[pessimizer]

What's the problem with Python? It's no more complicated than VB and was designed as a teaching language. The significant whitespace may be annoying, but it's semantically identical to other ways of specifying blocks.

Javascript for teaching programming to children is an awful idea, though.

[MarcScott]

JavaScript is an excellent language to get children to learn to code, because it runs in a web-browser, an environment children are very familiar with.

[pessimizer]

Javascript is an awful language to get children to learn to code because it doesn't understand numbers and pretends to be object-oriented when it's prototypical - which puts it by itself in the world of popular languages.

That it naturally runs in a browser is an awful reason to use it. Use something that compiles to javascript if you feel web programming is so important.