Cooking with your kids in the kitchen may be one of the best things you can do for them— promoting healthy habits and fostering your relationship with them.
Recent studies have shown that children benefit from working with parents or grandparents in the kitchen to prepare meals.
Learning to prepare their own food will help your children build confidence. It will help them learn to make healthy choices about what they will eat and become more adventurous about trying new and healthy foods.
Cooking with your children can strengthen the bond between you and encourage communication, making it more fun and more natural.
Cooking Up Confidence
Children often begin to show interest in helping in the kitchen by the time they are two or three. This is not too young for them to begin helping.
A very young child can snap the ends from green beans, crumble bread for bread crumbs, peel garlic, wash vegetables, learn to measure ingredients and roll out the dough, stir mixtures with a spoon… Think about the tasks you can give your child as you sense his or her interest growing.
Just being involved is important for children this age. As they grow older, they can learn to take on more difficult tasks like cracking eggs, cutting vegetables, operating appliances, and following a recipe on their own.
Start out with simple recipes so that your child can be encouraged by his or her initial success. Don’t make a huge deal out of spills or imperfections. Complement them on a job well done.
You are your child’s guide and mentor as they learn in the kitchen, but it may surprise you how quickly they will become experts if they enjoy it. Many children soon want to begin experimenting with their own recipes, adding or substituting ingredients and learning which flavors go well together.
With encouragement, patience, and room enough to experiment and make mistakes, children learn to complete a task and enjoy results. They learn when they follow rules and when they break them in a safe environment.
They learn the pride of accomplishment and the joy of giving to others.
Working Up Appetites with Cooking
Recent studies have proven that children who help with cooking eat more vegetables, and more of their dinner. They are generally more ready to try new things if they have helped to prepare the meal.
Children enjoy the chance to learn about the food they consume and to choose how and what they will prepare. They want to savor and appreciate their own accomplishments.
Let your child help you decide on menus and shop for ingredients. Help them to understand the benefits of each food they choose and look for ways to do something new with the food they already profess to dislike. Encourage healthy choices and make it fun.
The variety of healthy choices that we enjoy today is huge. Take advantage of it. Don’t always insist on eating a vegetable they don’t yet like.
Children who are offered a variety of choices will be more apt to make healtier choices.
Opening Conversation on Cooking
Working together in the kitchen is a great way to spend quality time with your child and opens up many opportunities for natural, heart-to-heart conversation. It emphasizes the closeness of family.
It is sometimes easier to broach serious topics when your hands are busy and you are working side by side rather than facing one another.
Lighthearted conversation, laughing and even singing together, tend to flow out of the rhythms of cooking. A relationship built on working and communicating with each other is one that will not be easily shaken when your child or family goes through difficult times or stages.
Building Life-long Skills in the Kitchen
Your children will be able to use the skills they learn in the kitchen with you for the rest of their lives. If you have guided them to try new things and make healthy choices, this will also follow them into adulthood and continue to benefit them.
Getting your children involved in the kitchen will mean more time, more patience, and more clean-up. But, the life lessons and valuable time spent with you will be worth it for them in the long run.
Below is a fun, simple recipe for pancakes, which are a great place to start. It takes only moments to whip these up from start to finish, and while the original recipe is simple and delicious, the possibility for experimentation is almost endless.
Enjoy getting your child involved in making these and play around with the ingredients!
Need a little helping hand?
