If we stopped mass farming chickens where we would we get our cheap eggs. This is, of course, if everyone suddenly stopped eating chicken. Would we have old folks homes for chickens? I read that egg laying chickens are only permitted around a year of life.

If you don't mind giving the youngster a somewhat graphical and simple approach to programming, I highly suggest using Game Maker. It is a graphical game creation tool that also includes it's own scripting language that is very easy to get a hang of.

One of the more interesting aspects is that anything that is done with the icons or Drag and Drop items can be done through scripting creating a nice staged approach to learning programming.

It was created by a professor named Mark Overmars as a teaching tool to get children interested in programming.

http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/

It has very basic OOP functionality built in with child and parent objects, and you can actually create some pretty interesting applications with it. The problem is that is a bit too fun and you will need to encourage your child to use this solely as a launching pad and not a final destination.