How Can You Involve Your Children in the Kitchen at Home?

Cooking is a wonderful activity to share with your children and can be a brilliant learning experience for them at the same time. Cooking with your children can build their knowledge and understanding and set them up well for a future living independently.

But getting your kids into the kitchen to begin with can seem like a massive undertaking, especially if they’ve never seen a potato peeler before. With this in mind, the following steps can get your children safely into the kitchen and learn with you.

Build Their Knowledge First

While your children’s enthusiasm may be admirable, without a little foreknowledge of what cooking is and how it works, your time in the kitchen with them will be little more than an exercise in frustration. For especially young children, start by introducing them to the concept with a read-through of a basic recipe. Older children could be involved by looking at cookbooks and choosing recipes with you. This is also a great way to begin instilling lessons regarding safety in the kitchen. There are lots of dangerous implements and appliances, with a number of potential ways to get injured – whether cuts, burns or slips and trips. Taking time ahead of getting stuck in to make them aware of these dangers, and institute some ground rules for behaviour while cooking, can make your life a lot easier when you all get to cooking.

Help with Food Prep

Easing your children into the kitchen is key – and a fantastic place to start is in having them help you prep for cooking. Many food prep tasks are incredibly easy to carry out and afford the opportunity to talk your kids through the cooking process, or even introduce them to new ingredients and preparation methods. Start them out with washing vegetables and salad leaves; not much can go wrong with running water and a colander!

When your kids feel a bit more confident in helping you out, you can move them on to slightly more difficult or involved tasks – such as peeling root vegetables. There’s an element of play to peeling, and the results are easy to see afterwards. Once they’ve mastered the art of peeling, you may be able to trust them – under supervision – with chopping veg using a small paring knife.

Assistance in Cooking

When they seem confident and comfortable in the kitchen, you can graduate them to the actual ‘cooking’ part! Giving them dominion over your saucepans while you’re making a dish will give them a sense of purpose in involvement, and give you a chance to introduce them to the hob and oven proper. When they’ve got the hang of safely stirring, seasoning, and moving hot cookware around, you can involve them from step one with a simple dish like a pasta sauce. Voila; your children are cooking!

*This is a collaborative post