Though it can be tempting to ask the kids to play in the living room whilst you’re preparing dinner, getting them involved with the cooking is a good idea.
Below, we’ve put together some of the reasons why - and share with you some of our favourite free recipes for kids.
Teaches important safety lessons
Perhaps one of the most important reasons for teaching your children to cook from a young age is that it can teach them valuable safety lessons.
By showing them how to hold kitchen tools, wear oven mitts, and turn on and off appliances, you can have peace of mind that your kids aren’t going to cause havoc in the kitchen when you’re not around.
We recommend that you supervise them whenever you’re cooking together, and slowly build up their tasks and responsibility level. For example, a four-year-old is obviously not going to be able to cut vegetables or boil an egg, but they could wash fruit and put chopped vegetables into bowls.
Exposes them to new foods
For many children, trying new foods can be overwhelming and intimidating - as such, many parents find it difficult to get their children to eat fruits and vegetables. By cooking with your little ones, you can expose them to new foods, colours, shapes, textures, and tastes - and though they might not like everything, they might also pick up a new favourite item of food or two.
Getting your kids to explore food with their different senses can also be useful - for example, rinsing vegetables, kneading dough, and tearing up lettuce leaves all encourage your kids to touch and interact with new foods. In time, they’ll want to give them a taste too!
Gets them involved in mealtimes
If you’ve got fussy eaters, cooking with your children allows them to get involved in mealtimes and select recipes, dishes, and sides that they’re going to enjoy. You can make cooking together even more enjoyable and fun by asking them to choose recipes in advance and prepare lists of ingredients that you can buy together in the supermarket. And when you’re cooking, you can tweak recipes and dishes to suit their needs.
For example, you might add sweetcorn or peppers to a pasta dish to give it some colour, texture, and flavour. Making your kids feel like they have some involvement in the family dinner can give them both confidence and autonomy - and in years to come, they might even start cooking for you.
Learn new skills
It’s not just stirring, chopping, and mixing skills that your children will learn when they cook with you - they’ll also improve their maths skills when working out how many cupcake cases they’ll need, and they’ll develop their measuring and fraction skills, too. Cooking can also give your children an introduction to science - explaining how temperature affects food and when certain foods need to be cooked or washed before they can be eaten. Cooking can help you broaden your child’s vocabulary and explain the origins of dishes or ingredients.
It’s good fun
Finally, cooking with your children can be good fun. Sure, it might take a little bit longer than it would to prepare something on your own, and you might need to clean up after them, but it allows you to spend some quality time together, chat about your day, and make memories. If you don’t think they’re quite ready to help out with spaghetti and meatballs or steak and chips, you could set aside some time to make some fun recipes like chocolate cornflake cakes, ice cream sandwiches, or biscuit and yoghurt parfait.
We’ve got lots of fun recipes on our website for your little ones to try - let us know if you end up making any of them!