This is pretty terrifying to me. I recognize that a grade school student earning some income can be helpful for them and/or their family, but endangering their health and childhood is a no-go for me.

Pretty much all I see is, “If we need to keep capitalism going, we gotta indoctrinate them young.”

Honestly I never could keep terms like grade school in my head, but where I lived in my teens there weren’t many jobs that I was allowed to do before I was 15, and lifeguarding (what I did) was a 15 minimum.

Honestly I think that was probably a year or two too low given what the job is, but I think meh, I think it was close to good enough that I wouldn’t have thought to change the status quo, at least not by loosening it.

I absolutely wouldn’t agree with lowering it however, and if anything wouldn’t hesitate to support raising it to 16 for small tideless pools.

I certainly hope that there are also age restrictions for different bodies of water (though I only lifeguarded at swimming pools and a very long time ago, if I ever knew the restrictions I also forgot them).

Personally I’d require:

• swimming pool age restriction +1y for small and shallow (waist/chest deep) but moving pool-like bodies of water like lazy rivers at a water park
• same as above for most other water park fixtures like slides, etc where the water is relatively close to waist deep and does not have a tide
• 18 for tide pools and “rapids”-like fixtures at a water park, natural bodies of water like small lakes, slower rivers
• at least 18 for large lakes (for North Americans, the Great Lakes), inland seas, and oceans, if not 21+ with minimum of 2-3 years at a suitable smaller body of water from the previous category

My rationale is that lifeguarding isn’t actually that easy a job, and when shit happens it can get real fast, all it takes is a rescue at a July 4th pool event to spiral out of control (and people are overconfident and do stupid things). Especially for the larger and more dangerous bodies of water, the area of responsibility goes up significantly, the amount of training you need to do the job properly goes up, the visibility goes down, and the baseline level of danger goes up significantly between a pool and an ocean.

For both the sake of the kids and the people they are supposed to be protecting, they need to be older, more mature, and well trained. I don’t know if anyone would consider lowering age requirements on lifeguarding, but they better not. That’s an extremely stupid idea.