Teaching kids about healthy food is a great way to get them into eating sensibly at an early age, but what better way to teach them than to let them help you with the cooking? Cooking with kids is a great bonding experience, and gives them the confidence they need to be able to make their own decisions when it comes to certain meals. It also teaches them about where food comes from, about farming techniques, and about the general ecology. Let’s talk about 9 reasons why you should cook with your kids.
Cooking With Kids is Fun
It really is! After all, if you enjoy cooking, you can pass that enjoyment on to your kids, and they will enjoy it too! You can spend quality time with your children and show them what cooking is all about – especially the safety and creative side of things – while giving them the chance to get their hand in with the preparation.
You Can Be Creative
Cooking is not about following strict rules; take a basic recipe, and a selection of ingredients, and let the kids choose what they want to do with them. It might come out right, it might not, but it doesn’t matter; they have tried, and had fun with you doing it!
Learn About World Cuisine
One of the great things about cooking with the kids is that it teaches them that the world is a bigger place than they may understand. Teach them about Asian cuisine – you might want to cook a curry, a great and healthy dish for kids – and about the various European dishes, as well as much more around the world. What could be better than a geography lesson with a meal at the end? It’s a great way of getting them to understand that there are different cultures out there.
Encourage Healthy Eating
Encouraging your kids to cook is a great way to teach them about healthy eating – and also healthy ways to cook. Healthy food often equates to boring food through the eyes of children, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Teach them not only about healthy meals and ingredients but also about why you use certain appliances. For example, tell them about the advantages of the air fryer over regular frying and why steaming is better than other methods of cooking vegetables and you’ll soon have them yearning for healthy meals every time.
Improves Team Work
Cooking together is a great way of teaching the kids about the importance of teamwork; you can arrange for one to prepare some ingredients, and the others to do so with another ingredient, and so on. It also teaches them that they need to work together sometimes in order to achieve a goal. It’s great when you get your kids working in unison to help create a meal, and gives you a lot of satisfaction too.
Learn how to Prepare
Having to prepare ingredients for cooking means they will learn the importance of preparation so that they can see how important this can be in other areas of life. This is just one reason why cooking is a vital educational tool in the home, and it will give them an advantage in later life when they realize how important preparing for events in life can be.
Learn to Manage Expectations
Experimenting with cooking, and giving the children a chance to have their own input, can teach them that sometimes, not everything goes to plan! That pizza may turn out to be terrible, but in the end, it doesn’t matter because you can always try again. Disappointment will play a big part in their lives in the future, so by giving them a free hand in the kitchen, they can come to understand that if at once you don’t succeed, you can try, try again!
Kitchen Safety
Children need to learn that there are many potential safety issues in life, and the kitchen is a great place to teach them how to be careful and stay safe. Of course, children should always be supervised when cooking, so it gives you a chance to explain why certain areas need to be approached carefully, and what the potential problems may be.
Learn to Cook
This is the obvious one; encouraging children in the kitchen means they will learn to cook at an early age, and this can only be of benefit. Think ahead to when they leave to go to university: your kids will be the ones who can rustle up a great dish for their housemates, and that’s a great thing to be able to do!
Cooking is fun, and is even more so with the kids! Why not check out some recipes now, and get our kids cooking at an early age – you never know how much fun you will have!
Author Bio: Simon Barker is a cooking enthusiast who has seen the benefits of cooking with kids, and who continues to enjoy showing youngsters how much fun it can be to cook. He also owns www.airfryerhub.com where he puts his honest reviews on his favorite air fryers and other cooking utensils.
Leave a Reply