I have just started teaching my daughter to program. I would certainly agree that starting off is not nearly as easy as it used to be.

Kids love interactive and graphical environments and trying to do this in any mainstream language quickly becomes non trivial.

I chose Python and pygame but it gets confusing for the child to see things like:

   from pygame.locals import *

and

   for event in pygame.event.get():
     if event.type == QUIT:
        pygame.quit()

and

   size = (120, 640)
   screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)   

One can tell her to ignore these and just accept they are necessary but it does cause issues and looks very intimidating to a beginner.