Abyss Scuba Diving

When Should A Child Learn To Dive?

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Scuba Diving Age

Scuba diving is a great family sport, and many parents ask, how old do you have to be to scuba dive? Before a parent has their children taught to dive then, the child’s readiness to learn to dive needs to be considered.

According to PADI Standards, kids can be certified as Junior Open Water Divers as early as the age of ten. In most countries, ten years old is now the minimum age for scuba diving.  Children develop physically and mentally at different rates, making it difficult to define an age at which all children can safely dive.

A child’s maturity, reasoning skills, and physical limitations should be considered when determining if he is ready to begin scuba diving. Because we are concerned for your child, we require that the child must be at the very least weight of thirty-five kilograms and physically strong enough to carry their gear to the water. For kids aged 10 to 12 years old, we require them to do a one-on-one PADI open water course.

Much of the debate about children and diving stems from the fact that there is no concrete experimental evidence to prove that scuba diving is either safe or dangerous for children. Hyperbaric scientists cannot take young children diving and expose them to various dive profiles and risk factors to see how many get decompression illnesses or dive-related injuries. Such experiments would be unethical. For this reason, the data is not available, and we must come down on the side of safety.

Another factor that must be remembered is that not all kids and teenagers are ready to handle the stress of the underwater environment and the theory work required for a diving course. Before parents have their kids taught to dive, then parents need to know that the child wants to learn to dive. (This should not be the mere desire of his parents and friends.). The child must be comfortable in the water, can he swim and have a sufficient attention span to listen to and learn from class discussions, pool and open water briefings and debriefings and other interactions with an instructor.

Once the kids are ready to learn to drive, then diving is a great sport that the family can enjoy for many decades.

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