What's his need in terms of the target template: how accurate does the optic need to be?
How is his eyesight?
The reason I ask is because what driven considerably by what
Classified and
Ginge wrote above: about weight and intended use.
As you may have seen in other threads, my daughter loves her 15-22:
And this was a few years back:
She's grown from having to bench the gun to really tackle those head-shots (that's a Tac-Strike quarter-scale:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/e5/94/72e594afb8674815056075b350ebb797.jpg) to being able to hot-dog head-shots cold and on-demand).
The distance limitation on that range is ~60 yards. In the picture of her in her winter coat, she was mag-dumping on the head at the 25. It's easy when the gun has no recoil.
If he's not going to really need magnification, you can save him quite a bit of hefting of the gun, particularly if he's young, by going with a smaller/lighter unmagnified RDS paired with a flyweight mount. I wish I had saved some of her paper/cardboard targets for show-and-tell, but particularly with young eyes uncorrupted by disease (my daughter is nearsighted, those are actually prescription shooting glasses: I'm more talking about astigmatism, which may cause non-itched reticles to bloom as a visual aberration, and make for harder precision shooting until the shooter has mastered proper target-focus and other sighting fundamentals specific to the RDS) and with proper execution of the fundamentals, from contact distance to the 100 yard line, an unmagnified RDS really doesn't give up too much to a LPVO in terms of precision/accuracy, unless the target is
really demanding.
A reasonably affordable, reasonably good scope and mount is unlikely to drop below the 1-lb. mark. And while the 15-22 is light and while that extra pound is closer to the fulcrum, it's still going to add considerably to the weight.
FWIW, I have a a Vortex Crossfire II 2-7x32 on my 10/22. For a more dynamic shooter, I'd go for the 1-4x24 variant instead.
Both the Crossfire 1-4x and
Ginge's Leupold VX 1-5x have a bit more forgiving eyeboxes versus the TruGlo, it seems. The Leupold is significantly lighter than the Crossfire, and given that their prices are comparable (what's your budget, BTW? and does it include the mount? if not, what's your mount budget? that Noren
Classified suggested, for-instance, exists in a totally different playing field versus the three others discussed here), I'd favor the Leupold - I can't find the weight for the TruGlo, though?
I'm honestly not worried about either the reticle or magnifications at this point: with the variability of .22LR loads, he'll want to true the scope no matter what. Even with something as simple as the Crossfire II's V-Brite setup, he could still use the simple subtensions to great effect, at-range.
The good thing about optics in this price range is that if it fails or doesn’t suit you, you can replace it and not be heavily invested in it. 
