What water safety really is.
A piece by Hannah Freeman — on floaties, rescue swimming, and the thing we’re actually protecting.
Water safety is the most misunderstood phrase in my field.
Most parents hear the words and picture a few things: a floatie strapped to a child’s arms, a survival swim class where a baby is dropped in and taught to roll onto their back, a lifeguard watching the pool. These are the symbols of safety. None of them are the actual thing.
Real water safety is a relationship. It lives in a child’s body — in how their nervous system responds when water touches their face, when they are held, when they are startled, when they are tired. A child who has been trained to perform a safety skill is not the same as a child who is actually safe in water. And every year, we lose children who could “float on their back” on cue.
Here is the quiet truth of this work: panic overrides training. A child who has learned to roll over in calm, supervised conditions will not always do it when they fall in alone, in cold water, in shock, in the dark. The body in panic reaches for what it knows most deeply — not what it was taught in a class. So the question I ask, as a teacher and as a mother, is: what do we want to live inside our children’s bodies most deeply?
My answer is: ease. Regulation. A sense that water is a known place, a familiar element, a language they already speak. I want a child who — if they fall in — does not panic, because their body does not read water as foreign. That is what keeps children alive.
Why I don’t use floaties.
Floaties feel like safety. They aren’t.
They lift a child’s body into a position their nervous system doesn’t actually understand — head up, feet dangling, core disengaged. They teach the body a shape it cannot hold on its own. They give a child the sensation of floating without any of the skill that makes floating real. And they tell the child, very quietly, that water is something that holds them up for them.
The result is a child who feels safe with the floatie, and unsafe without it. When the floatie comes off — and it will come off, at a lake, at a party, in a moment of surprise — the child’s body has no true memory of what water actually feels like. That gap is where accidents happen.
In my classes, we use fins. Fins don’t lift — they extend. They keep a child’s body in the horizontal position the water is actually asking for, and they let a small body feel their own strength moving through it. A child in fins is not being held up by a foreign object. They are meeting the water on its own terms, with a little more power. The difference is profound.
Rescue swimming has its place. It is not the foundation.
I respect the survival swim lineage. It has saved lives. But it is not where water begins for a child, and it should never be the first or only relationship a child has with water.
A child who learns water through fear — through being dropped in and forced to figure it out — carries that fear in the body for years. Sometimes forever. For children with sensory sensitivities, trauma histories, autism, or nervous systems that are already carrying a great deal, this kind of training can cause real harm. I have met the grown children of these programs. Many of them still will not put their face in the water.
What I teach is slower. It looks less dramatic. There is no emergency drill in the first class, or the fifth, or the tenth. There is a caregiver in the water, a child in arms, a slow introduction to an element that will be part of their whole life.
Over time, in the right sequence, we build real skills — breath control, floating, movement, self-rescue. But all of it is built on top of a body that already trusts the water. A body that knows water. A body that, if it ever finds itself in water unexpectedly, has a baseline of ease to return to.
That is what safety actually is.
What I ask of parents.
If there is one thing I want parents to take from this, it is this: the goal is not to make your child perform safely in water. The goal is to make your child at home in water. Performance is brittle. Home is lasting.
That means no floaties. It means fins, when they’re developmentally ready. It means time in the water with you — not around you, not near you, but with you, skin to skin, breath to breath. It means slowing down, even when the culture around you is speeding up. It means choosing joy as the primary teacher.
This is how I have taught for 25 years. It is how I will teach for 25 more. And it is why, when families come to me after survival swim trauma or floatie dependency or a scary moment at the lake, we can almost always find our way back. The water has been waiting. Their body remembers.
That is water safety. Everything else is theater.
If this resonates, I’d love to meet your family in the water — whether in person in Hood River, or online from wherever you are. Join our email list for water rituals, class openings, and writing like this, delivered gently
