A child can drown in seconds. Doctors want more families to be prepared

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A child can drown in seconds. Doctors want more families to be prepared

2026-07-04 20:01 Last Updated At：20:10

NEW YORK (AP) — Doctors and others are sounding an alarm: More U.S. children have been drowning in recent years.

“When drowning occurs, seconds matter,” said Dr. Rohit Shenoi, the lead author of a recent American Academy of Pediatrics warning. “Quick rescue and resuscitation can mean the difference between life, death and lifelong disability.”

About 4,000 to 5,000 Americans drown each year. Most are adults who die in natural bodies of water, such as lakes, ponds or oceans.

But statistically speaking, drowning is a much larger danger to children. It’s the No. 1 cause of death for kids ages 1 to 4, and one of the top killers of children ages 5 to 14. The drowning rate is higher for white kids in the younger group, but much higher for Black, American Indian and Alaska Native children in the older group.

Drownings of very young children sometimes occur in bathtubs. But most, like Stewie Leonard's, occur in swimming pools.

The Stew Leonard’s grocery chain offers a Disney-like shopping experience, featuring food-promoting animatronic characters like a dancing banana, a mooing cow and singing avocados. But several of its stores also have an animatronic creature that seems out of place: a life-jacketed duck named Stewie who sings about how not to drown.

The duck is named for the son of Stew Leonard, the grocery chain’s chief executive. The boy was 21 months old when he drowned during a family vacation on the island of St. Martin in 1989.

More than a dozen adults and kids had gathered at a birthday party for Stewie's older sister, who was turning 3. Stew Leonard was outside hanging balloons and his wife was inside baking a cake.

“I saw Stewie outside and I assumed that he (Leonard) was watching him,” said his wife, Kim, noting that other relatives also were in the area of the pool.

“We never communicated with each other; ‘You’ve got him?’” said Kim Leonard, now 65. “When everyone’s watching, nobody’s watching.”

“There were a couple of balloons floating in the water,” Leonard, 71, recalled. “And you know after a few minutes, sort of everybody was like, ‘Where’s Stewie?’ Unfortunately I was the one who found him. He was face down in the pool.”

His death led the couple to start a foundation that pays for children’s swimming lessons and promotes drowning prevention.

Unintentional child drowning deaths in the U.S. fell from around 2,000 a year in the 1980s to below 1,000 a year by the early 2000s, thanks in part to public awareness campaigns, expanded access to swimming lessons, and adoption of pool fencing laws. Between 2000 and 2019, health officials saw a 38% drop.

But then the trend reversed, with the number of child drowning deaths rising from 756 in 2019 to 865 in 2024, the most recent year for which complete data is available. The bulk of them were children younger than 5. The child drowning death rate also increased slightly, from 1.1 to 1.2 per 100,000 children.

What happened?

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted swimming lessons and lifeguard training programs, and contributed to a national lifeguard shortage. Meanwhile, some data suggests an increase in swimming pool construction and increases in unsupervised swimming, said Tessa Clemens, the CDC Foundation’s senior director for drowning prevention initiatives.

Kym Roberts studies drownings in Australia — where child drownings have been either level or decreasing in recent years. She said “drowning in young children is often associated with falls into water and lapses in direct supervision.”

Some possible good news: Preliminary U.S. data for last year suggests child drownings declined. But it's not clear whether that's the start of a trend, and the deaths still remain higher compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, Clemens said.

Inventors have recognized a need for child water safety measures, and recent years have seen the emergence of immersion alarms that sound if the wristband a child is wearing goes underwater. But manufacturers of such devices note they can serve as an extra warning system, but should not be considered a primary way to keep children safe.

The federal government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, laid off Clemens and the rest of the staff of its drowning prevention program last year. But new guidance and drowning prevention support continues to come out of other organizations, including the CDC Foundation and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A CDC Foundation program has paid for basic swimming and water safety skills training for over 35,000 students since 2024. The program operates in 11 states with higher drowning rates: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.

The AAP says research shows that policies can make a difference, including lifeguard standards, life jacket regulations and requirements that swimming pools be completely surrounded by fences with self-closing, self-latching gates.

Stew Leonard emphasizes two other approaches — swimming lessons for young kids and complete focus by caregivers when young children are around water.

“I mean, I love ballet. I love karate. I love tennis lessons. You know, all the activities that kids can do,” he said. “But the only thing you can do to save their life is put them in swimming lessons.”

His foundation has funded over 250,000 swimming lessons for children and opened two swimming schools — one of them across the street from his company's headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Also, “shut your cellphones off when you're around the pool, watching the kids. Don't sit there reading a book. Don't sit there talking to your friends, neglecting your child that's near the water,” he said.

“This happens in the blink of an eye.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Fireworks, heat and politics: America celebrates its 250th birthday

WASHINGTON (AP) — The 250th anniversary of American independence is colliding with a country gripped by political polarization and a heat wave bearing down on millions of people across multiple states as celebrations get underway across the United States on Saturday.

The signing of the Declaration of Independence, one of history's most celebrated articulations of democratic ambitions, is being marked in myriad ways. President Donald Trump, set to take a central role in festivities, plans to speak on the National Mall in Washington ahead of what's being billed as a historically enormous fireworks show that will rain down over the nation's capital. The president was in South Dakota at Mount Rushmore on Friday, where he delivered a dark speech about the threat of communism in the U.S. as the chiseled images of four of his most prominent predecessors loomed behind him.

Elsewhere, fireworks are scheduled to be set off Saturday over Navy Pier in Chicago and against the skyline of New York City, which also hosted a ball drop at midnight to usher in the holiday with the same fanfare as New Year's Eve. Bristol, Rhode Island, describes itself as home of the nation's oldest Independence Day celebrations dating to 1785. In Los Angeles, Queen Latifah will host a concert featuring performances by The Smashing Pumpkins and Chris Stapleton. Chaka Khan is billed as a special guest.

Anticipation for the milestone holiday has been building for much of the year, serving as an opportunity for Americans to reflect on their complicated history as onetime colonists of an empire who became a superpower of their own. Celebrations months in the making had to adjust or cancel activities entirely as much of the East Coast sweltered under heat that approached and in many cases surpassed triple digits.

In Washington, the Great American State Fair was closed for several hours Friday afternoon during the worst of the heat. The city's Independence Day parade scheduled for Saturday was canceled.

To the chagrin of many on the East Coast, the weather was downright pleasant on the other side of the country. The Pacific Northwest enjoyed temperatures in the 60s on Friday with a few light showers.

In the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, Megan Kurowski, 31, brought her two dogs to the dog park so they could get some exercise before she went to work. Kurowski said she was feeling positive about America’s 250th anniversary and was planning a possible paddleboard to watch the fireworks.

“Everyone’s just, from what it seems, been pretty excited about celebrating 250 years,” she said.

Other American pastimes are overlapping with the holiday.

More than a dozen Major League Baseball games are on the schedule for Saturday. The World Cup, being hosted in the U.S. for the first time in 32 years, will have matches in Houston and Philadelphia on Saturday following a nail-biter overtime win by Argentina over Cape Verde on Friday outside Miami. Pop culture enthusiasts can obsess over Taylor Swift's Friday wedding to football player Travis Kelce at New York City's Madison Square Garden. And Madonna released her 15th studio album, a collection of dance tracks.

The celebrations are unfolding against the backdrop of a deep divide that has been expanding for years, visible in everything from political expression to cultural norms to age-old questions over race, class and immigration.

At Mount Rushmore on Friday, Trump spoke of communism as a "mortal threat to American liberty.”

“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” he said.

Without naming Trump, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who is also a democratic socialist and recently backed several successful congressional candidates in their primaries, appeared to reference Trump during a speech Friday.

“Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” he said.

Ahead of the holiday, auto technician Joe Fuqua-Bejarano in Topeka, Kansas, sized up “what makes us awesome” as a people. It is clearly not the politics, in his view, but rather resilience.

“We’ve just all got to find unity somewhere, whether that’s in laughter or perseverance, and keep everybody cool,” he said from the fireworks stand where he is doing a booming business as a side hustle.

Jerry Chin of Newcastle, Washington, said he wasn’t aware that the U.S. was celebrating its 250th anniversary and planned to stay low-key around the holiday. He and his wife generally skip the fireworks and instead stay home with their fearful dogs to keep them calm.

“America’s a great place," he said, “but there are some concerns.”

Associated Press writers Martha Bellisle in Seattle and John Hanna in Topkea, Kansas contributed to this report.