Cooking With Your Children
Cooking with your children, an often underrated activity holds many benefits. Here are four of those benefits:
- Cooking with your kids is one of the best activities to teach your children practical skills from a young age. Measuring amounts of different ingredients or combining ingredients together are valuable skills that a child cannot learn without cooking. Additionally, measuring ingredients, for example, is an excellent way to begin the process of teaching your child basic math skills like counting and the concept of fractions. Never exposing your child to the cooking process, on the other hand, especially while they are young, will keep them in the dark about how to cook and will make them dependent on you for their most basic need.
- As the New York Times explains, children who participate in the cooking process, are more likely to eat the food. If your kid is a picky eater, or if they generally don’t tend to finish their plates, involving them in the cooking process can be the first step to fixing that issue. By having your child pick which tomato to buy or what veggies they want for dinner, as well as help with the actual cooking process, they will be more inclined to eat and finish what they helped make.
- Studies show that kids who help in the kitchen are more likely to be confident and adopt the mindset of “I can” rather than “I can’t”. For most preschoolers, cooking a dinner for a group of people is an intimidating task, however, when involved in the process, after helping successfully make dinner, kids will feel a sense of accomplishment. For example, if the dinner menu is homemade pizza, seeing all the ingredients laid out on the counter is daunting but after helping make it, the completed pizza becomes a representation of the idea that anything is possible.
- Cooking with your kids is a medium to grow closer. In our busy world of work, school, after school activities and different events, time to truly talk to your child is rare. Cooking together, if made an activity that is done together, can allow for time to talk about your days. Talking about your days as well as any other topics that may come up is bonding time that you may not have time for otherwise
We know your days are busy, we know the time to spend with your child is rare, but cooking is a daily activity that needs to be done anyway, so take the time to cook with your child that will not only be fun also holds many benefits for them.
