It happened in a split second. I was sitting near the edge of my parents’ pool, watching my daughter and chatting with a friend when I turned to talk — just for a moment.

“Did Abby just go under?” my friend interrupted my sentence.

My heart dropped. My daughter’s head was bobbing just below the surface. I jumped in, pulled her out, and held her shaking body against mine while a terrifying could have pinged through my mind.

“It’s okay, Ericka, it was only a second,” my friend told me. It didn’t help. In that instant, I viscerally understood how any parent, no matter how vigilant, could lose a child to drowning.

I was lucky. Christi Brown was not. Her three-year-old son, Judah, had already taken traditional swim lessons and was wearing a puddle jumper at the pool. He took it off to dry, but jumped back in the pool without it — thinking he was safe because he was used to a flotation device. She found him underwater minutes later, and Judah died that day.

“All they taught him at the age of three was to be confident in the water, without teaching him competence in it,” Brown told me of her son’s past swimming lessons.

That distinction — confidence versus competence — is the whole argument for why every parent of a young child should seriously consider infant survival swim lessons. These lessons are easily identified on social media by striking videos of young children being tossed into the water, where they immediately roll onto their backs and float, a technique designed to help them survive an accidental fall into a pool.

The videos can be shocking to watch. Despite their controversial nature, I believe it’s worth the cost to potentially save your child’s life.

Recently, influencer Emilie Kiser lost her three-year-old son, Trigg, to a drowning accident, which has caused many moms to reconsider safety measures. But Kiser isn’t alone; there are drowning incidents reported every week in this country, especially in the summer months.

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages one to four, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that drowning rates in that age group jumped roughly 28% in 2021 and 2022 compared with 2019.

It doesn’t look like the movies. Kids don’t thrash and yell; they just quietly go under in a silent tragedy.

“It’s remarkably undramatic in nature, and most of the time it’s not recognized by people who are watching swimmers,” ER physician Dr. Scott Youngquist said.

Survival swimming lessons train children as young as six months to float unassisted and swim to safety if they fall in unexpectedly.

I spoke with Pediaswim founder Joy McGinty, one of the method’s best-known practitioners, and she doesn’t mince words about the flotation devices most parents rely on instead. A puddle jumper, she says, is “like cocaine — because it can kill” a child by giving him false confidence.

“With a huge percentage of kids that drown, if you ask a parent what is the last picture they have of their kid alive, they’re in a puddle jumper,” she said. Someone took it off, and the child jumped back in without it. That is precisely what happened to Judah.

I know the skepticism firsthand — because I hesitated too. My son started traditional lessons at age one; two years and three different swim schools later, he still couldn’t have saved himself if he fell in.

Harvard health expert Dr. Claire McCarthy, M.D., has noted that children under five simply aren’t cognitively or physically ready to learn conventional swimming. Survival swimming exists precisely because of that gap.

Critics raise real questions, and parents deserve to hear them squarely. Some object to the brief distress babies show in early sessions, calling it traumatic. Others point out that infants under one most often drown in bathtubs — a risk survival swimming doesn’t address.

Dr. Clay Jones has argued in Science-Based Medicine that the marketing oversells the method and that it’s wrong to place “the onus of drowning prevention on an infant.” Concerns about so-called “dry drowning” circulate too, though the Red Cross has pushed back on sensationalized reporting that it says has needlessly terrified parents.

These are fair points to weigh, not reasons to dismiss the method outright. No one — least of all instructors like McGinty — claims survival swimming replaces supervision. It’s a last line of defense, not a substitute for watching your kids.

“You don’t want your kid to have to use this skill,” my sister Shelby Gil, who left a nursing career to become a certified instructor, told me, “but you can know that they will have skills to save their own life if they need to.”

Unfortunately, the lessons aren’t cheap or convenient. They can run $75 to $300 a week, and instructors are somewhat scarce outside places such as Florida where pools stay open year-round. I drove 25 minutes each way, five days a week, for six weeks of ten-minute sessions.

Nonprofits like the Judah Brown Project (created in honor of the Judah in this story), McGinty’s Gift of Swimming, and Hope Floats now offer scholarships precisely because families keep learning about this option only after tragedy strikes nearby — a pattern that repeats itself, town by town, drowning by drowning.

When I finally enrolled my daughter, I braced for tears. Instead, she came to enjoy her lessons and her teacher. On the last day, her instructor had us dress her in boots, a jacket, and gloves — because real emergencies don’t happen in swimsuits — and she jumped in fully clothed. She floated, and I felt safer knowing she’ll always know how to do that now.

“Don’t be us,” said Judah’s mom, Cristi. “We don’t want you to live the rest of your life without your child.”

It’s not about guilt or shame. It’s a warning worth heeding and an investment worth making.

***

Ericka Andersen is the author of “Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith” (InterVarsity Press, 2026)

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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