The importance of swimming lessons ... for all
Water Damage
By MARTHA SOUTHGATE, NYT
CULLEN JONES and Lia Neal were among the many swimmers to win medals for the United States in this year’s Olympic Games. But their inspiring performances obscure a disturbing truth. Not only are they, as African-Americans, anomalies in the elite levels of their sport, but enormous numbers of African-Americans do not have even rudimentary swimming skills, a lack that costs lives.
A 2010 study by the USA Swimming Foundation and the University of Memphis reported that nearly 70 percent of African-American children do not know how to swim. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-American children between the ages of 5 and 14 are almost three times more likely to drown than white children.
Cullen Jones could have been one of them; his parents put him in swim class after he almost drowned at the age of 5. Jones has become an evangelist for the importance of swimming lessons, working with Make a Splash, a water-safety initiative focused on minority children. But it can be tough even to give swimming lessons away. Starting last fall, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston made swimming lessons mandatory for their members, who are predominantly black and Hispanic. Though the lessons were free of charge, a number of parents had to be talked into allowing their children to participate: they were terrified of letting them get in the water.
This bears out the USA Swimming Foundation’s finding, in its 2010 report, that “fear trumped financial concerns across all respondent race groups in low-income families.”
(More here.)
CULLEN JONES and Lia Neal were among the many swimmers to win medals for the United States in this year’s Olympic Games. But their inspiring performances obscure a disturbing truth. Not only are they, as African-Americans, anomalies in the elite levels of their sport, but enormous numbers of African-Americans do not have even rudimentary swimming skills, a lack that costs lives.
A 2010 study by the USA Swimming Foundation and the University of Memphis reported that nearly 70 percent of African-American children do not know how to swim. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-American children between the ages of 5 and 14 are almost three times more likely to drown than white children.
Cullen Jones could have been one of them; his parents put him in swim class after he almost drowned at the age of 5. Jones has become an evangelist for the importance of swimming lessons, working with Make a Splash, a water-safety initiative focused on minority children. But it can be tough even to give swimming lessons away. Starting last fall, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston made swimming lessons mandatory for their members, who are predominantly black and Hispanic. Though the lessons were free of charge, a number of parents had to be talked into allowing their children to participate: they were terrified of letting them get in the water.
This bears out the USA Swimming Foundation’s finding, in its 2010 report, that “fear trumped financial concerns across all respondent race groups in low-income families.”
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home