Swimming pool row erupts as parents 'too busy on their phones to watch children' threatened with eviction

A network of public swimming pools have started evicting parents who are too engrossed in their phones to pay attention to their children.

A spokesperson from the Hamburg Bäderland network of 25 public pools in Germany said the new policy is due to an increase of near drownings at their pools.

The network has instructed its staff to tell supervisors of small children to leave if they ignore one verbal warning to put away their phones and watch them.

Spokesman for Bäderland Michael Dietel told The Times parents were ignoring flyers distributed in the pools asking them to put their phones away.

He said: "The problem is getting worse...We’ve had cases where we’ve saved the child, resuscitated them, the ambulance and emergency doctor are already on site and then at some point the parent comes along because they’ve finished their call or were somewhere else in the building."

“The mobile phone is one factor but there are other distractions too. Some parents are also simply ignorant...In the past we’ve warned guests three or four times, but we’re less tolerant now. If they don’t react the first time, they have to leave. We’ve already done that a number of times. We’re talking about supervisors of children aged three to six here.

“We usually prevent serious incidents because we detect situations. But we very often get children running along the edge of the pool calling for their parents. Then our lifeguards have to take them by the hand and go looking for mummy and daddy.

“It puts us in a quandary because it takes us away from overall supervision of the pool which involves paying attention to the elderly swimmer doing his lengths who may get a heart attack.”

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It comes as the German Life Saving Association (DLRG) said it had recorded 1,200 cases last year in which children got lost.

The group has volunteer lifeguards monitoring more than 100 beaches along Germany’s North Sea and Baltic coasts between May and the end of September.

DLRG spokesman Martin Holzhause said: "It usually happens because parents aren’t paying attention, and phones have been a big factor in that for years.

"Our lifeguards tell parents to take more care when they reunite them with lost children."

Dietel said phones had been a growing problem for years. He added that swimming pools were better placed to tackle the problem than public beaches, where people cannot be evicted.

According to DLRG figures, at least 378 people drowned in Germany in 2023. This is up from 355 in 2022. Of these, 16 were children aged ten and under.