The Other 167 Hours

At the very beginning of this year, my first Substack held a particular focus on crib safety. September is National Infant Safety month, so let’s zoom out this week and talk safety and swim lessons.

A child might spend thirty to sixty minutes a week in a swim lesson. As a swim teacher with over two decades of experience, I have spent most of my working life inside that unique time block, so I am the last person to undersell it. Lessons build comfort, movement, confidence, and enjoyment, and for some age groups they may go along with a lower risk of drowning. But there are 168 hours in a week. Outside the lesson, that same child is being bathed, visiting grandparents, wandering through a backyard, sitting at a family barbecue, staying at a hotel, walking past a spa, playing near a bucket, or living in a house with a pool gate that may or may not latch. A preschooler goes to the beach, the lake, the water park, a friend’s house, or a backyard pool where five adults each assume one of the other four is watching.

Please dont hyperfocus on “the other 167 hours.” It is a way of thinking, not an exact measurement. A thirty-minute lesson is about 0.3 percent of the week, and a full hour is about 0.6 percent, but that number says nothing about how much of the rest of the week a child is actually near water. What it does is point at something the injury-prevention world has understood for a long time: for nearly all of a young child’s life, whether they drown depends far less on what they can do in a lesson than on the systems around them.

Other fields already work this way. We do not expect an infant to survive a crash on their own, so we use a regulated car seat, install it correctly, (or we head to our local chapter of Safe Kids and have one of their certified car seat installers help us), build safer cars, pass laws, offer installation checks, and tell parents when to change the setup. We do not expect a sleeping baby to notice a broken crib rail, so we require safer designs, product testing, recalls, and standards. We do not rely on “don’t touch” as the main safeguard when there is a gun in the house, so we lock it, unload it, store the ammunition separately, and in some states hold adults legally responsible for keeping it away from kids.

Drowning prevention should be just as comfortable saying that a young child is not the safety device. That takes nothing away from swim lessons. It puts them where the evidence puts them, as one layer of protection among several. The real question for those of us who teach was never whether kids should learn to swim because we know they should. The question is whether we describe what they can do honestly, and whether our programs help families build the fences, routines, supervision habits, and emergency readiness that protect a child during the rest of the week.

Do not make the child carry the system

Injury prevention has a simple framework that goes back to William Haddon, who spent his career on traffic safety. Instead of asking only “what did the person do wrong,” you look at the whole event, before, during, and after, and at everything involved: the person, the hazard, the physical surroundings, and the social surroundings. Applied to drowning, it means asking more than whether a child can float or swim a distance. Can the child reach water without an adult knowing? Is there a barrier between the house and the pool? Does the gate close and latch by itself every time? Is one adult actually assigned to this child, or is there just a group of adults who are all sort of aware of her? What happens when the caregiver gets a phone call, a knock at the door, a second kid who needs something, a pot boiling over? And if a child does go under, how fast can someone notice, pull them out, call 911, and start CPR?

Safety professionals rank protections in a rough order. The most reliable ones get rid of the hazard or wall it off. Emptying a bucket removes the hazard entirely. A four-sided fence with a self-closing, self-latching gate separates the child from the water. Below that come things that organize adult behavior, like naming a water watcher or writing an emergency plan, which work well but only when people follow through. At the bottom sit the things that depend on the individual, like a child’s swimming skill or a properly fitted life jacket. Those matter a great deal in the right situation, and they are also the layers most likely to fail when conditions change.

None of that means a fence is effortless. Fences have to be installed, maintained, closed, and paid for. Car seats have to be chosen and installed correctly. Gun safes only work when people use them. What these measures do is cut down the number of moments in which a child’s life depends on a toddler’s judgment, or on a tired parent remembering perfectly in the middle of a normal, distracting day. That is the difference between a system built for ideal behavior and one built for real life.

What car seats, cribs, and firearm storage can teach us

Car seats: we do not teach toddlers to survive a crash

Child passenger safety is the clearest example I know of responsibility landing in the right place. A toddler does not become “car safe” by learning rules. An adult picks the right seat for the child’s age and size, installs it, buckles the child in, keeps them in the back seat and rear facing, and follows the guidance on when to move to the next stage. The seat itself has to meet federal standards, and state laws back up its use.

A 2021 review that pooled studies from five countries found that car seat laws were generally linked to more kids being restrained, more being restrained correctly, and fewer injuries and deaths. The same review flagged a problem worth remembering: where seats were unaffordable or laws went unenforced, the benefits were uneven. So the lesson is bigger than “laws work.” A good law needs a usable standard, help getting the product installed, clear public messaging, and equal access. Crash research makes a related point. Car seats protected young children better than seat belts alone, but when the seat was badly misused, that advantage shrank. A safety product has to be well designed, fit the child, and be used right.

A crash is obviously not a drowning, and a car seat is not a pool fence. But the principle carries over. We do not ask children to make up for a dangerous environment with a skill they are still learning. We surround them with protections that adults operate and regulators test.

Cribs: fix the product instead of asking the baby to adapt

The 2011 U.S. crib rule is a good example of controlling a hazard, and it is worth describing carefully, because I have heard it described incorrectly.

In June 2011 the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the manufacture and sale of traditional drop-side cribs and tightened requirements for structure, mattress supports, hardware, and testing. Before the rule, more than 11 million cribs had been recalled in about four years, and detaching drop-side rails had been linked to at least 32 infant suffocation and strangulation deaths since 2000. Nobody suggested teaching babies to recognize a rail coming loose. The dangerous product category was removed from the market and the bar for every crib that followed was raised.

Here is the claim I would not make, even though it sounds good: that infant deaths “dropped dramatically because of the 2011 crib standards.” The record shows a real hazard and a strong policy response. It does not show that the rule, by itself, moved national infant mortality. “Sleep-related death” covers a lot of ground, including sudden unexpected infant death, suffocation in adult beds, soft bedding, overlay, inclined sleepers, and crib failures. The crib rule targeted one slice of that. It deserves credit for the slice it fixed, without being credited for trends it did not cause.

So the accurate version goes like this. The 2011 standards took drop-side cribs off the market and strengthened design and testing in response to documented deaths and recalls. They almost certainly reduced exposure to those specific hazards. The evidence does not support saying they changed overall infant mortality on their own. I actually think that is the better model for our field, because it does the thing we are often bad at: name the hazard, name the fix, and stop short of promising more than the data can back up.

Firearm storage: “don’t touch” is not the plan

This comparison needs the most care. Guns and water are not the same kind of hazard. They differ in how they hurt people, how often kids are exposed, how political they are, and whether you can remove them from a home at all. What they share is one principle: when a hazard can kill a child in a single moment of access, adults should not rely mainly on the child’s training, self-control, or ability to follow a rule.

The landmark study here is by Grossman and colleagues, who compared homes where a child had been shot, by suicide or by accident, with similar homes where no one had. Four storage habits each lowered the risk: keeping the gun locked, keeping it unloaded, locking the ammunition, and storing the ammunition separately. A later review of programs that tried to get families to adopt those habits found that the ones that worked best paired counseling with an actual lock or safe handed to the family.

That “advice plus a device” finding is the part I keep thinking about for aquatics. Information matters, but advice on its own asks busy people to change their behavior in an imperfect world. A gate latch, a fence, a door alarm, a life jacket, or a CPR class makes the safer choice easier to actually make. None of them is enough alone, and all of them beat a pamphlet.

So the parallel is not that water is like a gun. It is that nobody in firearm safety accepts “I taught my kid not to touch it” as a substitute for locking it up, and we should stop accepting “my kid can swim” as a substitute for keeping a young child away from water unsupervised

Drowning is a systems problem

For U.S. children ages one to four, most drownings happen in swimming pools. For babies under one, about three quarters happen in bathtubs. Kids also drown in lakes, oceans, spas, buckets, and coolers. Those numbers alone make a skill-only story hard to hold onto. Swimming ability has almost nothing to do with a baby drowning in a bathtub. A toddler who moves confidently through a warm lesson pool is a different swimmer after an unplanned fall into a cold backyard pool, a dark spa, a vacation rental, a canal, surf, or a pool reached through a gate someone left open.

The case reviews are where this gets real. Anderson, Ramos, and Schuman went through 1,537 pool and spa submersions involving U.S. children thirteen and under, using the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s own investigation files from 2000 to 2017. Parents were the supervisor in a little over half the cases, but grandparents were supervising in 14 percent, childcare providers in 10 percent, and other adults in nearly 10 percent, and when the supervisor was not a parent, the incident was about twice as likely to be fatal. In the fatal cases, the average gap in active supervision was around sixteen minutes. Where the records said what the child had been doing, nearly half were simply playing outside. The authors’ conclusion was that safety messaging has to reach grandparents and other caregivers, not just parents. The CPSC’s own review of in-home submersions among children under five found that most victims were under two, that bathtubs and bath seats came up again and again, and that the circumstances included supervision lapses and, sometimes, an older child left in charge. An Australian review of drownings among children under five found the most common distractions were housework, yard work, and socializing.

None of that describes bad parents. It describes normal family life: a second kid who needs something, a phone ringing, a delivery at the door, a task that feels urgent, and the assumption that another adult has taken over. The systems answer is to build homes and routines that can absorb one ordinary interruption, rather than blaming caregivers for being human.

The fence: the layer with the strongest evidence

Of everything on the list, the best evidence belongs to isolation fencing, meaning a four-sided fence that separates the pool from the house and the rest of the yard. A fence that uses the back wall of the house as its fourth side does nothing to stop a toddler who walks out the sliding door. A Cochrane review of the research found that fencing was linked to lower rates of child drowning and near-drowning, and concluded that the fence should isolate the pool from the home and have a gate that closes and latches on its own. Australian studies found more risk with three-sided fencing than four-sided. The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend a four-sided fence at least four feet high with a self-closing, self-latching gate, alongside supervision and the other layers rather than instead of them. Special acknowledgement to Eric Lupton and his incredible dedication to reducing drownings and his work with this profession via his company Life Saver Pool Fence. ( not sponsored, he’s just a good guy and collegue whom I respect).

A fence is still not magic, and one study shows why. Researchers in Los Angeles County looked at pool-fencing ordinances in place in the 1990s and found no link to lower drowning rates. The likely reason was that the ordinances were weak, did not require true isolation fencing, and were barely enforced. That is a warning about bad policy, not evidence against fences. A standard has to spell out an effective design, be enforced, be maintained, and reach the families who cannot afford or control the installation. Older national survey data estimated that about 15 percent of U.S. households had access to a residential pool, and that adequate fencing was less common among renters, lower-income families, and people in apartments and attached housing. A real systems approach has to include housing, rental rules, affordability, and retrofit help, and not just parent education.

Alarms, covers, life jackets, and CPR: helpful layers, not replacements

Pool alarms, door alarms, and covers can give warning or buy time after a child gets through a barrier. Their value depends on whether they are installed, maintained, loud enough, and not so prone to false alarms that everyone ignores them, and above all on whether an adult is close enough to respond. The evidence for alarms as a lifesaver on their own is much thinner than for fencing, so they belong behind barriers and supervision, not in place of them.

Life jackets matter most around boats, docks, open water, current, and depth, anywhere a child could not be expected to save themselves. They have to fit and they have to be Coast Guard approved. A life jacket does not replace an adult, and pool toys are not life jackets. CPR and emergency planning come into play after something has already gone wrong. They cannot stop a child from reaching the water, but they shorten the time between the event and help. For a family or a facility, being ready means CPR training, a charged phone, knowing the address, rescue equipment where it makes sense, and an emergency plan that has actually been practiced.

Where swim lessons fit, and where they do not

Swim lessons matter. What I want is to avoid overselling lessons and brieflyshare what the research actually says, because our field has been a bit “generous” about it for a long time.

The study everyone cites is by Brenner and colleagues, published in 2009. They compared children who had drowned with similar children who had not, and among one- to four-year-olds, those who had taken formal swim lessons were much less likely to be among the drowned. The headline number is an 88 percent reduction in risk, and that number needs a warning label. The study was observational, not a controlled experiment. The estimate was wobbly, with a range so wide that the true effect could be anywhere from enormous to almost nothing. ( Shout out to anyone who attended my “ Words Matter” session on this specific topic!) The one-to-four-year-old analysis rested on 61 drowned children, only two of whom had taken lessons. The study only knew whether a child had participated in lessons; it knew nothing about the program’s quality, how many lessons, what skills were taught, whether the child retained them, or whether they would work in unfamiliar water. It left out bathtub and bucket drownings, where swimming skill would not have helped anyway. And families who sign up for lessons probably differ from those who do not in ways that also affect drowning risk.

It is still meaningful evidence, and it supports lessons as one protective layer. It does not tell us that any particular program, number of lessons, or demonstrated skill makes a child safe. The CDC says lessons can reduce drowning risk and, in the same breath, that children who have had lessons still need close, constant supervision. The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its drowning policy this June and lists lessons alongside four-sided fencing, active supervision, life jackets, and CPR, repeating the line from its 2019 statement that swim lessons do not “drown-proof” a child.

Taking lessons is not the same as being protected

We need better words than “can swim” and “can’t swim,” and these are the distinctions I find myself explaining most often, to parents and to newer instructors. Taking lessons means a child showed up. It says nothing about quality, “dose” (aka consistency), or what was learned. Learning a skill means a child can do a specific thing, like float, kick, climb out, or turn around, under the conditions where it was practiced. It says nothing about surprise, cold, current, clothing, exhaustion, or a strange pool. In addition, something I don’t see discussed enough is the variable of GROWTH and its impact on buoyancy and skill maintenance, but I will save that for another time. 🙂

Keeping a skill means it survives time away from practice; it says nothing about whether it shows up in an emergency. Water competence, the term researchers now prefer, means a whole bundle of physical, mental, and emotional capabilities, which is a far better way to think than “swims or doesn’t,” but it still does not mean the child is immune from drowning or can go without an adult. And actual drowning-risk reduction means fewer kids drowning, which is the thing we want, and also the thing our data almost never lets us trace back to a specific lesson or skill.

Babies: reflexes, performance, and prevention are three different things

Kudos to making it this far! The infant side needs even more care. Babies do show real physical responses to water, including holding their breath and slowing their heart rate, which are often called a diving response. Those responses are real. They are not evidence that a baby can swim to safety, protect their airway, or survive a drowning event. In the same way, a movement an instructor draws out, a practiced response in a warm familiar pool, an impressive video, or a spot in a baby swim class is not evidence of a skill the baby chose, kept, or could use somewhere else.

A 2023 systematic review looked at every comparative study it could find on formal aquatic activities for babies under three. It found eighteen. Some suggested developmental or therapeutic benefits, though most were small, observational, and open to other explanations. The finding that matters most for us is that not one of them measured drowning prevention as an outcome. That does not mean baby swim has no value. Families come for bonding, play, sensory experience, comfort in water, movement, inclusion, or therapy, and every one of those is a fine reason. It does mean that none of those reasons should be dressed up as drowning protection. “Waterproof baby” has no place in professional water safety communication, and neither does “drown-proof.”

Risk perception: the worry is reasonable, the evidence is indirect

The fear that lessons make parents complacent gets stated too strongly. We do not have solid evidence that lessons cause parents to supervise less, or that a parent’s belief in their child’s skill leads directly to more drownings. What we do have is uncomfortable evidence about beliefs.

Morrongiello and her colleagues followed parents through a set of swim lessons and found that as parents saw their kids improving, more of them came to believe the child could keep themselves from drowning and needed less watching. An earlier New Zealand survey of 882 parents of two- to four-year-olds found that parents whose children were in swim school were more likely than other parents to agree that a toddler could save themselves after a fall into water, and that swimming ability was preferable to relying on an adult. And when researchers surveyed preschool swim instructors, they found real disagreement about whether a more confident toddler should mean more supervision, not less. That last one tells me this is our problem as much as it is a parent problem.

The fairest summary is that the evidence for risk compensation after swim lessons is limited and mostly about attitudes rather than outcomes, and that it is still enough to justify saying, over and over, that a new skill never reduces the need for supervision or barriers. Which is why I would retire the phrase “water safe.” A parent hears it as a verdict on their child’s overall risk. It is far more useful to say exactly what happened and under what conditions: “Your child rolled to a back float on her own today, in this warm, familiar, supervised pool.” “He is starting to move himself through the water with support.” “These are pieces of water competence, and they do not replace close supervision or a fence.” Simply changing your verbiage to “safeR” is preferable.

The other 167 hours: build for a normal day

“Constant supervision” is good advice, and it is incomplete when it becomes a slogan with no plan attached. Adults get interrupted. They have more than one kid. They are cooking, unloading groceries, on a call, talking to relatives, in the bathroom, at the grill, helping someone out of a changing room, or assuming someone else has it. After a drowning, the useful question is rarely why the caregiver looked away. It is what else should have been in place so that one ordinary lapse did not turn fatal.

At home, that means a four-sided fence, a self-closing and self-latching gate, alarms or locks on doors that open onto the pool, and getting rid of small water hazards. In the bathroom, it means never leaving a baby or toddler in the tub, draining it right away, and setting things up so you never have to leave the room for a towel. At gatherings, it means saying out loud who the water watcher is and handing off out loud when it changes. At vacation rentals and relatives’ houses, it means asking about pools, spas, gates, alarms, and door access before the child gets there rather than discovering them after you unpack. The Anderson data on grandparents is the best argument I know for making that phone call.

The same thinking applies to our facilities. Operators can build redundancy into check-in, deck layout, lifeguarding, family swim, staff roles, how a child is released to an adult, and emergency plans. A swim school is not only a place where a child learns a skill. It is one of the few places where a family’s whole way of thinking about water gets shaped, and that shaping follows them home.

What instructors and swim schools can do now

We cannot install every family’s fence or supervise every bathtub. We can make systems thinking part of how we teach, and I think all of the following are within reach of any program.

Ask about the rest of the week at enrollment. A short, nonjudgmental set of questions goes a long way. Does the child live in or regularly visit a home with a pool, spa, pond, canal, dock, or open water nearby? Do those pools have four-sided fencing with a self-latching gate? Does the child spend time at grandparents’, friends’, daycare, hotels, or rentals with water access? Who is the assigned supervisor when the child is near water, and do the adults hand off to each other out loud? Is anyone in the family trained in CPR? Are there tubs, buckets, pet bowls, or other small water hazards that matter at this child’s age? This is not a home inspection. It is a prompt that moves the conversation from our pool deck into the child’s actual life.

Teach handoffs, not just watching. Swap “watch your child” for language people can actually use. “You are the water watcher now.” “I’m handing supervision to you, can you confirm?” “This child needs to be within arm’s reach.” “Several adults nearby does not mean someone is assigned.” “Never hand off silently.” It is a small change in habit with a big payoff, and PLEASE don’t feel foolish if a parent /host asks you to wear a water watcher tag! Its a great visual and often full of helpful information.

Make every progress report a prevention message. Pair the skill update with a reminder: your child is developing real aquatic skills; those skills are practiced in a controlled, supervised pool and do not replace active supervision, barriers, life jackets in the right settings, or CPR readiness. Drop “water safe,” “drown-proof,” “survival proof,” and anything else that implies the child can now cover for an absent adult or a broken gate.

Pair the message with something usable. Borrow the firearm-storage lesson: advice works better with a device attached. Point families to a local fence or gate inspection resource, a CPR class, a family water-safety plan, a water-watcher tag or handoff card, a checklist for vacation rentals, guidance on fitting a life jacket, and a reminder to dump buckets and drain kiddie pools. If your child is on the spectrum and elopes, eduacte neighbors so they may reinforce your water safety plan by checking their pools, spas or surrounding creeks, ponds, etc.

Describe ability as ability, not immunity. A child’s progress deserves recognition. Say what happened, name the conditions, state the limits, and keep the adult and environmental layers in the picture. That is honest, and once a family understands what they are being told, it is also better business than the alternative.

What we can borrow without forcing it

Water is not a gun, a crib, or a car, and I am not claiming the research on those hazards transfers one to one. What transfers is a way of thinking, and five pieces of it hold up. Do not put the main responsibility on the least capable person in the room, because toddlers cannot reliably recognize, avoid, or recover from a hazard that can kill them. Build the protection into the environment, so that access is prevented before anyone has to respond. Plan for predictable human error, because adults will be tired, distracted, social, and outnumbered, and redundancy is a kindness rather than an accusation. Attach every message to something that makes the safer choice easier. And match your claims to your evidence, because a child can be making real progress without being “water safe,” a standard can fix a hazard without explaining every trend, and a field earns trust by saying what it can do and what it cannot.

The promise we should make

Swim instruction was never a promise that a young child could be made responsible for surviving every water hazard in an adult world. The honest promise, and I think the stronger one, is that we can help children build real, age-appropriate ability in the water while the adults, operators, policymakers, and communities around them build the conditions in which that ability has a chance to matter. A child should not have to outswim an open gate. A toddler should not have to make up for a distracted backyard full of adults. A baby should not have to perform a float or a reflex to earn protection from bathwater or a bucket. The safest child is the one surrounded by systems that still work when the routine changes, an adult gets interrupted, a gate gets tested, or a skill does not show up when it is needed.

So here is what I would ask you to do with all this, whether you teach, run a program, guard a deck, or write policy. Think about the last family that walked out of your facility. If you could see every hour of their week between now and their next lesson, which hour would worry you most, and what would it take for your program to have already said something about it? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. Also, if you made it all the way through my article: HIGH FIVE!

References and Rabbit Holes

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