How should a child first learn to draw?
The biggest problem in this question is the age of the child.
If we're talking pre-teen, then I see no chance that the child will spend regular time practicing pen strokes or how to draw straight lines, because that simply isn't fun.
Children want to have fun. Coloring books are fun because you can achieve a pretty result without putting too much effort in it. Drawing mom as a stick figure an declaring that &quot;it looks like mom&quot; is fun because it's quick and sufficient to express what the child intended. Indeed, this art of reducing the real-world information to the minimum required to recognize the object can still be helpful as an adult if you happen to design graphical user interfaces for computer or phone apps.
What you need most is listening to what the child wants. Do they want stick-figure-mom to look more realistic? Or do they just want to express their phantasy by creating colorful blobs on paper? Are they interested in drawing comics or mangas? Or do they want to create cool tribal style tatoos? The only thing they will practice voluntarily are the things they truely want.
Since all of the above examples require very different techniques, there is no one book or one art class we can suggest. But there are many different books and online sources that cater to teens and young adults and teach them how to (better) execute one single art style. One of the all-time classics is figure drawing where you start drawing a cat by linking a few circles together, and in each chapter the circles get more and more pronounced until you only need them as guidelines for the finished cat. The same is true for comic and manga drawing books where you're shown how to simplify the human body by linking circles and rectangles.
My suggestion is to observe what kind of art the child is creating now and asking them what they love drawing the most. Then translate that to adult terms like &quot;figure drawing&quot;, &quot;landscape drawing&quot;, &quot;still lifes&quot;, &quot;comic art&quot;, &quot;water color&quot; or whatnot and go looking for one very short beginner tutorial (either as book or online; I personally prefer books because you can easily find them again and reread a chapter if you forgot. Printing an online tutorial is a cheap alternative). Give it to your child and let them explore without any pressure. They might forget about it for a year and then suddenly be in the mood again.
Don't give them more than 2 books at once, it might feel overwhelming. Don't go for the thickest book available, those are usually intended for older and more advanced students. Don't be discouraged if your child finds a particular book unhelpful, they might not have the required skill yet, but will probably return to it once they acquired the skill level. If your child tells you that a certain book doesn't help them at all, listen to them and ask them what they expected / want to read about, then go looking for a different book that covers those topics. Even if you have no idea about drawing at all, you probably are able to recognize those topics if you see them in a book.

To the question of copying:
Copying reference images is the first step for almost all professional artists, because it's the best way to produce encouraging results and learn the required technique.
Portrait artists spend countless hours copying photos of peoples faces. Landscape artists spend countless hours copying landscape photos. Comic artists spend countless hours copying photos of people in different poses. It's the best way to learn.
Granted, the step away from reference photos to your own imagination is a hard one, but forcing a child to take this step even before they learned things like shading or body proportions (by copying photos) is extremely discouraging.
And by the way: The full title of the article you linked is

&quot;Copy?...Real Artists Don't Copy!&quot; but Maybe Children Should.

The article talks about how children are discouraged from copying artwork from their peers and teachers in an attempt to encourage originality. But how is a child supposed to create &quot;beautiful&quot; original art if they were never allowed to learn the technique by copying existing beautiful art? If a child can only compare their own stick-figure cat with a real cat, their judgement of their own skills will be devastating. If they can compare their drawing with a stick-figure cat of another child, they will see their own skills in a much better and realistic way.