Paintball is a great day out for children. However, as much fun as paintball is, a paintball pellet leaves the barrel of a marker at over 200mph. You have to be confident you can trust your children to treat the equipment with respect.

How young is too young?

Most paintball venues in the UK will agree that players under 12 years old shouldn’t be playing, others might mandate a different minimum age but can offer packages for younger players if there’s a large booking. A handful of venues in the UK offered a modified, low-impact version of paintball for younger children – using much smaller and less powerful guns.

Precautions for younger paintball players:

Organise a group well ahead of time and make it clear to your venue that you intend to bring young players. This will give the venue a chance to organise your party to play against people at their age and skill level.

Make sure young players come wearing appropriate clothing. Your kids are guaranteed to get a bit mucky from scrambling about in a field, and baggy clothing helps minimise the bruising of getting hit by pellets.

Supervision is also necessary. While the vast majority of paintball facilities have referees to oversee player behaviour, it would be prudent to bring additional adults to make sure children are playing as safely as possible.

Image courtesy of Mayhem Paintball London

As we mentioned earlier, the United Kingdoms Paintball Sporting Federation is the self-regulation body for paintball facilities in the UK, and you should look for their endorsement of a paintball organisation ahead of booking a trip. Adherents to the UKPSF standards offer basic levels of first aid, staff training and public liability insurance.

If your children are simply too young to play paintball, a safer alternative might be laser tag. Laser tag can be played at dedicated indoor venues, but some paintball facilities will offer your children the chance play outdoors in the closest thing to a paintball experience without the risk of injury.

Laser-based games are actually played by adults as well and offer a few advantages over traditional paintball. No bruises, you won’t run out of pellets, the lasers are more accurate and there’s no need to worry about clunky safety gear. It’s worth thinking about booking laser tag even if your children are old enough to play paintball.

What can Children Learn from Paintball?

Understandably, some parents may have reservations about their child running around with a replica gun.  However, having read a number of books about child, and human psychology (including the Chimp Paradox which I highly recommend), it is clear that children need an outlet for aggression and it is also of great psychological benefit for them to get into ‘flow state‘.

This does however, have to be closely supervised and controlled.  Ensuring that games remain friendly and everyone shakes hands and has fun at the end is imperative. In addition, like other sports, paintball teaches teamwork, communication, is great for fitness and helps children to control adrenaline – the fight, flight or freeze reflex.  Without experiencing the infamous adrenaline rush, and without understanding and learning how to control it – these can lead to serious problems in dealing with stress in later life.  If children have a good grounding in ethics and treating people how they would like to be treated themselves (outside of the sporting arena), paintball will help not hinder their development. As a regular hobby for children, martial arts like BJJ are also a good shout.