[katiesue]

I am a parent and I let my 7 or 8 year old swim in the deep end all the time. She took swim lessons for years and is a fairly strong swimmer. When we were that age we spent hundreds of hours at the public pool diving in the deep end. There were these square blocks you could check out and dive for them in the 8ft, which I hated cause I always feel like I'm drowning if I go that deep. And diving for them was a part of our swim lessons as well.

And I don't think it's all lack of supervision, although it could be. Kids can do the darndest things so fast you can't stop them. Madz got her head stuck in the fencing at the Tomorrowland Train Station when she was two. They finally got her out with bolt cutters but they thought they might need to weld. She did it in a second and none of us could figure out how she even got her head in a position to get in the space so we couldn't get her out.