This video has been making the heavy rounds on the internet. We’ve got one crowd shouting that this is just your average Tik Tok of an evil swim instructor intentionally drowning a baby, while the other crowd clamors that this is the best way to teach your young an essential survival skill. 

Now there are argument for both. I feel like so much of how we judge parental practices as a society comes down to the first impression we collectively get when witnessing said strategy. Fair to say that the first impression one gets from this video is very, very bad. This baby is not being lowered into the water. This baby is being dropped. borderline discarded. That cherub hits the water with velocity, and torque. It’s getting the full 9.8 meters per second treatment. 

If you’re the swim instructor you’ve got to act a little less casual, no? I know there’s an argument for taking some comfort in the calm demeanor of a professional; but I think dropping a baby in the pool requires at least one spotter, maybe two. That can’t be too big of an ask. Just take your average high school life guard, pay them 15 bucks an hour, and have them stand there with their arms crossed for 20 minutes. Maybe have them mutter something nice and professional every few minutes like, “clean drop, Betty” or “wow this one’s a great floater!” I’m trying to think of an analogy here. Lets’s go with the most believable one: let’s say I get shot. While in theory a calm, collected surgeon is great; I’d feel much better with a couple really frantic aids running around the operating table, if only to show a little bit of urgency about my, you know, gunshot wound.

The pro-baby-dropping crowd definitely has a point as well. I’m all for babies that know how to not sink. However, I say again, there’s got to be a more refined way to do this. You think this baby has any fucking clue what’s going on? In its almost certainly 0% developed mind, it just thinks it’s being murdered over and over again! I’m no psychologist but I’m not going too far out on a limb to posit that there are likely terrible mental consequences for surviving multiple attempted drownings at the age of 2. I vividly remember almost drowning while holding onto the swimming pool edge, and I was just a slightly fucked up 7 year old! Sure I couldn’t pick up any pennies with my left hand or speak remotely intelligibly, but I could understand at a base level that drowning was bad and I didn’t want it to happen to me. Call me a reckless parent but I’ll probably wait until my kid can walk or say more than one and a half syllables before sending them to Titanic Survival School and dunking them like a giant, flesh colored Oreo.

All that being said, I could see changing my mind on this in a jiffy. You know how they say fatherhood changes you? Well maybe my big change won’t be suddenly finding my life’s meaning or greater purpose, maybe it’ll be a sudden obsession with my first-born floating well. If my newborn baby doesn’t float, I don’t want it. Send it back! It’s faulty beyond repair! How can you spend 9 months floating in the womb and then pop out not ready to float in a swimming pool? No study skills. No work ethic. No instinct. Poor game prep. Call it what you will. Fuck that. 

p.s who ya got? Baby panda or baby swimming underwater?