Life Jackets for Infants and Toddlers

My husband and I might be a little crazy, but our son Chase took his first swim in a pool when he was just 11 weeks old. He was actually almost born in water, but at 2 weeks late, he was disqualified from our hospital's water birth tub. We had read all about babies having a natural affinity to water, and sure enough, when we held him just by his head, he stretched out his arms and legs and relaxed in the warm pool water, just like the books said he would.

Not long after that we contemplated taking him on his first short sail. Crazy, maybe but still safety conscious, I picked up a cute little PFD at a major retailer. It was blue and had little turtles on it. It seemed to fit his tiny body well enough. So, we took a brief sail on a beach cat and all went well.

Once ashore, I decided to take Chase in the pool with the PFD on, to get him accustomed to how it felt in the water. I lay him in the pool in the PFD on his back, and he promptly flipped faced down. Of course he was not able to right himself. Nothing bad happened, I flipped him back over immediately, he did not cry or panic as he had already become comfortable with his face being briefly in the water, but it was a good lesson on how glaringly inadequate the PFD I'd selected was.

I had a mission. After surfing around on the web a bit, I was off to a major marine outfitter, certain I could find a better floatation option there. I had now read a bit about PFD ratings and was determined to find a PFD rated 1. A 1 rating will "provide the most insurance of keeping the wearer's head face up." This was something that would obviously be important on a non-swimming infant or small child.

In the aisles at the marine supply store, I was swarmed by well meaning sales people. I explained that I was looking for a PFD for babies under 20 pounds that was rated PFD 1. Together we raked through their entire stock of kids PFD's and could not find one. I also looked for a harness, thinking a better approach might be to just have my little crawler hooked on. The webbing on the store's version of a child harness I was shown was so thin, I would not even put it on dog.