zenithd

When the employment outlook changes, and I expect it will, we will be in a traditional recession.

Actually, the problem is the opposite. Their muscles get too strong too quickly and then they blow a pulley because their tendons aren't strong enough for the forces that their muscles are easily capable of producing. This happens in adults too, but AFAICT it's more common in kids and adolescents (but perhaps that's because most adults who get into the sport later don't ever climb as hard). Growth plate injuries are less common but devastating.

Avoiding these sorts of injuries is probably the biggest reason why training or a team is worth the $.

It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing.

The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.)

In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem).

> I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention...

Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees":

Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference.

"let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them.

"Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below.

Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.