What is "older"? I recall when I was 12-13 years old I started learning basic, in high school I ended up trying to tackle C unsuccessfully until college.
They tried to do Scratch in college in some of my classes, it was useless shit. I understand it's use in trying to make kids think in logical, practical problem solving ways, but given what real programming ends up looking like, Scratch has always seemed useless to me. You could probably just teach them python right off the hop, then get into bigger languages like java, c#, etc after they understand basic programming constructs.