I recently shared a post about ways to market real food to kids and one of the ways was to get in the kitchen and cook with kids. So, I thought I’d expand on that post with 10 Benefits Of Cooking With Kids to help build their foundation of a lifetime love of cooking.
Of course it goes without saying that all kitchen experiences with young children should be completely supervised for safety assurance.
1. Learn where their food comes from
Rather than finding their food magically appearing on their plate, cooking the meal themselves will give them an appreciation for exactly how that meal came together.
Everything from sourcing the ingredients themselves and the work that goes into preparing the dish will teach them an important lesson in the work needed for their meals to be made.
2. Develop Cooking Skills
Starting with simple skills such as whisking and measuring kids can slowly do more and more in the kitchen. This helps improves their confidence in the short term and build a sense of comfort in the kitchen in the long term. My kids a real sense of accomplishment when they eat a meal that they helped make, it’s a real self confidence boost!
3. Develop Reading Skills
When I cook a recipe together with my kids, we always start by reading through the recipe together. It may even be a recipe I am working on for the blog, so they get to see first hand me scribbling down the ingredients I want to include in the recipe and calculating the quantity.
Following a recipe, or even making one ourselves, teaches the kids about clearly following instructions and the importance of learning to read!
4. Develop Maths Skills
Depending on the age of the child the maths skills can be as simple as counting the quantity of eggs needed in a recipe to the more advanced measuring and calculating the ingredients needed if you are doubling or halving the recipe you’ll be following.
5. Learn Cause and Effect
Every cooking experience can easily be turned into a science experiment too…
Discovering what happens to the versatile egg when it’s whisked, scrambled, cooked, baked into a sweet treat and more offers endless opportunities for learning experiences.
6. Learn patience
This applies to both adults and kids!
Learning a new task takes practice and patience for the kids and for us adults who are well aware that we would “just do it quicker ourselves”!
Waiting for a dish to cook teaches all of us a lesson in patience too.
7. Learn task completion
If they want to enjoy the fruits of their cooking then they have to work on a recipe from beginning to end to be able to enjoy the finished product.
8. Experimenting with ingredients
From trying different flavor combinations together to discover how they taste to getting creative with different recipes, experimenting with ingredients can be a fun way to let their creative juices flow.
You could even use your collective imagination to conjure up exciting names for the dishes you create.
9. Learning about their senses
Picking a favorite food of theirs to explore further will teach them about how each of their senses work.
For example you could take a banana and ask them to use their senses to explore the banana peeled and unpeeled and observe the difference textures and smells. You could take it a step further and compare the taste and texture of an unripe and an overly ripe banana.
10. An increased likelihood of trying new foods
This is a biggie – I’ve found first hand that my kids are WAY more likely to try a food once they have handled it, smelt it and prepared it – it’s a natural curiosity.
I try not to manipulate their cooking experiences TOO much, I prefer to involve them with activities and ingredients that they love, to encourage their love of cooking rather than force them to repeatedly handle ingredients that they intensely dislike.
Over to you – please share the benefits you feel your kids have experienced as a result of spending quality time in the kitchen with you.
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