Inadvertent Neglect

It seems inevitable. With summer, the arrival of hot, steamy weather, child casualties occur.

Parents and child and infant caregivers think they have their eyes on children in their care, then suddenly a split-second passes and they don't know where the child is. A frantic search is conducted and the child is discovered in the backyard family pool, and bleak despair descends as the child battles for its life. Is the acquisition and possession of a personal family swimming pool of that great importance?

Do parents ever ask themselves which they would prefer: peace of mind knowing that their child is not exposed to the potential danger of curiosity combining with lack of understanding of danger that may see them tumble into a pool without the presence of an adult to monitor their safety - or the great summer pleasure inherent in possessing your very own pool, a luxury that is affordable for greater numbers of two-earner families.

It's a fundamental question: which has more value to the deciding adults, the care and safety of a child or the cachet and pleasure of having a swimming pool right in your own back yard? Parents know they cannot be at close attention at all times when their children are small. Accidents occur, and for the most part they are minor occurrences. There is nothing minor about a near-drowning.

And a fatality in a family when a child, momentarily unsupervised, falls into a pool and drowns brings that family to the brink of self-destruction. A marriage, with the parents mourning a treasure they cannot recover, teeters on the cusp of dissolution, and often slips over into being sundered with each parent blaming the other, where both are inconsolable and irreconcilable.

In this instance, in Stittsville on Sunday, an alert parent momentarily distracted, was able to save her two-year-old son who had re-entered the family pool without her immediate knowledge. The child will survive. He is being held in hospital for observation purposes, but is in stable condition.

There will be many more infants and young children who will not be as fortunate in the outcome of their unsupervised adventure. There were 89 drowning occurrences in Ontario between May and September in 2010.

Ontario's deputy chief coroner would like to see firmer rules on guarding backyard pools in child and infant death prevention. A good start might be a bylaw that all such pools - in-ground and above-ground - be mandated to have four-sided fencing directly around the pool itself and within the fence surrounding the backyard.

This type of preventable accident reflects the mindset seen in parents and caregivers leaving vulnerable children alone in a vehicle strapped into an infant car seat, windows securely rolled up, and doors locked in blistering heat. The child who was rescued by police in Orleans by having the family vehicle's window smashed to reach the child was spared death.

And it would seem the child's parents, who left him seated in their vehicle in a commercial parking lot while they went off to do some shopping, will not be charged with child abandonment or failing to provide the necessities of life to a child, or any other charge demonstrative of neglect, however unintended.