No kid should be left alone near a swimming pool or body of water, let alone in it. I'd even go so far as to say the same for adults. Anything can happen, and if you're near water, you want someone else around just in case it does. The argument against swimming lessons for infants is that parents might become lax about watching their kids around water, thinking that they are somehow magically waterproof.

While that might indeed be true, that wasn't the case for Amanda Jelley. Even though her two-year-old daughter Elizabeth had been taking Water Babies classes since the age of eight months, she still kept the door to the family swimming pool locked. At least, usually. For whatever reason, the door was left unlocked and her daughter found her way into the pool room.

"She was running around but suddenly she went quiet so I began looking for her," said Mrs. Jelley. "She was calling 'Mummy, Mummy' but she wasn't panicking. It just sounded like she wanted me to look for her. When I saw the door was open I just went cold. I thought that was it. I thought she had gone under the water." It turns out that Elizabeth had indeed fallen in the pool.


"When I found Elizabeth she was holding on to the side of the pool," noted her mother. "She seemed quite content." Jelley believes her daughter used techniques she learned in the Water Babies classes to right herself and get to the edge of the pool, where she waited for her mum to help her out.

No matter how many swim lessons your kids have had, they should never be left alone in a pool. Even I, who swam competitively, taught swim lessons, and swam a mile a day before having kids, would think twice before getting in a pool without someone around. Still, I think it's clear that in this case, when a situation occurred, having had swim lessons gave little Elizabeth Jelley a happy ending rather than a wet one.