The Vigilance Trap: moving beyond vigilance to build a world safer for kids.

We were barreling down the I-10 just west of downtown Phoenix, a corridor of highway in our Valley of the Sun known for its bumper-to-bumper, brutal, high-speed, high-risk driving and road rage events that tend to occasionally make national news. We were en route to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport—an airport that lives up to its reputation as America’s “friendliest airport,” in stark contrast to the roads leading to it—to depart for a work trip. During this trip, I’d be spending time with an organization that had recently experienced an occupational fatality, and they were working hard to learn deeply about this event.

As I sat there in the passenger seat, running the trip through my head, planning, plotting, thinking of the people I would soon be spending time with, and staring out the window, one of the many massive billboards that scatter the highway, taking up every small piece of unused land, caught my eye.

“STAY VIGILANT” in big, bold, dramatic letters consumed the top of the huge sign.

This demand for extreme vigilance was quickly followed by “prevent childhood drownings!”

This state that I have grown to love over the years, a state I now simply call home, has become known for several not-so-great things. Fatal road rage events, children dying after being left in hot cars, wrong-way drivers, and of course, childhood drownings. In fact, for children between the ages of 1 and 4, accidental drowning is the leading cause of death, with the vast majority of these occurring in home pools, and has recently spiked to record numbers of fatal events at the time of writing.

We quickly passed the sign, but it stuck with me.

I recalled a conversation I had just had with a friend the week prior. Her family had just moved into a new house with a pool. Not long after moving, she had given birth to her third child.

Recently, the news had broken of a major social media influencer who had a young son drown in their backyard pool in a neighboring community.

This worry was always there, but with this new pool and this latest tragic drowning, and with two of her children now falling directly into that high-risk age range, she was panicked. Worried. Distraught.

She debated just selling the house, or filling in the pool. Was it worth this worry? This anxiety?

What greater fear does a parent have than losing a child? Especially in such a way. Especially in your very own backyard.

The joy of this new house, one with a big, beautiful backyard and sparkling pool, now seemed like a death trap in her mind.

Now, this is not an uncommon worry in the greater Phoenix area. Roughly 32% of homes have pools, and most people—at least those that have lived here for more than a couple summers—even those of us without backyard swimming pools or hot tubs, know just how often these tragic drownings occur. After seeing the news reports almost weekly during the summer months—of a far too familiar scene that gets etched into your mind—of a helicopter circling about a home in a neighborhood that, without very close examination, could pass as your own, with the tragic overlay scrolling the bottom of the screen reading “child pulled from pool in valley community…”

But the overlay isn’t required, audio isn’t required. When you live here, when you see that image, you know what is happening—instantly. And while you pray and beg for a good outcome, those seem rare; few and far between.

This conversation played through my mind as we neared the airport, this conversation about worry, fear, and swimming lessons. But that sign kept coming back to me: “STAY VIGILANT!”

Is that really it? Is it that simple? Hyper-vigilance?

Does preventing child drownings in backyard pools simply boil down to paying an adequate amount of attention?

Vigilance is a good thing.

Being attentive is a good thing.

But perfection is an impossible standard. Especially with something so important.

Demanding perfection feels like the right answer. Calls for greater personal responsibility are easy, aren't they? They offer a neat, tidy villain: the neglectful parent, the inattentive caregiver. It’s comforting, in a twisted way, to believe that these tragedies only befall “bad” parents, not us. Because we’re good parents. We’re attentive. We’re vigilant. We’d never let that happen. It’s a convenient fiction, one that allows us to feel safe by distancing ourselves from the unthinkable. But it’s a dangerous lie.

We lose sight of a very simple fact buried in all of that mess; a fact that sits behind those tragic events:

Great parents, attentive parents, vigilant parents, have kids drown in swimming pools.

We like to find villains. We like to point out that ‘good parents would never let this happen,’ that it all boils down to a lack of care or a dereliction of parental duties. But that’s simply not true. Most people whose children drown in pools aren’t bad parents. In fact, most are the exact opposite.

But great parents, even the best parents, are still simply human beings. Amazing, wildly imperfect, and fallible human beings. These aren't situations where a parent knowingly allows their child near the pool. These are overwhelmingly scenarios where children, often in just a few natural moments of being out of sight, access the pool and fall in or get in without their parents' knowledge.

If you have small children, whether you have a pool or not, take a moment: Do you know where your kids are right now? That brief normal lapse, that momentary unawareness, is all it takes.

If you answered that you don't know, does that make you a bad parent? Absolutely not. Odds are, you’re a great parent. Not knowing, losing attention, having a million things pulling at your focus—that doesn't make you neglectful. It makes you a human being, juggling a thousand things, and experiencing a completely normal, fleeting moment of inattention. Error is normal. People mess up, even good ones. We know—even if only deep down—that we too will eventually mess up—it’s simply part of our humanity.

Losing attention, becoming ‘situationally unaware,’ is not a choice we actively make. It’s something that happens to us, more than we choose to make happen.

Knowing that this demanded—and our well-intended attempts—for perfection in vigilance or attention will, eventually, always degrade, break down, and fail at some point. Knowing that we will always at some point get it wrong or simply not be 100% vigilant 100% of the time… How can that be the answer to preventing these tragic, heartbreaking events?

It can’t.

In fact, if we are relying on people to get it 100% right 100% of the time to prevent such tragedies, we will always find ourselves 100% disappointed in the outcomes we see.

And this is where we get twisted. We conflate these moments of imperfection, these lapses in attention, these instances of not being vigilant enough, with negligence. That’s not negligence. That’s called being human. The sheer, messy, unpredictable reality of it.

Educating, raising awareness, and reminding of the tragedy that can occur and the need for attention or vigilance is mostly well-intended and is likely a good thing.

But trying to fix people will never fix the problem. Because people are people, they aren't the real problem, and even if they were, fixing people is an impossible task. And even if it were possible to fix people, we’re then left with the job of fixing every person, one by one, as we go. The never-ending task.

So, what do we do?

We can’t fix people, but we can fix pools.

We can’t fix people, but we can make it far harder for kids to drown in pools.

It’s this idea of designing systems that account for human fallibility rather than fighting against it.

In a recent interview, Jessie Singer, author of There Are No Accidents, put it in terms I couldn’t shake. She was talking about designing for the real world, for real people, and she quoted an early administrator of NHTSA and pioneer of the first child car seat, Dr. Sue Baker, saying:

“My most controversial stance is we should make the world safe for drunks. We should make the world safe for drunks because if we make it safe for drunks, sleepyheads, and people who aren’t paying attention, then we’re all protected.”

That quote hits hard, doesn’t it? And it immediately brought me back to that conversation I’d had with my friend, the one whose family had just moved into a new house with a pool. Her panic, her worry, wasn't some isolated overreaction. It was a primal fear, amplified by a system that placed the entire burden of prevention on her shoulders. She was, in essence, being asked to be 100% vigilant, 100% of the time, to protect her children from a known, predictable hazard. And she knew, instinctively, that it was an impossible ask.

This isn’t about shaming parents or minimizing their role. Good parents, and even the less-than-perfect ones, are already doing their best. They’re exhausted. They’re juggling a million things. They’re human. The question isn't how to make them more vigilant, but how to make vigilance less essential for survival. How do we design the environment so that when—not if, but when—that attention wavers, the consequence isn't a catastrophic loss?

Simply put, the punishment for making a mistake or losing attention shouldn’t be death.

This is where we pull back the curtain on a different way of thinking, a more robust and frankly, more humane approach to safety. We need to shift our focus from blaming the human to fixing the system.

We don't rely solely on drivers to always be perfectly attentive to prevent car crashes. We build roads with rumble strips, put up guardrails, design cars with airbags and anti-lock brakes. These are "fixes" to the environment and the equipment, not attempts to perfect human behavior. We acknowledge that people will get sleepy, distracted, or make a bad judgment call. The goal is to make those human errors survivable.

So, when we talk about preventing childhood drownings, what does "fixing the pool" look like? It means moving beyond just "awareness campaigns" and "parental responsibility" and into the realm of layers of protection. It means recognizing that no single barrier is foolproof, but a series of overlapping defenses can dramatically reduce risk.

Some Examples of Layers of Protection for Pool Safety

• Robust, self-latching, self-closing pool fences that completely isolate the pool from the house and yard. Not just any fence, but one that meets stringent standards, is regularly inspected, and is built to withstand the ingenuity of a determined toddler. This is the primary engineering control, the foundational layer.

  
  

• Elevated Deadbolts on Access Doors: Place deadbolts higher on any door from the house leading to the pool area, out of reach of small children. A good practice is to make these key-only locks, preventing a child from simply flipping a lever or knob.

  
  

• Door and gate alarms. These aren't just annoying; they're an active early detection and warning system, providing precious seconds by sounding an alert whenever a barrier is breached.

  
  

• Pool alarms. These floating or submerged devices detect disturbances in the water, signaling an unexpected entry. They're not replacements for fences or deadbolts, but they are placed there on the assumption that our other controls will fail. When that child gets that deadbolt open—maybe even because you, being human, left the key hanging out of the lock—and they find a way to scale that seemingly unscalable pool fence, the pool alarm is your last line of defense in the environment.

  
  

• Swimming lessons for young children. While not a "system fix" in the same way as a fence, it's a vital skillset that offers a child a chance to save themselves if all other barriers fail.

  
  

• Effective pool covers. Not just for keeping leaves out, but as a robust physical barrier when the pool is not in use. These should be designed to support the weight of a child, making accidental entry virtually impossible when properly secured.

  
  

• Ease of Use: Lastly, none of this works if it's not used. We must embrace another fundamental rule of human behavior: make it easy. Design these safety controls to be as user-friendly and effortless to activate and test as possible. If a pool cover is a hassle to put on and take off, it won't be used consistently. If a fence latch is finicky, it might be left open. Simplicity encourages use.

  
  

A note on "extreme ease of use." Think about the massive impact ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft have had. They didn't preach "don't drink and drive harder." They simply made it incredibly easy to do the right thing—to get a safe ride home with a few taps on your phone. This radical simplification of the safer choice has had a profound, positive impact on reducing drunk driving-related fatalities. The lesson is clear: when you make the safer option the easiest option, people will use it.

These are layers that collectively make it excruciatingly difficult for a child to accidentally enter a pool unsupervised. Each one acts as a buffer against that inevitable moment of human fallibility.

The "Stay Vigilant" billboard isn't wrong in its sentiment; we absolutely should be vigilant. But the truth is, our vigilance needs to be aimed at designing systems that fail safely, and at preparing for those moments when all the variables align in the worst possible way. Simply aspiring to be more vigilant with our attention or "trying harder" isn't a strategy. It’s like telling pilots to "Fly Safely" without equipping their planes with redundant safety systems, or telling drivers, “don’t worry, you don’t need airbags or seatbelts; if you pay hard enough attention, you won’t wreck.”

True safety comes from building environments that are kind to our mistakes, that minimize the catastrophic outcomes of normal human error, not from demands of perfection.

It’s time we stopped expecting parents to be perfect and started demanding that our communities, our builders, and our regulations create environments where our children are protected, even when they're just being kids, and when we, the utterly fallible humans who love them more than anything, inevitably, momentarily, drop the ball. It’s not about finding villains. It’s about building a better world. A world safe for drunks, yes, but more importantly, a world safe for kids, even when the rest of us are just being human.

 About the Author

Sam Goodman, founder of The HOP Nerd LLC, has spent nearly two decades in the trenches, pushing the boundaries of safety and Human and Organizational Performance (HOP). He's not just a recognized leader; he's a vocal advocate for operational curiosity, effective organizational learning, and sustained improvement across the globe. Sam cut his teeth in some of the most challenging sectors imaginable, from power generation to broader energy, maintenance, construction, and other high-risk industries.

Beyond his consulting, Sam hosts "The HOP Nerd Podcast," where he dishes out valuable insights on progressive safety. And here's where it gets interesting: he's also a comedian, using a smart, tongue-in-cheek approach in genuinely funny video content to dissect workplace absurdities, especially in safety. It's his unique way of making critical topics accessible and engaging.

As a global consultant and a sought-after keynote speaker, Sam is an established HOP authority. He's penned multiple best-selling books on HOP & Safety such as "10 Ideas to Make Safety Suck Less," alongside other impactful non-safety works like his latest, "Lessons from Dad." He's also the mastermind behind impactful tools like the "Starting Points: Operationally Curious Questions" card decks, designed to spark pre-event operational learning in the day-to-day.

Through The HOP Nerd LLC, Sam partners with organizations worldwide, focusing on operationalizing HOP principles, implementing effective Learning Teams, and cultivating robust cultures of operational curiosity and continuous improvement. His company has a proven track record across diverse critical industries, from healthcare and energy to manufacturing and biomedical.

At his core, Sam's passion is simple: empowering teams to learn from their operations, drive meaningful change, and achieve lasting operational success.