Some kids really are ready at an early age. Despite the fact that no one in our family dove, my son was begging us to let him dive from the time he was a toddler. At an age when other kids were watching Sesame Street he was fixated on an old Jacques Cousteau video. He took a Scuba Ranger course at 8, was certified at 10, and earned his instructor certification at 18. He'll spend this summer in the Caribbean as a 19 year old assistant instructor.
That said, I think there's a real danger in the drive to set records for youngest anything (OW, AOW, JMSD, Tech, etc.) in scuba. I worry that it will lead parents to disregard safety standards. For instance, one of the things my son learned early and well was that you don't cut corners in scuba. As a JOW diver you stay within the 12 meter limit, you don't cut it close on your air supply, and you don't do dives that are beyond your skill level. Even a mature kid with good judgement really isn't old enough at 10 or 12 to be making judgement calls about breaking the rules, but right off the bat this "record breaking" kid is being taught that it's okay to bend them. She clearly didn't do the paper test, 5 proper pool sessions and 4 open water dives in two days, so she was allowed to start instruction before her 10th birthday.
The other thing I worry about in terms of safety is that in the rush to get the course done quickly a kid trying to break a record isn't going to learn the technical information and skills well. I remember that when my son was studying the book I realized he hadn't yet encountered some of the basic concepts inherent in scuba, such as mass, volume and density. I used to joke that for him mass was the state in which we lived, volume was the button on the remote and density had to do with how stupid his little sister was. He was smart enough to be able to parrot back correct information verbatim from the book but with imperfect understanding. As a result I had to tutor him through the book, questioning his answers to make sure that he fully comprehended what he was reading. He would have passed the course without my intervention, but I don't think he would have been as safe a diver as he was in the early years without it.
Another concern we faced was the buddy issue. Although I had no doubt he'd be a well trained and conscientious diver I didn't feel he was fully ready to be responsible for a buddy's life. I also worried that if he was paired up with an instructor who insisted on doing something stupid he might not yet have the authority to overrule them. As a result my husband went through the certification course with our son. On all post-certification dives they triple buddied-son, hubby and instructor. The instructor was there to keep the dive safe from a technical standpoint (hubby was too green) and hubby was there to look out for our son's best interests. Son gradually took on more and more of a leadership role.
We were reminded of the danger in even the most seemingly simple dive one weekend when our son was 12. I came across a news item in the paper about a man who had died on a local shore dive the day before. We realized that my son had been on the exact same dive, in the same location, with the same shop/dive leader the weekend before. It made me ponder what it would have been like for my little boy to deal with a death within his dive group.
So the bottom line for me is that I'd like to see these kinds of records ignored. They don't really benefit anyone or anything other than the egos of misguided parents.
