I doubt that's the case for 8 year olds. C requires a mental model of more hidden abstractions than something like Small Basic (a decent grasp of pointers is kind of non-negotiable). I mean the Array and Stack objects in Small Basic sound like they would be a lot easier to handle for a beginner than anything equivalent in C.
I once explained arrays and frontbuffers/backbuffers to a 9 year old. I can't say that he did anything useful with the knowledge, though he wasn't put to sleep by it and went away knowing a little more on how graphics are done.
There's quite a bit of a gap between an understanding sufficient to follow someone else's explanation and an understanding sufficient to build something (including learning a rigid syntax understandable to a machine in order to express the concepts).
I creeated Small Visual Basic to solve this issue. It's based on SB but more powerful, and it is actually an easy incarnate to the dot net platform, so, actually easier that C and even python and more powerful as it leads to learn a powerful commercial system (VS.NET).
https://github.com/VBAndCs/sVB-Small-Visual-Basic
If you start from nothing, C can be as easy as BASIC. You can do a lot without ever touching malloc/free.