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The guilt that the caretaker has to live with for the rest of their life is probably unbearable. I guess it depends on the circumstances surrounding the drowning whether they are charged with a crime.
Parents simply don't watch their children around water.
A normal backyard can be made relatively safe for a toddler, but having a pool is just inviting tragedy unless it's got a high fence around it and every precaution is made at all times to protect children from it.
There is no excuse to leave babies in bathtubs to drown, most often the mother or other caretaker got absorbed in a television show or telephone conversation and forgot the baby in the water.
The other thing if a family wants a pool so badly is to get their children swimming lessons at very young ages -- a smart thing to do even without a pool. They have swim classes for newborns on up.
We've had drownings of toddlers here even where the family was having a party and plenty of people were around. They just had too much to drink and were involved socializing and everyone forgot to watch the 3 year old around the pool. Alcohol and drug use aren't helping.
I think the parents should be accountable if the parents never taught their children how to swim. There are parents who are so afraid of their children drowning that they won't let their children swim. All things being equal, children who aren't taugh to swim are at greater risk of drowning. If the children know how to swim, then the person who is supervising the children is accountable---unless the parents left the children with somone who is irresponsible, then the parents are ultimately accountable.
I grew up in a pool home. When my oldest son was a baby/toddler, we had him in a home day care situation. I loved his sitter, but she had an inground pool, AND she kept the lower level door open in order to allow air circulation. When my son started walking, I asked her to put up a child gate on the door, which I bought. Her answer was that if he went out the door, she would spank him. Needless to say, that didn't go over well. She finally agreed to keep the door locked.
We have had pools ourselves since our kids were little. They took swim lessons, but I never thought they could be left unattended around water. We've also never lived anywhere that the pools weren't required to have their own fence.
A pool is a huge responsibility, and kids are drawn to water. Not a good mix for the inattentive.
Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.
Children can drown in minutes without anyone being aware they are in trouble even if they are watching.
When these types of threads show up I just tell myself that the "It could never happen to me" attitude is a defense mechanism to shield against the knowledge of how capricious life really is.
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