Here’s something that I bet you didn’t know…the youngest students in our CPR classes are typically around 12 years old.

Note that these pre-teens are students in our ADULT CPR classes. And they’re learning how to save a life before they can even get a learner’s permit. That, my friends, is awesome.

What’s more, we may even consider students that are younger than 12 in our classes. They just have to pass a written test and a skills test to receive certification. Skills tests do involve rolling over an adult and compressing the chest to 2 inches deep, which does requires a certain size child.

I tell you this because a recent study confirms that children as young as nine are capable of performing CPR and that the limiting factor (as mentioned above) was body weight, not age.

In fact, these kids — ages 9 to 18 — did pretty much as well as adults. Four months after taking a one-day course, 86 percent of the students were able to perform CPR correctly; more then 90 percent properly used an automated external defibrillator (AED); and 69 percent positioned the head correctly to open the airway.

Bottom line: the study authors concluded that grade-schools should consider offering CPR training. And we heartily agree!

Bob Ellis/The Oregonian