5 Easy Things to Teach your Child About Cooking
Cooking with your child can be a wonderful opportunity for so many things: bonding between parent and child, experiencing nutrition and nourishment, building motor skills, and practicing measurements and math, to name a few. But the lessons that hold true to cooking often parallel the important lessons of life and growing up, and learning them through cooking provides the tangible experience and safe learning space to really help these lessons stick for a child of any age.
As a professional chef and a father of two, I thought I’d offer five lessons for kids in the kitchen that remain helpful outside of it as well.
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The only way to know how your food is progressing as you cook it is to taste often. If you wait until the end of the dish to taste, by that point there’s usually not much you can do to fix it if something went wrong. Tasting often encourages kids to be present and mindful about what they’re doing, to take the time to read their senses and then think critically about what to do next.
Does the soup need more salt? Would it benefit from a twist of lemon juice? Are the noodles cooked all the way through or do they need to boil a little longer?
This can also be a handy reference point, outside of the kitchen, to help kids be mindful about other tasks in life, and to regularly “check in” with themselves about what they’re working on or doing. Even adults can use reminders to be more present and mindful from time to time, and remembering to pause, taste, and think is a great opportunity to do so.
2. Work with care first and speed second.
When it comes to cooking, there are plenty of ways one can arrive at injury if proper care and caution are not taken. Learning how to properly respect and work with fire and sharp edges can teach safety to younger kids, and later, responsibility to older ones. But even beyond the more dangerous tools in the kitchen, there is room to teach care and respect about how we treat the food we eat.
Peeling and cutting carefully keep our hands safe and our food looking better, and sometimes those processes might be slow for a a child’s patience. With time, however, a child will have the satisfaction of seeing their skill level and speed improve, and that, too, can be a transferable lesson about patience.
3. Become comfortable with failure.
There’s no way to get good at cooking without being bad at it first. Even good instincts in the kitchen or a strong palate will only take you so far, and like most skills, pushing out of one’s comfort zone is the key to growing. That means mistakes. Fortunately, as most of us have come to learn, mistakes are often the best way to learn a difficult lesson; and as long as your child is okay with arriving at a different outcome than intended, there’s lots gain from messing up in the kitchen. Use those ‘failures’ as the teaching opportunities they are: “Now we know to add salt just a little bit at a time. We can always add more later, but we can’t take it away once it’s in the soup.”
4. Always strive for balance.
This applies to so many different aspects of food and cooking: from nutrition, to presentation, to flavor, striving for balance is always the goal. The literal lessons of balanced nutrition are ones that we, as parents, know are part of our job; but as we have all experienced, they can be the hardest to get to stick with kids. Getting hands-on experience with food can often spark new passions and interests in kids, and suddenly food can be exciting when perhaps it wasn’t before. It’s also a great way to introduce kids to new foods, and can help demystify for those pickier eaters.
The quest for balance in flavor also teaches about cause and effect, and involves kids in the process of finding that balance by adding flavors and thinking critically about their effects on the dish. Even balance in presentation on a plate offers opportunities to learn for a variety of ages: color, composition, and spatial relationships are all teachable on a well-constructed plate of food.
5. Cook for others, not yourself
What might be the hardest lesson of all when to comes to cooking is that it’s really not about what you like; it’s about the likes and dislikes of whoever you’re feeding. You may love things spicy… but if you’re serving grandma and grandpa, maybe tone things down for them a bit.
Perhaps you are of the popular belief that there’s no such thing as too much butter and bacon… but if your guests are into eating healthy, it might not be the best night for that fried chicken BLT.
Thinking about others is always a helpful reminder when to comes to raising kids, and the kitchen is a great arena to keep that in mind. Then, when dinner is served, and they can see the direct results of their unselfish choices in preparing for others, the genuine satisfaction and pleasure that come along with that are tremendous reinforcement to remember it for the future.
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