NEW YORK (news agencies) — Doctors and others are sounding an alarm: More U.S. children have been drowning in recent years.
“When drowning occurs, seconds matter,” said Dr. Rohit Shenoi, the lead author of a recent American Academy of Pediatrics warning. “Quick rescue and resuscitation can mean the difference between life, death and lifelong disability.”
About 4,000 to 5,000 Americans drown each year. Most are adults who die in natural bodies of water, such as lakes, ponds or oceans.
But statistically speaking, drowning is a much larger danger to children. It’s the No. 1 cause of death for kids ages 1 to 4, and one of the top killers of children ages 5 to 14. The drowning rate is higher for white kids in the younger group, but much higher for Black, American Indian and Alaska Native children in the older group.
Drownings of very young children sometimes occur in bathtubs. But most, like Stewie Leonard’s, occur in swimming pools.
The Stew Leonard’s grocery chain offers a Disney-like shopping experience, featuring food-promoting animatronic characters like a dancing banana, a mooing cow and singing avocados. But several of its stores also have an animatronic creature that seems out of place: a life-jacketed duck named Stewie who sings about how not to drown.
The duck is named for the son of Stew Leonard, the grocery chain’s chief executive. The boy was 21 months old when he drowned during a family vacation on the island of St. Martin in 1989.
More than a dozen adults and kids had gathered at a birthday party for Stewie’s older sister, who was turning 3. Stew Leonard was outside hanging balloons and his wife was inside baking a cake.
“I saw Stewie outside and I assumed that he (Leonard) was watching him,” said his wife, Kim, noting that other relatives also were in the area of the pool.
“We never communicated with each other; ‘You’ve got him?’” said Kim Leonard, now 65. “When everyone’s watching, nobody’s watching.”
“There were a couple of balloons floating in the water,” Leonard, 71, recalled. “And you know after a few minutes, sort of everybody was like, ‘Where’s Stewie?’ Unfortunately I was the one who found him. He was face down in the pool.”
His death led the couple to start a foundation that pays for children’s swimming lessons and promotes drowning prevention.
Unintentional child drowning deaths in the U.S. fell from around 2,000 a year in the 1980s to below 1,000 a year by the early 2000s, thanks in part to public awareness campaigns, expanded access to swimming lessons, and adoption of pool fencing laws. Between 2000 and 2019, health officials saw a 38% drop.
But then the trend reversed, with the number of child drowning deaths rising from 756 in 2019 to 865 in 2024, the most recent year for which complete data is available. The bulk of them were children younger than 5. The child drowning death rate also increased slightly, from 1.1 to 1.2 per 100,000 children.
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