Practical, interactive tools to help your family stay safe around water. Free, no sign-up, and everything runs right in your browser.
Looking for more? Explore our water safety guides, the drowning statistics dashboard, or find swim lessons near you.
A family water safety plan is a short written agreement that names who is watching the children at any moment, what the rules are at your pool, beach or lake, and exactly what everyone does if a child goes missing. Writing it down matters because most drownings happen during a lapse in supervision when several adults are present and each assumes another is watching.
Our Family Water Safety Plan Builder walks you through it in a few minutes and produces a plan you can print and put on the fridge. It is free, needs no sign-up, and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere.
One named adult should be the water watcher at any given time, watching the water continuously with no phone, no book and no conversation, and handing the role over explicitly when they need a break. Rotating in 15–20 minute shifts keeps attention sharp, and saying the handover out loud — “you have the water” — is what prevents the gap where everyone assumes someone else is looking.
Supervision is one of the layers of protection, not a substitute for the others. See layers of protection explained for how supervision, barriers, lessons, life jackets and CPR fit together.
Yes. Every checklist, plan and printable on WaterWiseKids is free to download, print and share, including for use by schools, swim programmes, paediatric practices and community groups. There is no sign-up, no email capture and no watermark, and you may reproduce them for non-commercial safety education as long as the source is credited.
Popular printables include the water competency skills checklist, the swim milestones checklist, the pool fence and gate inspection checklist and the reach, throw, don’t go rescue card.
If you run a swim school, camp or clinic and want to hand these out, you are welcome to — see for swim schools. For citable national data, use our drowning statistics hub.
The tools here fall into three groups, matching the three questions families actually ask. Plan tools decide who does what: the Family Water Safety Plan Builder generates a printable household plan naming your Water Watcher, your barriers, each child’s swim ability and your emergency sequence.
Assessment tools tell you where you actually stand rather than where you assume you stand. The water competency skills checklist tests the five abilities — enter water over the head, return to the surface, float or tread for one minute, turn and orient, swim 25 yards, and exit — that separate a child who can survive an unexpected fall from one who cannot. The swim milestones checklist maps typical progress by age, and the pool fence and gate inspection checklist walks the barrier itself: height, gaps, latch height, self-closing action and climbable objects near the fence.
Response tools are for the minute that matters. The reach, throw, don’t go rescue card and the drowning CPR quick card are designed to be posted at the water, not read in advance — short enough that a panicked adult can follow them.
Every one of them is free, needs no email address, and can be printed at home. For the national data behind the recommendations, see our child drowning statistics dashboard, and for the full explanation of how the layers fit together, read the five layers of drowning protection.
Start with the layer you are least sure about. If nobody in your household has been formally named as the supervisor at the water, build a family water safety plan first, because that assigns the role. If your barrier is the weak point, run the pool fence and gate inspection checklist. If you are unsure whether your child could actually survive a fall into deep water, use the water competency skills checklist, which measures the five specific abilities safety organizations treat as the threshold rather than asking whether the child can “swim.” Most families find one obvious gap on the first pass and can close it in a single season.
Yes. Every tool and printable on WaterWiseKids is free for non-commercial safety education, including handouts at swim schools, summer camps, pediatric offices, libraries, parks and recreation departments, and community water safety events. You may print and distribute them as-is with the source credited, and you may link directly to the interactive plan builder from your own site or newsletter. We ask only that materials are not altered in ways that change the safety guidance, and that CDC, American Academy of Pediatrics, and American Red Cross recommendations are not restated as our own findings.