I’m all for kids doing dumb shit, getting hurt, and learning valuable skills and life lessons. It can be very educational and fun for all parties involved.
Where I get concerned is when people are playing with tech can a easily move from “skin burn that heals in a week” to “partial / complete loss of sight in one eye” with little obvious indication that you’ve crossed that boundary.
Lasers in particular can be very nasty in this space. An simple 1mW green laser will look basically identical to a 1mW IR laser. But the IR laser has a real risk of causing partial sight loss because it not visible, so you don’t blink or look away when it shone in your eyes. Instead the first indication of a problem will either be pain or partial loss of sight, at which point the damage is done and can’t be repaired.
To further complicate things damage to eye can also depend on if the laser is pulsing or running continuously. So laser that seems “safe” when operated continuously can become extremely dangerous when pulsed.
Finally if you’ve got a laser that burn your skin. Then it’ll annihilate your eyes in a instant. The optics in your eyes have a focal magnification of about 100,000x so 1mW/cm2 becomes 100W/cm2 once it hits your retina. Which itself is not the most robust organ in the body.
In short things like lasers create a difficult to control hazard that pretty much targets on of the most sensitive, important and difficult to repair parts of the body, the eyes. People live perfectly normal lives missing fingers and toes, with 3rd degree burns and horrific scars. But permanent sight loss is a totally different ball game, it’s high impact, life long, and we have pretty much no technology that can reverse it.
So please, encourage your children to mess around with technology, take stuff apart. Burn fingers, break bones and slice up hands. But for the love of god, protect them permanent sight or hearing loss. Let them lose that stuff at music festivals or too old age. And doing that mean making sure they really understand how dangerous lasers can be, and how something a simple as taking your goggles of at the wrong moment can have huge life altering ramifications, before they start playing within anything more powerful than a DVD player.