“This guide doesn’t teach you to swim, but to get by in the water. Maxime Ferez has been a lifeguard for ten years. And for this 33-year-old Northerner, the drowning of young children is not inevitable. That’s why he came up with a sixteen-step guide, called “Little Swimming Fish” to teach children, from 3 years old, to familiarize themselves with the aquatic world. A saving initiative when we know that in general, a quarter of accidental drownings concern children under 6 years old.
Because with the arrival of summer emerges the specter of drowning. The numbers speak for themselves. In 2018, 443 accidental drownings affected children under 6, causing 35 deaths. In 2021, the year of the last survey, the number was down (265 drownings including 20 deaths), but the Covid-19 epidemic had also limited departures on vacation.
Monitoring and learning
This situation has encouraged, for several years, the Ministries responsible for Health and Sports to launch prevention campaigns focused on the right actions to adopt for effective supervision of swimming with children. Especially since half of these drownings occur in family swimming pools.
Maxime Ferez works on another bias, that of learning to swim, but in a particular way. “Parents often tend to cut corners when they want to teach their child to swim,” he explains to 20 minutes. The important thing is not that they have mastered a codified stroke such as the crawl or the breaststroke, but that they can quickly become comfortable in the water. »
First observation: the shortage of lifeguards in recent years. “In college, one in two children is not independent in the water and is unable to come back to the edge, worries Maxime Ferez. Many children, alas, do not go to the swimming pool or too little during their schooling, because the sessions are often very complicated to organize, for lack of structures. »
“Learn to evolve in the water and not above it”
In addition, the baby swimming sessions set up in certain municipal swimming pools were greatly disrupted with the Covid-19, then the increase in energy. The water temperatures had to be lowered to save money, to the detriment of the comfort of young children. This educational guide is therefore timely for parents who wish to teach themselves the essential actions to avoid drowning. “It is not a question of stealing the work of the lifeguards but of giving some rudimentary keys: giving confidence to a child by avoiding negative language and teaching him to put his head under water, for example”, underlines he. The main advice he gives is to do without means of flotation. “You have to learn to evolve in the water and not above it”, he specifies.
This “armband-free” learning has been developed in primary schools since the 1970s. It is described as natural “to the extent that it exposes the properties of water to those of the human body, the ability to naturally float and deform to slide and propel oneself autonomously”, according to the theories of Alain Vadepied, a physical education teacher who has worked on the subject.
With progressive exercises, this practical manual is therefore supposed to help develop aquatic ease and discover the pleasures of swimming. At each stage, the child has a little coloring to do to validate the acquisition of each skill in a fun way. “It’s a guide that I designed in my corner, based on my own experience,” says the lifeguard. He also plans to create an e-learning by filming the progress of his 2 and a half year old daughter.