Video shows Colorado woman letting trainer toss her baby into pool, internet calls her 'worst kind of mom'
A Colorado mother defended her parenting skills after a TikTok video, showing her cheering as her baby was flung into a pool by a swimming instructor, was viewed over 50 million times on social media.
Krysta Meyer, 27, started an account on the video-uploading platform back in February and since then, her content has been viewed by about a couple of a thousand people each time. She was really shocked to find that millions of people had viewed a video of her infant son Oliver that she uploaded on Saturday, June 20. "Oliver amazes me every week! I can't believe he is barely two months in and is catching on so fast. He is a little fish," she captioned the video.
You can watch the video here.
The short clip showed Oliver being thrown into a pool by an instructor, who dove in after him. By the time she waddled over to Oliver, the baby had found his way to the surface and was paddling along on his back. It ended with the instructor picking up Oliver and giving him a hug as his mother squealed with delight, praising his efforts. The video received over 100,000 comments, most of them by users who expressed shock at the technique by which the infant was being taught how to swim.
"Dropped him in there like a bath bomb," one user wrote, while another commented, "Lil mans not swimming he's fighting for his life." A third chipped in, saying, "If I was his mother, I would not be able to watch that."
Meyer later revealed to Buzzfeed in an interview: "A lot of people are seeing a kid being thrown into the water and thinking, That's not good! You shouldn't be doing that!" she said. "I've gotten death threats. I've had people tell me I'm the worst kind of mom, that I'm endangering my children, that I'm traumatizing them." She clarified what the people did not know was that Oliver was not in an average swim class. He was being trained in an infant survival class in an institute called Little Fins.
"The whole premise behind what we do is safety," said Little Fins co-owner Lauri Armstrong. "We teach 8-month-olds to assess their situation and find an exit strategy [in water]. I know it seems crazy."
Armstrong further insisted that the instructors are highly trained and worked with each infant at their individual pace in a safe and controlled environment. She did, however, understand the "shock factor" for people watching Meyer's video as they were encountering a baby getting tossed into the water. But there is an important reason why her instructors used the unconventional method. "When kids fall into bodies of water, it's often not pretty. It's often very disorientating," she added. "They have to learn to come up and recover on their own."
Jenny Bennett, who co-founded Parents Preventing Childhood Drowning said she was not comfortable with a few ways babies were getting thrown into the water at Little Fins, as it's being done from "unrealistic heights." "The first time I saw [the TikTok], I thought it was shocking," she said. "It's not too high where the child is dropped into the water, but I've seen some at this facility where the child is held upside down and dropped in. That's very unrealistic and could potentially cause harm."
However, Meyer defended her choice of the institute by saying she's completely comfortable with the classes. "I have them in swim classes in a controlled environment and with certified instructors," she said. "I feel so much more comfortable about my kids being around water and they can have that fighting chance to survive. I have my kids' best interests in mind."