What is the right age to start Diving?

[Bill51]

Padi dropping the age limit to 10 was the final straw for me, and I switched to Naui where the minimum age is still 12.... and we'll take a long look at the 12 year olds.

I see comments like this and I start wondering if I’ve lived my life in some alternate reality. While I see plenty of immature 14 year olds and 25 year olds, in the crowd I run with I see many gifted and mature 8-10 year olds frustrated with the constant discrimination they experience based solely on their age. These are the kids that spend their 14th birthday soloing sailplanes with the FAA’s blessing who have demonstrated their abilities, skills, and judgment at handling in-flight emergencies that would challenge many older pilots. I nearly dropped out of high school from the shear boredom and frustration with teachers who couldn’t look at students as individuals and preferred to lump them all together assuming they were all the same. Never mind that I was teaching celestial navigation to bush pilots in Central America at the age of 8, I wasn’t old enough to take the calculus class I wanted so I had to spend 5 hours per week sitting on my hands with my mouth shut while a teacher did a poor job of trying to explain multiplication tables to kids that didn’t care.

Alexander Hamilton was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on international trade by the age of 13 and was still a teenager when he began writing some of the documents that would form the foundation of the United States- and he was what was called a “***** orphan” growing up on the streets of St. Croix. While he may have been exceptional, 200 years ago this was not considered that unusual. The world has certainly changed in 200 years, but humans have certainly not evolved to be much different psychologically and one cannot say the world is harder or easier than it was, just different. What history shows us is different is that back then young adults were given more individual freedom to mature at their own rate, while today much of a child’s life experiences are restricted by their chronological age rather than their individual growth and abilities. If we set arbitrary rules about what children can do at a certain age, it relieves parents, teachers, and society of the responsibility to make individual judgments about a child’s competence, and it relieves them from taking responsibility if they make a mistake.

All of the mature children I meet have a few things in common. Their parents neither push the children to grow up, nor arbitrarily hold them back. All of them have parents who truly enjoy being adults, rather than being the parents that constantly complain about the responsibilities of being an adult or parent. The parents enjoy life to the fullest and make becoming an adult look like more fun than being a child that can only watch a parrotfish spin it’s cocoon on the TV.

 

[Diver Dennis]

Well said Bill51. In mexico I sometimes dive with the owner of a dive operation and his daughters. They are 9 and 13. They both dive small bottles, no deeper than 30'. Granted they grew up in the industry and they are both kids sometimes on the surface but when it comes to diving, they are both serious and cociencious divers. Do they truly understand the concept of life and death? Perhaps not but they do understand that diving is dangerous and bad things can happen if they don't listen. On the dive boat they act no more like kids than a lot of older folks who know better and THEY will listen to instructions.
I don't have kids so I can't say whether I would let them dive. I know, however, that these two at least, are ready.