The safety organization, which strives to educate parents about how to respond in an emergency, shared the chilling image last month, showing what appears to be an empty swimming pool. The post, in fact, illustrates the danger of dressing children in a certain type of swimwear.
The hard-to-spot child, swimming in the depths of a swimming pool, was reportedly wearing blue, and blends in with the water almost perfectly. It’s a color parents should avoid buying for their kids.
The team at CPR Kids stressed the importance of dressing kids in fluorescent and bright-colored swimwear, instead. They said the photo was taken during a pool party with friends gathered, and someone noticed how well one child’s swimsuit blended in with the color of the pool.
“She asked one of the children who was wearing a pale blue swimsuit, to swim to the bottom,” CPR Kids wrote. “The result shocked her—as it did everyone in the CPR Kids team!”
The result shocked social media users, too, with many of them commenting that even with the child’s location circled in red, they still couldn’t make out the shape of a human form under the surface.
“That is so scary!” one mother wrote. “I couldn’t see the child at all.”
Several parents commented that they now needed to buy new swimwear for their children.
CPR Kids added that the pool is normally clear. But by 2 p.m., it had become cloudy, perhaps because of sunscreen or other residues brought into the pool by so many bodies, or perhaps due to inadequate pool filtering.
Regardless of the cause, a cloudy pool could happen to anyone.
One parent on the thread even pointed out that blue swimwear can blend in with a clear pool just as easily.
As for CPR Kids, they assured viewers their image was not “edited in any way,” adding, “This is why the person who captured it thought [to share], as they couldn’t believe how hard it was to see their little one at the bottom.”
As swim season approaches, the kids safety organization hopes to increase parent awareness and prevent more child drownings.
