I have read email list anecdotes of Smalltalkers who introduced their kids to Smalltalk as a first programming language. In the majority of cases, their kids liked Smalltalk and their reactions to subsequent languages are, "Why are they so complicated? They don't do anything more than the simpler one."

Smalltalk as it exists today has about 8 terminals & nonterminals in its grammar. Python has something like 30. Ruby has something over a hundred, but for an intro to programming, you can just ignore most of the grammar and use a subset which makes it very close to Python in simplicity.

Smalltalk was specifically designed to be usable by children.