Nope, if he was looking for oncoming traffic he was not looking where he wanted to go. The advice about looking where you want to go is mostly to do with avoiding “target fixation.” People can see some thing they know they want to avoid and will start to stare at that thing and the car tends to go where the driver is looking.
Your son was probably turning right and looking left. That’s not where he wanted to go, but wasn’t where he should have been looking either.