It is never too late, (or too early), to get your kids helping in the kitchen. Although it requires time, patience, and a few extra clean-ups, especially when the kids are younger, the advantages of cooking with kids are totally worthwhile.
Kids are eager to have frequent joyful experiences involving food to beat the anxiety they’ll have around tasting the unfamiliar. Over time, cooking together with your children can help build that confidence—and provide rich sensory experiences.
Here are five ways to enjoy cooking together with your children while raising an adventurous eater along the way.
Engage other senses.
For a hesitant eater, tasting an unfamiliar food can sometimes be intimidating. Cooking is a way to help your child explore foods using other senses besides taste. This helps to build positive associations with food. Steps like, kneading dough, rinsing vegetables, and tearing lettuce all involve touching food and being comfortable with texture. The complex flavors we experience when eating food come from both taste sensations from the tongue AND smelling with the nose. While cooking with new ingredients, some children may feel too overwhelmed to taste. If this happens, you’ll try suggesting smelling a food first; this might provide a bridge to tasting within the future.
Use cooking to raise smart kids.
There are numerous lessons that will be taught while cooking. Math concepts can be easily introduced while cooking. Concepts like counting, measurement, and fractions naturally unfold when navigating a recipe with kids. Open your child’s mind to science by explaining how food changes with temperature or how certain foods can help our body be healthy. While cooking together with your child, practice new vocabulary as you describe how food looks, feels, and tastes. Following a recipe from start to finish helps build the skills for planning and completing projects.
Make cooking part of the family culture.
The family meal can start within the kitchen as you cook together. Family meal preparation is a chance to celebrate your cultural heritage by passing down recipes. Help your kids find new, seasonal recipes to add to your repertoire and family cookbook. Cooking together and prioritizing health over the convenience of processed food are great ways to lead by example and help your children invest a culture of wellness. Setting up daily and seasonal traditions around cooking together help strengthen your family’s commitment to a healthy lifestyle.
Keep it safe.
Teach kids the importance of staying safe while cooking by showing them how to hold kitchen tools safely, how to use oven mitts to protect hands from heat, and how to turn appliances on and off safely. Always supervise children when cooking to make sure they’re sticking with safe and age-appropriate tasks. The best way to keep cooking safe is to understand your child’s abilities and his or her stage of development. A four-year-old child, for example, may not be ready to sauté vegetables over a hot pan but may have the fine motor skills to rinse fruits or tear salad leaves. Keeping safety in mind, it’s not difficult to urge kids—even toddlers—involved within the kitchen.
Ask for input.
Children feel more included in mealtime once they are asked to be a neighborhood of meal preparation. Collaborate together with your kids when selecting recipes for main dishes or sides. Let them help you make the shopping list and find groceries in the store or farmers market. When cooking together, let children offer a critique of the foods you’re preparing. Together you can decide what ingredients you should add to enhance the flavor. Talk about how people enjoy different tastes, and share your preferences with each other. Letting children be “in charge” of details like the way to set the table will help them feel invested in mealtime.
With all the advantages of cooking with kids, why wait so long before you started? Bring the kids into the kitchen! With enough practice, your child will someday be ready to cook you a delicious, healthy meal.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
