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I think that one thing that is often overlooked is making sure to keep up motivation. There are aspects of programming that will always be pretty dull and dreary. You may spend days or weeks trying to fix a silly bug. Throughout all of the crap, you do want to keep up an excitement level.

I partially say that because you mention a 12 year old kid, so I am thinking how to keep their attention.

So yes, whilst I'd say Python is a good free and popular language to start on, and one that is widely used professionally, often the programming tutorials are boring as hell.

R is kind of the same. There isn't really a fundamental difference between R and Python. R tends to be used more in statistics circles and consequently has a lot of stats modules built in, but that isn't to say there isn't anything you can't do in Python.

Ultimately the language you use professionally will come down to what you are told to use, and if you have a solid foundation in a different language it should be fairly transferrable.

Out of left field, might I suggest you check out Unity 3d? Yes, it's a video game creation software but you are making those games in C# (or Java, but I'd recommend C#). I dare say that most of the programming you do in Unity will be a lot more fun. Yes, there will some things that you learn which are Unity-specific, but a lot of it will be about fundamental programming. And if you are thinking "I just want to program... I don't want to do any art of graphics or sound or whatever" then that's fine, you can just get free assets off the marketplace.

I think that if I were creating a curriculum for 12 year olds based on coding I'd use Unity to create some type of Angry Birds knockoff. In one fell swoop you'd learn coding, physics, mathematics and project management.