Childhood mortality rates

[dauerbach]

People are notoriously bad at assessing risk.What is the difference in death rate for those under 16 in homes that have a pool vs. homes with handguns. What is the difference in living to the age of 16 if you grew up with a pool in your backyard vs. letting your infant sleep on their stomach? Obviously I am trying to talk someone out of building a pool.

[elfkin477]

Oh. Obviously.

Most kids (90%) who drown are “supervised”, and drowning is the second leading injury-related cause of death in children after car accidents. Seems clear your acquaintance’s kid is at a greater risk of drowning than being shot.

[dauerbach]

I was under the impression that it is about 100 times more likely to accidentally drown. However, I do not know what that means. I don’t know about the prevalence of handguns vs. pools.

[md2000]

This topic came up when the author of Freakonomics went to a grief counselling support group after his child died. (Neither gun nor pool). He found that a lot of the parents there had lost their children to drowning, typically in backyard pools.

I guess the question is, how many people leave loaded guns where their kids can find them? Vs, how many houses in a relatively affluent neighbourhood have pools? My guess is based on Canada, so I don’t know how US parents typically behave, nowadays and 20 years ago… The only person I recall dying at my high school drowned, but it was a boating accident one summer. An more kids are killed in car accidents because it’s a relative opportunity issue - they spend more time in cars than around pools usually, I bet.

[Nunzio_Tavulari]

examined data from 496 child-drowning deaths from 2000 and 2001 from 17 states and found that 88 percent of the drowning victims were under supervision.

That four-sided isolating fence can prevent up to 90 percent of residential pool drownings.

Those two statements cancel each other out in my mind. If the child is being supervised, it unlikely that 90% of the deaths would come from them wandering into the pool. In fact, if your kids are getting that far away from you, the fence would be more likely to block your view and be an obstacle to a rescue attempt.

In short, this seems like another journalistic scare using unrelated statistics. I don’t doubt that drowning is a major cause of children’s deaths, but this doesn’t make the case well.

[DSeid]

Here are some childhood mortality numbers but of course without the denominator data (how many pools, how many guns in households, etc.) it doesn’t mean much.

Here’s a bit that claims some denominator numbers and comes up with that “100 times more likely” figure that dauerbach recalls:

… if you do the math and let little Johnny go over to little Billy’s house to swim, he is roughly 100 times more likely to have a fatal accident vs. letting him go over to little Timmy’s house, where dad has a gun.

Of course, these are hypothetical and of course, if little Johnny is 8 and knows how to swim, the numbers change. However, what I really want to do is educate parents on how to provide a safe environment for their kids and the kids of their family and friends – both at home and while away from home.

So to start off simple, if you have no gun you cannot be injured by a gun. However, this is America and whether you are a hunter, a gun collector, or are a strong believer in the second amendment- your kids are likely to encounter guns at some point in their life. This is where Smart Parents = Healthy kids. Smart parents will protect their home if there are guns in the house and they will educate their kids about gun safety just in case they run into a gun at little Timmy’s house. Read this simple page from the AAP on gun safety. The main points:
Always keep guns unloaded.
Keep guns and bullets separate.
Keep both locked up and unaccessible to inquisitive kids.
Keep keys hidden.
Just following these simple rules will virtually eliminate any risk to your child.

So what about the far more riskier swimming pool… Well, there are many things you can do and there is a good summary from the AAP here. First and foremost is to prevent access. This means installing a 4-sided, 4-foot, fence with self-locking gates. While most families that have this kind of access prevention (apartment complex, neighborhood pools, etc.), most backyard pools DO NOT have adequate access restriction. In a paper published in Pediatrics it is estimated that this intervention alone can reduce the number of deaths by about 20% and save around 88 lives per year. …

[Little_Nemo]

@Nunzio_Tavulari

Those two statements cancel each other out in my mind. If the child is being supervised, it unlikely that 90% of the deaths would come from them wandering into the pool. In fact, if your kids are getting that far away from you, the fence would be more likely to block your view and be an obstacle to a rescue attempt.

It probably depends on their definition of “supervision”. It’s not unreasonable to say that you’re supervising your children if they’re at home and you’re there also. But that doesn’t mean you have them in your immediate sight (assuming their child is past the toddler stage). Parents can be “supervising” their child even if the child is up in their bedroom or watching TV in the den or playing out in the backyard.

[DSeid]

In case anyone is interested, here’s a bit more rigorous and well cited a treatment of the question which comes to only a slightly different answer (albeit from a guns rights source):

having a swimming pool in a household is something like 21.6 to 27.8 times as likely to lead to an accidental death as having a firearm, when we look at the numbers for all age groups. For children less than 15, the difference is more like 52.8 to 68.0 times as likely.

Thinking about the question a bit though does raise one possible additional issue: the question asked is limiting the answer to accidental deaths only. Is that the proper comparison? What if, for example, it was definitively established that having a gun in the house significantly increased the risk of suicide and/or homicide of a child in the house? Given that homicide is the second leading cause of death in youth and suicide is the fourth, even a small increase in those nonaccidental numbers might skew the results the other way.

Not claiming that such is established, or not, and not wanting to provoke a gun debate, but pointing out that the specific question asked does bias the answer.

[doreen]

Here’s the definition of supervised :

But recent research from the National SAFE KIDS Campaign shows that nearly 9 out of 10 children between ages 1 and 14 who drowned were under supervision when they died. The study defined supervision as being in someone’s care, not necessarily in direct line of sight.

According to this definition, a 4 year old left in the yard while mom runs inside to answer the phone is supervised. A four-foot tall, locked fence would probably keep that child from drowning while supervised by this definition. Keeping small children “within arm’s reach” would certainly prevent it .Supervision for the purpose of that research doesn’t mean adequate supervision

[md2000]

IIRC, before Toronto required fencing around all backyard pools, somewhere about 1970, the majority of drowning deaths I read about were toddlers and up to about 5yo. Probably too young that when they fell in, they could not swim enough to reach the shallow end (or too short to stand up there) or reach the side and pull their way around. Ocasionally older kids would drown for unexplained reason, but usually a kid of about 8 could open any gate anyway. It was the 1 to 5yo that were being fenced out. It seems to have worked fairly well.