Teaching the very young to swim could save thousands of lives a year, UW researcher says
Teaching very young children to swim could save thousands of lives a year around the world, writes UW’s Dr. Frederick Rivara in this month’s issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.
Dr. Rivara, head of the Division of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, was commenting on an study in the journal finding that formal swimming instruction of children age 1 to 4 years old reduced their risk of drowning by 88%.
Currently, about 200,000 children and adolescents around the world drown each year. In the U.S., drowning is the second most common cause of injury death for children age 0 to 14 years—and drowning is the leading cause of overall death in children younger than 15 in countries such as China and Bangladesh.
The study also found that swimming instructions appeared to reduce the risk of drowning in children after 5 to 19 years, but because of the small number of cases in the study the results were not statistically significant.
The study looked at drowning cases in several regions of the U.S. and compared them with randomly selected living children of similar age to serve as “controls”.
In the 1- to 4-year-old group, the researchers interviewed the families of 61 drowning victims. Of the children who drowned only 2 (3 percent) had ever taken formal swimming lessons. Of the 134 “control” children, on the other hand, 35 (26 percent) had had formal swimming instructions.
The findings suggest that formal swimming lessons can reduce a young child’s risk of drowning by 88 percent. The lead author of the study was Dr. Ruth Brenner of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
In his commentary on the study, Dr. Rivara writes that teaching children to swim can be done “pretty much anywhere in the world without need for Olympic-sized swimming pools.”
A program in Bangladesh, for example, that uses bamboo barriers to create safe swimming areas in lakes and rivers has been able to teach thousands of children to swim at a cost less than $5 per child, Rivara points out.
Swimming lessons should not take the place of such strategies as pool fencing and adult supervision, Rivara writes, but “formal swimming lessons offer an opportunity to make a real difference in communities around the globe….”
To learn more:
- Read the paper “Association between swimming lessons and drowning in childhood” in the March issue of the journal Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine and Dr. Rivara’s commentary “Prevention of Drowning: The Time is Now” in the same issue.
- Visit the Drowning Prevention page maintained by Public Health – Seattle & King County
- Visit Seattle Children’s Drowning Prevention and Water Safety Web page, which has a list of resources of water safety and swimming instruction.
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