I wanted to echo the comments about the recoil and noise. You absolutely have to manage those, and not just with your equipment. I always try to shoot as far away from the guys at the public range with the big breaks as possible. The interesting thing with my boys that are now 14, and 12 is that when I tried talking them into shooting rifles larger than the 22lr, and 223 rem, they really didn't want to have anything to do with it. Now that they are pretty proficient with those rifles, and my larger centerfire rifles have a suppressor on them, when we are at the range, they ask me if they can shot them. One of the rifles is very light weight 308, pushing 168s. It's got a little bit of bite to it, but because it isn't crazy loud, and because they wanted to see 'what they could reasonably handle', almost like a dare, they were all about it. Now I hear them talking to their friends about how cool it was.....that's when you know you got them hooked!
My son and I also share a story about how I tricked him on his first turkey hunt (he was 8 years old, ~55lbs). He was excited about shooting a turkey but he was a little hesitant about shooting the 20 gauge. I told him that he didn't have to shoot it much, but that he had to display for me that he could make an ethical kill on the paper turkey target, before I would let him go out and hunt for real. I also explained to him that we had to pattern the gun to know what the real effective range was. So, we got a few different types of turkey loads, and some splatter turkey targets, and we went to a friends house. I actually did the true patterning portion with the real turkey loads, and I had 2 EXTREMELY LIGHT TARGET LOADS IN #9 SHOT that I had him shoot. He was pleasantly surprised about how little recoil there was, and how many pellets actually hit the target in the vital areas. The next morning, I loaded the same gun with a full turkey load, and he put the smackdown on a nice Tom. The funny thing is, like we have all experienced, he doesn't even remember the gun going off! And 6 years later, it is still the only time that Dad 'duped him', that we still laugh about. I would even go as far as to guess that he will probably play the same trick on his child some day, if the opportunity presents.