It was pretty frustrating job hunting as a 15-year-old. Nobody liked the idea of hiring someone with no work experience, even for minimum wage, and there were a lot of jobs that I seemed qualified for that were legally mandated to require people 18+.

The problems with children are really just problems with adults.

I suspect we're violently agreeing. Minimum wage is too high for the value provided by the jobs I used to do, although they were not value-less. And restrictions around child-labor are well-intentioned but occasionally produces sub-optimal results. Ten-year olds threading bobbins in a 1870s textile mill twelve hours a day is a different beast than a high-school kid picking potatos or strawberries for a few hours as a summer job.

You don't pick strawberries for a few hours after school - you have a limited window to harvest some crops and it's back-breaking, all-day work.