I was on a 17 day voyage in February on a Regent ship with a lot of sea days. I only saw one 12-year-old child. He was the son of guest lecturers on the ship, and they were traveling with his grandmother, who only spoke German. My trivia team adopted him, and he really added a lot to our experience. The maximum size for trivia teams is six, and we had six before he joined our team. No one complained that we had “too many” on our team. He was such a cute young man, generally well-behaved, unless he had consumed too much sugar. A few afternoons, he was very twitchy and rambunctious. But we all loved him. I think he was quite the mascot wherever he went on the ship. And let me just say that, although this was not on an Oceania cruise ship, Regent skews very old as well.
When I was about 10 years old, my family traveled internationally, including on a cruise ship. We were pretty wild, not well-behaved like most of these children you are hearing about, but the international travels really had an impact on me (hopefully for the better).