The more we try to solve this with spots and facilities, the easier it becomes to think that safety is something that gets "taken care of." But water doesn't negotiate, and it doesn't check whether the spot is nicely laid out. Personal responsibility — being able to swim, staying sober, holding on to your child — remains the first line of defence.
Where things go wrong, the problem rarely lies in a shortage of swimming spots; it lies in skill and awareness. In the Netherlands, where I work, this is now playing out in full: swimming education is under pressure, and not every child still learns to swim well as a matter of course. The Netherlands isn't alone in this — similar examples can be found across Europe, from declining swimming education to children growing up without any swimming experience, though the picture varies greatly from country to country. That's where the bottleneck is, not in the number of spots. No new recreational lake makes a child who can't swim any safer.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not against good swimming spots — quite the opposite, beautiful and safe places to swim are valuable. But that's the second step, not the first. Reverse the order — infrastructure first, people second — and we'll build a country full of facilities that never touch the real problem.
So let's put our energy where it does the most good: learning to swim, learning to judge danger, and understanding that open water is never automatically safe. Invest in people first, then in places. That's not a popular message on a hot day — but it's the message that saves lives.
