But not his own father! Running dangerous experiments on your child without their consent is surely at best extremely unethical. To me it sounds positively sick, or in layman terms, psychopathic.
Every generation before me was taught to swim by being tossed in a pond. It's a dangerous world. Pretending it isn't just lowers the minimum required stress before anxiety takes over.
Yes the world is a little bit more dangerous for that kid at least. At any moment his father might throw him in a lake with neither consent nor warning. I never had to worry about my parents experimenting on me and I simply learned to swim with lessons. Lucky me to have had such parents.
What makes it worse is that OP described it as an experiment that was primarily for his benefit, because he wanted to see what it would look like to see kid drowning. No word of wanting his kid to learn something (which still wouldn’t have been ok but at least barely makes a tiny bit of sense). That is mental, and child abuse.
Why add dangers, though? Even just perceived ones? It's perfectly possible to teach children to swim without giving them the experience of fearing for their lives.
It is indeed a dangerous world. A good parent equips their child with tools to mitigate those dangers -- teaching the child to swim in a gentle and supportive way, for example.
A bad parent subjects their child to an intentional near-drowning, leaving the child afraid, confused and fundamentally unequipped for the danger.
This is how it is now, and this is how it was in previous generations. I do accept that bad parenting was more prevalent in the past, but then, so was leprosy.
