Supervising vs. Watching
When it comes to CHILDREN & WATER, “Adult Supervision” must be replaced by ADULT WATCHING!
I have been around water my whole life. I grew up on a lake and I think I was enrolled in swimming lessons before I was 3 . Then at 5, I was on swim team. At13 I became a volunteer coach and then in 1987 at 16 years old, I was trained and certified as a lifeguard and swim lesson instructor. And that is what I have been doing ever since.
For as long as I have been teaching swimming lessons through my own company, the mantra of “Adult Supervision”, or some version of that phrase, has been the common term that my industry, the aquatics industry, has used to describe how we need to be keeping our children, our families safe when they are around water.
For the past number of years, I have doubted that this phrase is at all representative of what we REALLY want adults to be doing when they are with their children in and around water. I know that for the families in my program, I expect a whole lot more than supervising. We talk about it often.
Each season, I ensure that my swim families are getting a healthy dose of information, tools, strategies and resources for all things water safety related. But, what about families in other communities??
So, I started to do some research. I talked to parents. I observed parents. I talked with other instructors and teachers. I listened to the rhetoric that was swirling around me at events hosted by aquatic professionals. I watched what was going on in the world of aquatics generally and swimming lessons more specifically. I was fully invested in finding out how water safety is being taught by the professionals and how it is being received an acted on by the parents.
In October 2023 I decided I would take a road trip to visit 500 preschools and daycares, from Virginia to New Mexico and back, to talk with parents about swimming lesson preparedness and how they can be more involved in that process and in keeping their children safe in and around water.
This was done in an effort to find out what “water safety and drowning prevention” information was in schools and if any of that information was making it home from school with these little children who are at the highest risk of accidental death by drowning.
Within the first day of this trip, in the suburbs of Nashville, TN, I did not like what I was hearing, seeing or finding.
To say is was dismal would be giving too much credit.
IT DID NOT EXIST. Not in one single solitary school was there any information about “swimming lessons”, “swimming lesson preparedness”, never mind “water safety or drowning prevention”.
ZERO. NOTHING.
And that is what I continued to find in every single school that I visited on this trip. Almost 500 preschools and daycares.
ZERO. NOTHING.
I was ready and wanting to talk to parents about how to get their children introduced to the water at a young age, what to look for in a results producing swimming program and the role that they can play to help their children be ready for swimming lessons.
I quickly realized that parents were not prepared for that conversation because they hadn’t been invited in to the conversation about the WHAT, WHY and HOW of water safety and drowning prevention.
So, rather than complain about the situation (at best) or ignore the situation (at worst), I made a decision to come up with a program that would address what was happening and offer some things that would create solutions and answers to the problems I saw.
What have been some of the problems??
Drowning continues to be the #1 cause of accidental death in children under the age of 5.
In the past 3 years, childhood drownings have risen about 11 ½%.
No matter how many drownings occur, fatal or non fatal, the mantra of “adult supervision” has remained the same.
Do you know what the definition of “Supervise” is??
“To oversee”.
Supervise. Such a passive, not committal word.
The word supervise is not enough. In my mind, the words, the term and the implementation of this word is clearly ineffective when we are talking about keeping children safe in and around water.
We know what “supervising” looks like. We see it all the time.
Maybe its 10 road workers hovering around a project while a few other workers are actually doing the project. Or maybe its 3 customer service people milling around while one or two others are doing the customer serving.
Sometimes it consists of a phone in hand and glancing up and down from the phone screen to whatever is requiring some of our attention, our supervision but definitely not our undivided attention.
The word that we need to be using is WATCHING.
The definition of “Watching” is “To be ALERTLY on the lookout, looking ATTENTIVELY, as to see what comes, is done or happens.”
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how we need to be when our children are in and around water environments?
We watch our kids in the car with mirrors on car seats.
We watch our kids sleep in their cribs with monitors.
We watch our kids when they are on the playground and we watch our kids in parking lots.
Clearly WATCHING is important to us BUT when we have our children around water, from pools to rivers and ponds to bathtubs, we have been taught that SUPERVISING them is adequate.
Its not.
I believe that drowning can begin to be eradicated when we WATCH.
When we are ALERT.
When we are ATTENTIVE.
When we are FULLY ENGAGED.
There is nothing more important in our lives that the precious treasures that are our children.
There is nothing that we would not do for them.
We can begin by giving them the gift of alertly and attentively WATCHING them any time there is a water environment that they might be able to access.
There are more strategies that we need to employ as well….8 more in fact. We will get to those in the upcoming weeks. When we build one strategy on top of another strategy, on top of another strategy, AND start and finish those strategies with WATCHING, we will have a foundation that is on its way to being unshakeable.
It’s time to eradicate drowning. Well, it’s actually past time.
Welcome to The WATCHING Initiative.
Let’s get started.