The Rascal is remarkable. Talk about value for money.
Life is all about perspective - I would rephrase the above based on my personal experience thusly:
“The Rascal is a remarkably poor value for the money.”
Because for the money, you’re not very far from buying one of a handful of the more popular repeaters out there, with better quality, better sights, and better features than the Rascal.
So when I initially read the OP, I immediately considered THIS to be the operative question:
Or am I approaching this the wrong way?
I would say yes - the Rascal, Cricket, or Mini Bolt are the wrong approach.
Personally, I recommend highly against the Savage Rascal, the Henry Mini Bolt, and the Cricket. They’re overpriced for their feature set, lacking in features, their function does not match their length of pull, and there is an inherent fallacy in the presumed discipline forced on the child by handing them a single shot.
I’ve shared my experiences with these single shot youth rifles as a parent and as instructor here several times, but I really hate seeing unwitting parents or others lured into buying these for kids. Been there, done that, would never do it again, and recommend others avoid that poor path.
First, functional restriction doesn’t teach discipline. If a child is too young to exhibit discipline, they’re too young to be shooting - whether chronologically young, or simply developmentally immature. I have taught children as young as 2 yrs old to shoot with semiautomatic rifles, and I have seen children as old as 45 which simply lack the discipline to handle firearms at all. Putting a governor on a go-kart might limit how fast a kid can drive, but it doesn’t stop them from mashing the pedal to the floor and wanting to go faster. Teach a child discipline, and espouse consequences for failures, and they’ll learn to drive or shoot only as fast as appropriate.
Secondly, even if we DID pretend young kids should be governed by an action, the size of these rifles does not line up with the age of a child which MIGHT acceptably be lacking in discipline. All of these rifles have 11.25 or 11.5” Length of Pull. This is typically suitable for a child somewhere around 12yrs old. Personally, if a 12yr old preteen, two years away from a legal permit-able age to drive themselves to school, lacks sufficient discipline that they can’t be trusted with a repeater, there are far larger issues at hand. As I mentioned, I have coached sufficient discipline into children as young as 2yrs old, and have commonly done well with any child over 5yrs old - these kids can run the rifles safely and responsibly, AND they need LoP’s around 8.5-9”, not 11.5”. So if the mechanism matched the kid (which it doesn’t), then the size still does not.
Of course then, despite being too big for small kids, 11.5” is too small for most adults or even mid-teens, so the rifle becomes this “single serving” device which the child quickly outgrows - spending more money on some other rifle which should have been bought in the first place.
For product value, you’re buying an under-featured rifle, typically poorer quality sights, less availability, and lesser quality stock. Some are now getting D&T’d at the factory for scope mounts, but not all - and the stocks typically don’t well accommodate the cheek risers needed to get a small face high enough for a scope anyway. A Marlin 60 or Ruger 10/22 can be bought for the same money, or within $50 at worst, with several other options falling also nearby - Savage Mark II as another example. One of these full size options with a $50 take-off stock cut down to fit the child until they’re grown is a much better option.
Lots of folks are reportedly happy with the Rascal/Mini/Cricket, but I’ve experienced a lot more folks becoming quickly disenchanted with them (myself included).