Teach your kids to swim: you'll be glad you did

As a result, my daughter has been a regular visitor to the community pool near our home for the last five summers, with her first visit coming at the age of six months, accompanying her father as he cooled down in that brutal hot summer of 2005. As a result, my wife and I have been extra-cognizant of the need to teach our daughter to swim so that she feels safe in a pool area. We've had her in swimming lessons the last two summers and we have spent hundreds of hours with her in the pool helping her get comfortable in the water.

She's four. Contrast that with the four-year-old who drowned in Cote St. Luc, whose mother blamed lifeguards' inattention for her daughter's death.

This is a senseless, tragic accident and blaming someone or something is immaterial. My child, my responsibility. Your child, your responsibility. If a little girl who can't swim is standing around on a pool deck and her mother knows she can't swim, maybe you want to keep a very close eye on her?

At our pool – Lakeside Pool in Pointe Claire which, by the way, is stocked to the brim with enthusiastic lifeguards who take my child's safety very seriously and who have already made the whole experience a lifetime of memories for my daughter – the backlash is already being felt.

Pointe Claire now requires two lifeguards to be directly supervising the pool any time even a single person is swimming, in reaction to the Cote St. Luc incident. It's the cover-your-butt syndrome, and you can hardly fault the city; they'd rather have two lifeguards looking after one swimmer than a lawsuit on their hands.

My one reservation in all of this is the notion that somehow, we're less safe in our little Pointe Claire community pool because a little girl drowned in a pool 25 kilometres away.

Even a worker at the Cote St. Luc pool – who spoke to a reporter on condition of anonymity, said lifeguards at the pool have to frequently fight with parents to make sure they supervise their children.

And that brings me to my point (and not a moment too soon, right?), which is that lifeguards, despite being trained lifesavers, good human beings and fantastic role models for my two children , are not babysitters. They're there to keep an eye on the whole pool and all of its denizens – not only your child or mine.

That's why I have been in the pool with my daughter for every second she was ever in a pool until I was convinced she would be safe swimming on her own. Even then, I'm always watching and never far away.

As most parents are – and should always be.