As a DM, you should know better than this.
You don't pick and choose which standards you think are relevant -- if you want to set your own standards, then create your own agency. There are ways in which the instructor could have handled this without breaking any standards, and I would encourage the OP to pursue them.
agreed.
the instructor could have stood beside him watching the kid and charged them a couple of hundred dollars and given him a shiny new plastic card saying "PADI seal" or something along those lines. that way the kid has fun and PADI makes more money from the professionals following "the standards". yay everybody wins!
i agree with a lot of the standards, not all of them. some just dont make sense to me. 50 year old fat unfit smokers are allowed to dive but lets say a physically well developed and intelligent 9 year old is not because he is a couple of months shy of his birthday. yes yes i know that standards, like laws, are based on a majority of the populace. unlike in the rest of daily life, there is no scuba police and no scuba courts to decide where to draw the line in the big gray area on a case by case basis. 90% is self regulation and the instructor made a decision to allow the kid to dive at a depth of 4' in a pool where he could keep an eye on him and made sure that there was an experienced diver beside him to guide.
i'm sorry but i dont follow "the standards" just because they exist. call me unprofessional or an idiot, i dont think i'm doing anything particularly wrong just because i disagree with some of the things PADI says. i have a brain and i choose to use it rather than to trust my life to a few lines in a book. PADI says its ok to ascend at 18m a minute, i say not ok, go slower, be safer. PADI says not ok to let a OW diver go below 18m, i might make an exception to bring one to 20m to see this awesome moray that hangs around in that spot.
a lot of things are left up to personal judgement. in the case above if i were there i might think that hey the kid doesnt look too comfortable in the water even though he passed his tests, no go for a quick taste for scuba. the instructor felt it was ok, maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong, i dont know.
but i'm not going to go all STANDARDS STANDARDS STANDARDS on him just because they exist. different people, different standards. who is to say i'm wrong and they're right?
shrug.