Maturity and attention to detail are important for JOW divers. But the parent/professional is right there to help them gain experience. Safely...
I think the whole idea of the JOW cert is essentially flawed. If you can't teach someone to dive well enough to handle themselves then they really shouldn't be in the water. The problem isn't even so much the kids, most of them can dive better than their parents.... but frankly..... to be honest .... I think many people are not good enough divers themselves to be supervising kids.
Case in point. Last weekend I had one of my OW students out for a dive at a busy dive spot. At some point a group of three divers passed us. One adult in the middle and two young teenagers (I met their father later, which is why I know this), one left of him and one right of him both attached to him with buddy lines.
None of them, including the "supervising" adult, had enough free attention left to see me and my student as we passed each other. They literally didn't see us even though we passed within an arm's length of them.
A little further up we met another pair of divers, this time a young woman and (I guess) her father. Again we passed by without the supervising adult seeing us. The young woman did see us and I waved to her and her "supervisor" saw my hand moving and grabbed it firmly. I thought he was greeting me at first but soon realised that he thought it was HER hand he grabbed and he wouldn't let go.... LOL. In the end his *daughter* had to make him attent to the fact that it was not *her* hand he was grabbing....LOL
I found that very amusing but at the same time..... these are the "adults" who are out there supervising JOW divers.....
I would think that it would be a good idea to have the JOW divers retake a long scuba course at some point. I don't believe they fully understand the implications of depth, time and decompression although it is possible that they pick this up over time.
Richard
In my experience young divers, even ones 10 or 11 years old, learn how to dive without too much difficulty. They aren't full of fear like a lot of adults are and from what I've seen most kids this age who want to learn diving take to diving like fish to water.
But where they *do* have trouble is with the theory. I once spent a couple of hours explaining to a young student why a boat floats and paperclip sinks. She hadn't had any of this stuff in school yet and didn't have the lateral thinking capacity to put it together. If you wanted to re-test them on something as they get older, for me, that would be the theory.
R..