Toddler drowns at Chon Buri’s Bangsaen beach during family vacation

A family vacation turned into a horrific tragedy when a toddler drowned at Bangsaen beach in Chon Buri earlier this week. The boy, who was only three years old, had been on a vacation with his parents, who live in Samut Prakan, a province just southeast of Bangkok. The boy’s mother says he disappeared from her sight for only a few seconds. A man at the beach told the parents he saw the boy near the floating bridge. The man and the boy’s mother then searched for him, until they found him partially submerged in the water. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Drowning was still the number one cause of death for children under 15 in Thailand in 2019. The annual average was 1,262 children per year in the country, according to a report by one institute. That’s equal to five children per day. From 2000 to 2018, there was a total of 22,700 deaths by drowning of kids under 15. At the highest point, drowning caused around 56% of childhood deaths.

The Thai government has done work to reduce childhood drowning in Thailand. Thai schools begin teaching children to swim at age 10. The director of Thailand’s National Institute for Child and Family Development (NICFD) told the Bangkok Post in a 2019 interview he thought that age was too late.

“For small children, such incidents usually happen when parents leave their children out of sight. For older kids, they will sneak out to play in water with their friends without telling their parents, although they can’t really swim.”

Sources: The Pattaya News | Bangkok Post