Swim classes focus on infants

BY GAYLA SCHAEFER FOR FLORIDA TODAY


Each year hundreds of children are hurt or killed in home swimming pools and other residential bodies of water.

For Kelly Haskins of Merritt Island, the problem hit close to home last year while she was sitting by the pool talking on the phone while her 11-year-old daughter played with her 3-year-old son, Hunter.

Her daughter yelled for her and, Haskins said, “I vaguely remember hitting the off button on the phone and throwing it down. I ran to the edge of the pool, grabbed him and pulled him up onto the patio. Hunter’s body was limp, cold and turning blue already. His eyes were rolling to the back of his head and he was definitely not breathing.”

Thankfully, Haskins’ husband knew CPR and got him breathing again, and the boy wasn’t permanently hurt.“

One thing I learned through this experience is to never take your eyes off your kids while they’re in the pool,” said Haskins. “The phone conversation took my attention away and all it took was a minute to nearly lose my son.”

Orlando Dominguez, chief of emergency services for Brevard County, said that his office strongly recommends parents to have a cordless phone by the pool to avoid walking away to answer a ring. And, if adults must leave poolside for any reason, take the children out of the water rather than leaving them unattended.“

It is very hard to say how many (drowning calls) total in Brevard each year because of how we classify the 911 calls,” said Dominguez. “A ballpark figure would be anywhere from 10 to 15 a year, but for us, any is one too many.”

Dominguez also recommends using approved flotation devices, removing toys from pools after use to avoid piquing little ones’ interest, having good safety gates and locks around pools and other residential bodies of water, and perhaps most importantly, teaching children to swim at an early age.

“I was very saddened recently to see yet another story in the newspaper of a child drowning,” said Ginger Blackman, a certified Infant Swimming Resource instructor on Merritt Island who teaches children from 6 months to 6 years old swimming survival lessons.

“This is a preventable tragedy .”

Infant Swimming Resource has more than 422 instructors nationwide, including several in Brevard County. According to Blackmon, more than 144,634 students have been trained and there have been more than 1,700 witnessed survivals as a result of the training and reports of more than 783 un-witnessed survivals.

“Florida ranks only second to Arizona in the number of childhood drownings,” said Jeff Girten, membership and marketing director for the Central Florida YMCA Cocoa Family Center at Brevard Community College.

Drowning ranks as the No. 1 cause of accidental death for children under the age of four in Florida, he said.

“The YMCA has a goal to do all we can to prevent drownings,” said Girten. “Being in Florida with so much water it is important to be safe.”

The organization partnered with the Dr. Phillips Foundation and Infant Swim Research to offer Safe Start drowning prevention at local YMCAs, including the one in Cocoa — which offers the classes in its Olympic-size pool to children from six-months to three-years-old.

Infant Swim Resources also offers classes instructors’ homes across Brevard. Haskins enrolled her son in an ISR program in Cocoa Beach taught by Allison Mollica two months after his accident.

“She was kind, gentle but strong, and taught him survival techniques in a matter of just 10 minutes a day throughout about three weeks,” said Haskins.

“At the end of the program, he was swimming underwater, and able to do a ‘starfish’ technique of floating on his back, then flip over and get to the side of the pool. At the final class, he had to swim fully clothed, just as he would if he were to accidentally fall into the pool.”

Blackman said that babies ages six to 12 months learn breath control, correct floating posture and the skills to attain a back float and remain floating for varied periods of time.

“Children who are at least 12 months old and walking will learn correct swimming posture, movement through the water, the rollback-to-float as well as rotating to a face down position to continue to swim. This ‘swim-float-swim’ sequence can be repeated until safety is reached.”

Apart from teaching children to swim, Dominguez also recommends that parents learn CPR techniques for infants and children.

“CPR for children is critical before paramedics arrive and there are many institutions that offer classes,” he said. “You can call most any fire department for information on classes or look in the phone book for organizations like the Red Cross and American Heart Association which offer it.”

Haskins, got a CPR crash course at the hospital where her son was taken after his accident.

“Before we left the hospital, a nurse took a few moments to teach me infant CPR on a ‘dummy child’ and that’s when I lost it,” said Haskins. “The whole experience came flooding back to me, and I realized just how closely I came to losing him, and how fortunate I was that my daughter alerted me when she did. I’m not sure how long he had been under water, or how long he had lost consciousness. All I knew was that he had nearly drowned on my watch, and I was only about 10 feet away. If this happened to me, this could happen to anyone.”