Kids are drowning because parents are obsessed with smartphones
Authorities worldwide have warned that children are drowning because their parents are obsessed with smartphones.
Safety experts cautioned that drowning deaths are often silent, and many recent examples show how children can die in crowded swimming pools without attracting any attention.
For example, officials in the United Arab Emirates issued a warning to parents to stop using their mobile phones at swimming pools after an eight-year-old boy and a nine-year-old boy drowned in June in unrelated incidents.
Also, officials in the US state of Arizona pleaded with parents to stop using their smartphones at the pool after drowning deaths of children between the ages of one and four spiked to twice the average nationwide.
In addition, German lifeguards last week directly linked the huge increase in children dying by drowning to their parents’ use of smartphones. Achim Wiese, a spokesperson for the German Lifeguard Association, said that not enough parents and grandparents are heeding the association’s advice to curtail the use of smartphones while at the pool.
This year, drowning deaths in Germany have increased to more than 300, including the drowning death in a pool last week of a seven-year-old boy in the Bavarian town of Marktredwitz.
Peter Harzheim, a spokesperson for the German Federation of Swimming Pool Supervisors, said that members of his organisation are seeing more people treating pools “like a kindergarten” and not paying attention to their children. He added that many parents are so “fixated” by their mobile devices that they do not even look “left or right,” never mind watch their kids.