It's easier point to framework that's already using PDO and and making sane defaults and solving bootstrapping problems. Once you've learned bunch of new concepts like ORM in one framework, it's easy to understand other ORs and be able to compare it to DMs.

My own experience with Laravel has been really positive. Actually I was thinking about creating something similar until I learned about Laravel, so it solved lots of existing annoyances regarding PHP coding for me.

Everybody needs to start somewhere and I believe that by nudging towards Laravel, my young friend'll learn more in the long run and in the meantime can concentrate on making services instead of writing home grown PDO helpers and custom routing libraries. They are problems that have been solved already multiple times.

Also, Symfony and Laravel communities are encouraging and teaching about the better ways of doing things so that'll help him in the long run.

In many small project it's more fun and more easier to use $favorite_framework instead of searching for reinvented wheel. There are cases when it's better to do more custom solutions but for many cases frameworks are just awesome