To be fair to the original point, I learned programming as a kid. All actually good programmers I know learned as a kid (except those who are so old that computers weren't around when they were a kid, but had similar mentalities from childhood).
It's reasonable to want to get programming in the hands of kids again, now that computer ownership doesn't expect the user to program it, as it did back in the days of terminal shells and BASIC prompts. But none of us who learned as kids did so because of cutesy kiddy crap. We did it because programming itself is interesting and fun.