A four-year-old boy tragically drowned in a popular swimming pool in China on Tuesday while his mum checked her phone.

The child’s mother, surnamed Xiao, was playing on her mobile phone just feet away as he struggled in water, according to a surveillance video posted by People’s Daily Online on Twitter.

Ms Xiao apparently did not notice her son was drowning as she went to look for the boy in other parts of pool after she put down her phone.

The boy and his mother were swimming in a pool in Xianyang, north-west China’s Shaanxi Province, reported Huanqiu.com, an affiliation of People’s Daily.

The woman was standing around three metres (10 feet) from the child when she was checking her handset, the report said.

The video shows that there were seven to eight swimmers in the pool, however none of them noticed the child was drowning.

After struggling for about three minutes, the boy was submerged in water at about 1.1 metres (3.6 feet) deep.

When Ms Xiao realised that her son was missing, she sought help from the staff at the pool, according to a friend of Ms Xiao’s.

Together they looked for the boy for more than an hour and eventually found his body at the bottom of the pool.

Ms Xiao told a reporter from Hua Shang Daily: ‘If I had known this would happen, I would never bring him here.’

She claimed she was just two metres (six feet) away from the boy when she was checking her phone, reports Daily Mail.

So tragic. Distraction can be very dangerous as Dr Adrian Mattke from Children’s Health Queensland & Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital explains in the video below.

Children can drown in just a few seconds.

It is best to carefully watch your children at all times around water.

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