You are listening to Episode 82, a mother's message, losing a child to drowning and turning grief into advocacy.

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Thank you for joining me on this episode. This episode is part of the mother's message series that I have on this podcast, where I invite fellow moms and dads if they would like to come to share a message about something in their lives that happened with their child to educate other parents, and I'm just so grateful to welcome Nicole Hughes. She is a mother.

We're talking about her loss of her child to drowning and how she's turning her grief into advocacy to help other families save their children from drowning incidents. Thank you so much for joining me today, Nicole.

Thank you. I really appreciate you having me here.

Well, that appreciation goes right back at you. I'm so grateful we were able to connect on social media for everyone listening or both on Instagram. Nicole's on Instagram as Nicole Hughes ate.

I'm going to put that on my show notes and I had posted something on my feet about swimming lessons and set one of her friends tagged her.

If we started a conversation about swimming lessons and the importance of swimming lessons, but we're going to get into what the importance is. It's not just swimming lessons, but it's survival skills.

We're going to talk all about this and we're going to talk about what happened, but just turning what happened to your family into advocacy is such a hard thing to do for many.

I don't think it can come with a lot of emotions and it can come with a lot of stuff with that, but I just so appreciate as a pediatrician, as a mother, myself, just what you're doing to help other families be educated.

And like we talked about earlier before the recording, just not fear mongering, but just education so people can make the best decisions to really help save lives. So I really appreciate you.

No, exactly. Yeah, it takes a lot of courage, I think, to listen, to be willing to be open to listening to this and obviously is about childballs and I do not want to fear monger.

We still, my girls were in the pool all the time. We live on the link. I mean, this is not about avoiding water, but it is about what I wish I had known three years ago.

There was so much information in my brain about, you know, screen time and, you know, organic food and all of these things that drowning was definitely almost like background noise.

I mean, of course, I knew kids could drown, but I thought that it was as simple as, you know, watch your kids when you're swimming.

And obviously we took it very seriously. And I think actually that is what does motivate me so much to advocate is we did take it very seriously.

When you look at everything that is like the sort of generic recommendations for water safety, we did all of those.

You know, we have, well, I've 16 photos of what would be my son's final day of life in a 14 of those who is wearing a life jacket or a puddle jumper.

I never ended up letting her water. I thought that was the best thing to do, you know, and we waited until he was ready to start swim lessons and all of these things that I thought I was doing the right thing on.

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