Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
How young is too young to float? Is it dangerous? Do we even know?
Graham and Ashkahn share their opinions and experiences with working with parents and having kids float at Float On.
Show Resources
FTS Blog – Floating While Pregnant
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: So today’s topic is, what’s the youngest we should allow people to float in our float center?
Graham: The youngest we should allow people to float. Well I guess-
Ashkahn: That’s a collective we. We as an industry I think was the basis, not just me and you.
Graham: Well I think fundamentally I would say I have no idea. That’s the basis of where we should start with this conversation. There’s certainly no laws or anything. It’s not like smoking or drinking or getting a driver’s license. There’s nothing out there that says people can only float above this age. So in that sense, it’s kind of up to you and what sort of risk you’re willing to take on with your business.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and at Float On we’ve decided on a few different tiers that we classify people into just depending on what their age is, and I guess each one of those comes with its declining level of risk, hopefully, that’s also associated with it.
Graham: Yeah and keep in mind, we completely made these up. These are just numbers that we made up one day and decided we felt good about.
Ashkahn: Yep, and there’s another side of this too, which we can get to which is the youngest people that we have ever heard of floating at all, not commercially necessarily. So back it up a little bit to what we do. So first of all, if you’re 70 years old, you totally don’t need parental permission. You’re okay to come in.
Graham: Anything below 70 though, we’re going to need your parent to come with you.
Ashkahn: So 18 though, 18 people officially become an adult, except for drinking in the United States.
Graham: And trying to become president.
Ashkahn: Right. Drinking and president is pretty much what’s excluded. So we decided floating wasn’t as important as either of those things. So 18 and over, it’s fine, you’re all good to go. Really 16 and over, I guess, for our center. You don’t need parental permission or …
Graham: 16? I thought our number was 13.
Ashkahn: For not needing parental permission?
Graham: Yeah. Or 12. 12 or 13. Here’s what I thought was going on.
Ashkahn: Yeah, you tell us what you think is going on and what our actual policies are.
Graham: I’m pretty sure that our rules are if you’re younger than 13 you need a parent’s permission, and if you’re younger than nine, you need a parent to actually sit in the room with you while you’re floating. So, bazinga. I’m pretty sure.
Ashkahn: All right. I’m looking it up. So it’s under 14.
Graham: Under 14?
Ashkahn: Yep. Requires a parent’s permission.
Graham: This is the thing that’s written in our thing?
Ashkahn: This is what’s written in our official handbook that I’m looking up right now.
Graham: 14. I’ve never heard that number before.
Ashkahn: Under 14 requires a parent’s permission and under nine requires a parent to be in the float .
So as you can tell, these are not very firm recommendations or numbers that we’re throwing out here, but at some point we just decided to draw a line and say, hey, kids under a certain age, it’s probably best if their parents know what’s going on in case something happens and that they have approval. To us, that was the safe thing to do.
Graham: These numbers might change as things in the industry change too. Right now I think everybody’s a little on the more extreme side of being cautious because everything’s new and unknown, and we haven’t done millions and millions and millions of floats to find these weird edge cases of what could go wrong. So I mean all this to say I don’t know of anything that’s ever gone wrong with a person, like underage floating in a float tank.
Ashkahn: No, and certainly not at that threshold of being 13 years old or 12 years old or anything like that.
Graham: Or any? Do you know any story of someone like, “They floated but they were five and …”
Ashkahn: So usually what has happened when we have someone who’s seven or eight years old coming in to float tends to be the same thing from what I’ve seen both firsthand and reports from our staff, which is people come in to float and they’re seven years old and they have their parent in the room, and they get 45 minutes in, and then … I don’t know whether it’s because they’re used to being in swimming pools or hot tubs or splashing around more, but they start playing around more in the water and get water in their eyes, and being a young kid, that’s just totally miserable and they start crying and they get out and they shower off and come out to the lobby. The parent takes the other half of the float, and then we hang out with the kid for 45 minutes I think what traditionally has happened with a certain age.
Graham: That’s not a health risk. You’re not going to get sued because a kid got water in their eyes.
Graham: So I don’t know. I mean we’re not lawyers. This should probably just be in the intro to this podcast. That should be part of the whole thing that you should know that we’re not lawyers, but yeah, I mean it’s really that, and we tend to be a little less cautious I think than some of the other centers out there. We tend to edge on the side of trying to have our float tanks be more accessible at the risk of opening ourselves up to a little bit more risk, the risk risk as I call it.
Ashkahn: Meta risk.
Graham: Again, we’ve made these numbers up and clearly we don’t even know them that well, and I guess that’s probably because this doesn’t actually come up that often. It’s not like every week we have kids asking us to come in. I can count on two hands.
Ashkahn: I can count on the numbers of stones in my driveway. I can count on, I don’t know, less than 10. I think less than 10 times can I even think of someone who’s come to Float On who’s been in an age range where we’ve had to do something special.
Graham: Yeah, and I don’t know. This is probably beyond the scope of the podcast, but I personally think that perhaps judging someone’s maturity based solely on the number of years that they’ve orbited the sun is strange.
Ashkahn: Fundamentally flawed.
Graham: Yeah. So we had an 11-year-old who came in to float with us who he’s the one who found floating, told his parents about it, got them to buy him a float, and bring him down to the float center, and they weren’t even floating at the same time, went in, totally loved the experience, talked about it afterwards, and was just this super cool, mature, young kid who was really into floating, and I’m just like: A. You’re going to be awesome when you’re an adult. B. Absolutely would I never discount that kid from floating or say, “No, you don’t get to try this out because you’re a certain age.” He was so on top of it.
I think the real concern is one of two things. One, are there some biological differences that would affect someone in a float tank at a young age? That would depend more on age. Not exactly or perfectly but relatively speaking. Two, if anything does happen, even if there aren’t biological differences, if something does happen and it’s a kid in there, that’s just such a more intense situation to deal with than if that person was an adult going by their own responsibility and not being beholden to anybody else.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that would be absolutely awful if something happened to a kid in our float center. So I think when we’re siding on caution or when float centers do side on wanting absolutely parent’s permission or a parent in the room, that’s the place they’re coming from is even if 999 times out of 1,000 everything is fine, one out of 1,000 is still this risk that you can’t take with something going wrong with a child in your place of business. That’s awful.
Graham: Yeah, but we let kids do weird stuff all the time. Have you seen ball pits? Those are intense and probably dirtier than float tanks are and more dangerous than float tanks are.
Ashkahn: Also not being doctors in addition to not being lawyers-
Graham: Yeah, you should know that. We’re not doctors or lawyers.
Ashkahn: Put that at the head of the episode as well. Not being doctors, I can’t think of anything that would affect kids more than adults at that age, nor have I even heard that as a concern or anything on waivers for something that physiologically is going to somehow be a problem with being in a float tank.
Graham: Yeah. Even despite that we still have these rules just because it feels like we should have something in place to deal with these more sensitive situations.
Ashkahn: So there you go. There’s your very concrete answer, which is it all depends, and if you feel like being really rigorous, you can definitely consult with a lawyer and a doctor.
Graham: Which we’re not. Which we’re also not.
Ashkahn: In a word or two, not doctors and lawyers. We are very rigorous in planning these episodes I should say.
Graham: That’s right.
Ashkahn: Obviously do your research into your own guideline practices well beforehand. So you can consult with them to make your own policies, but at some point, you do just need to balance the idea of risk that you’re taking on as a business with wanting to share this with as many people of any age as possible. Alright, thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow. See you later.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Monthly Budget for Float Centers – DSP 305
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The truth is… not much. As it turns out, monthly expenses for float centers don’t have huge variations unlike businesses that rely on retail, for example. Graham and Ashkahn explain they developed a sense for what’s within reason.
How to Sign on Float Ambassadors – DSP 304
Float Ambassadors have been with the industry since the beginning, but gained popularity sometime in the last few years. What are ambassadors and how to float centers find them? When they do find them, how do they get them to represent floating?
Graham and Ashkahn share their experiences with the practice of finding float mavens out in the world and the impact they’ve had on Float On.
How do you Talk about Psychedelics? – DSP 303
It’s no secret that the inventor of the float tank, John Lilly, was also an early psychonaut and used the tank for mental exploration in conjunction with LSD. Not everyone in the float community appreciates this shared history and some actively try to distance themselves from it given the taboo nature of psychedelics.
Graham and Ashkahn share their thoughts on psychedelics and floating and how, as a business, they can be completely separated while still being important, as well as explaining why some people might reasonably decide to disassociate from them.
What About 75 Minute Floats? – DSP 302
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Free Floats for Teachers – DSP 301
Graham and Ashkahn give their perspective on the pros and cons of giving free floats away for teachers. Giving out free floats is the Float On way and giving them to a specific group of people who could really use them sounds like a good idea.
The guys break it down and address some of the concerns any float center may have about running a program like this.
Latest Blog Posts
The Basics of Float Tank Sanitation
Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
Testing and Maintaining Float Tank Water Quality
Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
