In particular, hotels and resorts that cater to families are NOT places where parents can relax. It’s unfortunate but true.

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In the USA, you worry about child predators, here in Costa Rica – it’s about open drain pits, untrained hotel staff, sharp concrete and steel edges all over the places, broken balcony railings and door locks that could never work because they were never installed improperly.

This last weekend, at a hotel on the beach, my wife and her friends witnessed a drowning in the hotel pool – or rather, the untrained and bungled rescue efforts by hotel staff. Her two friends, one of them a trained nurse at a local school, intervened and may have saved the child’s life, but were probably too late to save her brain function.

The parents, a Tico couple, had just checked in minutes before – apparently the child ate something, choked, passed out in a few centimeters of water and the pool guard who pulled her out didn’t realize he should perform heart compressions as well as mouth to mouth.

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We’ve seen so many potential deadly situations – our daughter was bitten by a street dog that came into a beach hotel and the owner obstructed our attempts to take the dog for observation, out of God knows what misguided thinking. This tragedy over the weekend happened because parents are not always perfect and not always perfectly vigilant.

Bottom Line For Parents:

Have fun here, but never, ever assume the architectural design is safe, the maintenance adequate, the food preparation handled safely, or the lifeguards are actually trained to save lives.

And if you have a nanny, handcuff her to the youngest children and always have “explicit hand-off” between parents of who is watching the kids at these places. Common sense, of course, but it goes doubly here.

Ives Brant, formerly an instructor of self-defense for children and adolescents, has resided in Costa Rica since mid-2004.