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Home › Articles › Toddler Health › Pool Air Quality and Breathing Problems in Infants

Pool Air Quality and Breathing Problems in Infants

Can Swimming Early Mean Reduced Lung Function Later in Life?

By Teri Brown

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

He believes, however, that the most pressing threat to teaching infants to swim is that parents may let their guard down because they feel the infant has had lessons in learning to swim. Also, the ingestion of pool water may have containments in it and can cause a recreational water illness.

Fielding feels building swimming readiness in infants and small children is key. "The American Red Cross Parent and Child Aquatics Program is designed for children 6 months to 5 years of age and builds swimming readiness by emphasizing fun in the water," Fielding says. "Parents and children participate in several guided practice sessions that help children learn elementary skills, including water entry, bubble blowing, front kicking, back floating, underwater exploration and more. Once children can perform basic skills without parental assistance, they may begin Learn to Swim programs."

Dr. Harvey Barnett, the founder and director of Infant Swimming Resource, a nationally recognized program dedicated to prevent infant drowning, was a lifeguard at a very early age and was traumatized when his next door neighbor's infant drowned. He dedicated his life and all the knowledge he gained as a psychologist to working out techniques to teach nonverbal infants to swim. He says that far more children drown than die from respiratory complications from asthma that may or may not present years down the road and be arbitrarily attributed to early exposure to indoor swimming pools while disregarding thousands of intervening variables.

"The study cited here is inherently flawed and given the data that was collected and the method of collection as well as the lack of control of a myriad of other variables the authors have grossly overstated their conclusions," Dr. Barnett says.


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