safety in their home as well as when they are around outside water environments. Families will be able to take measures to prevent drowning in any water environment that a child may find themselves close to.

The Watching Initiative sounds like something you want and need to have in your home right?

I agree.

Why do we need a NEW set of strategies?

Well, it is because the old ones have proven that they just aren’t working.

I have been teaching swimming lessons for more than 35 years and I am very aware that other programs and schools of thought exist, that offer parents a set of ideas that will protect their families from drowning situations. 5 Layers of Protection is one that many people may be familiar with.

Despite ideas and programs like the 5 Layers of Protection, children continue to drown. In fact, as the years have gone by, more fatal drownings have occurred each year. Not less.

The harsh reality is that over the past 3 years, childhood drownings have risen 11 1/2 %.

How is this possible and why has nothing changed??

Are the 5 Layers of Protection and other water safety awareness/drowning prevention programs or strategies to blame for the rise in drownings?

Absolutely not. But at some point, I feel that the people “in charge” of these schools of thought need to recognize what they are standing behind is not working and they need to be considering the very real possibility that something needs to be done differently, said differently and taught differently to have a different, POSITIVE outcome!!

For YEARS I have been one of the people supporting schools of thought like the 5 Layers of Protection.

I believed it. Well, kind of.

I believed in the importance of the ideas or the layers but not the order of importance that these ideas or layers were listed in.

I also believed, based on personal experience that there may be a few strategies missing that could be helpful in eradicating drowning.

I taught these strategies to the parents and children I had in the Swim With Miss Dayna Swim School.

In a different order.

With the few additions.

But in the end, since these ideas were the industry standard, widely accepted across the country and no one else seemed to have issues with them OR offer up any other alternatives, I just went with it.

With my own personal spin on them.

I mean seriously, who was I to raise my thoughts and concerns on this? Who was I to think that I had some ideas that could prove to be useful?

On October 23, 2023, I left on a 5 week, 4,000 mile road trip, from Roanoke, VA to Santa Fe, NM , down to Albuquerque, NM and then back to Roanoke. My goal was to visit as many preschools and daycares as I could (that number ended up being close to 500 centers). I was ready and wanting to talk to parents about how to get their children introduced to the water at a young age, swim lesson preparedness, what to look for in a results producing swimming program and the role that they can play to help their children be more successful.

I quickly realized that parents were not prepared for that conversation.

The conversation that they were needing to hear first was the one where we started talking about NEW strategies around teaching water safety and drowning prevention.

Through 2023 I have had so much time to review each part of some of the other ideas that are out there, being shared with parents on this topic.

I have continued to read about one fatal drowning after another and the rhetoric has remained the same, one fatal drowning after another.

Over the past year I have come to the conclusion that maybe those ideas aren’t working as effectively as it could be, because maybe the ideas ARE in the wrong order AND maybe there are some important ones that could be ADDED.

Maybe, because we can have all the layers in the world in place but unless water safety and drowning prevention strategies START and END with parents WATCHING their children, it is very possible that nothing will ever change.

And that just can’t happen.

In 2023, at least 220 children under the age of 5 have lost their lives to drowning. (I say at least because there is no true recording and reporting system for drowning fatalities.

And yet NOTHING has changed.

What is the definition of insanity?

Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.

So, the insanity stops here. Now.

Over the next few weeks, we will cover each of the 9 strategies in more depth.

It’s time to eradicate drowning. It’s time to launch The Watching Initiative.

Let me introduce you to it right now.