Swim Lessons Help Minority Children Break the DrowningCycle

Katerina
Posting #3
Health
Swim Lessons Help Minority Children Break the Drowning Cycle
By Lan Trinh
Publication Name: CNN Health
Date of Publication: 5/10/12
Length: 864

When Wanda Butts' sixteen year old son drowned in 2006, she was determined to help minority children learn how to swim so no mother had to suffer the way she did. Butts realized that the one of the reasons her son drowned was because her father passed down the fear of swimming to her and she passed it down to her son, telling him never to go near the water and because of that, he never learned how to swim. A reason why A According the USA swimming, 60% of Hispanic children and 42% of white children cannot swim but 70% of African American children cannot swim. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, African-American children between the ages of five and fourteen are three times more likely to drown that white children in the same age range. A reason why the percentage of African American children not knowing how to swim comes from several cultural and historical facts. One is the segregation of swimming pools during the 20th century. Few swimming pools were built to serve the black community back then, so much of a generation was denied to opportunity to swim. This caused parents not being able to teach their children to swim because either they themselves did not know how to swim or they had no place to teach their children how to swim.A recent study conducted by the University of Memphis showed if parents can't swim, their children are far less likely to learn how. The study showed that fear of drowning or injury prevented African American parents from putting their children in swimming lessons. It also found that many avoid swimming for cosmetic reasons such as the effect of chlorine on one's hair. Not wanting any mother to suffer the same way she did, in 2007 Wanda Butts founded the Josh Project, a nonprofit organization that provides low-cost swimming lessons for children in Toledo, Ohio. To this day, the Josh Project has helped more than 1,000 children learn how to swim. "All children are at risk of drowning, but the majority of the children that the Josh Project serves are minority children, who we have found are more at risk," Butts said. The Josh Project will hopefully help many more children learn how to swim because swimming is a necessity in everyday life.