Faith and Family
Empowering Children to Cook
The pile of fast food wrappers littered the
kitchen table yet again. While the mother
and father did not like eating out so much
and were concerned with their family’s
overall health, it was difficult to find the
time to cook dinner during the week.
However, they vowed to change things and
become more involved as a family in
preparing meals at home. In order to start,
they decided to begin cooking multiple
meals during the weekend and to enlist their
children in helping out in preparing the
meals.
Learning to cook is a vital skill for
children to learn before they leave home as
adults. Cooking food can appear to children
to be a magical process that is too complex
for them to do. The truth is that even very
young children can learn to cook simple
dishes. That knowledge can build to more
complicated dishes as they get older.
Children who cook growing up are well
prepared to live on their own and to feel
more in control over their diet.
Cooking builds confidence in children’s
skills as they start making their own meals
and cooking for the family. The process of
cooking various dishes increases the odds
that children will eat what they have
prepared. For example, a recipe may require
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the use of quinoa along with other better
known ingredients. A child who prepares the
recipe is more likely to try it and may even
develop a taste for quinoa when he would
not have otherwise.
Cooking can teach children resiliency in
the face of failure. All cooks experience
recipes that do not turn out as expected.
Cakes can fail to rise, meat transforms into
shoe leather, and cookies can burn.
However, each failure is a lesson in what not
to do and what to avoid in the future.
Parents can lessen the sting to children when
a recipe does not turn out well by relating
their own experiences with recipes that went
terribly wrong. This lets children know that
everyone who cooks understands failure and
that it is no reason to stop cooking but to
learn from and move on.
In addition to the practical skills that
children learn in cooking food, there are a
host of other skills that get developed.
Following recipes requires math as children
will need to know dimensions of a pan to
bake, fractions to measure the correct
amount of ingredient needed, and the need
to scale recipes up or down. Cooking also
reinforces the need to follow steps of a
recipe. It only takes a time or two of adding
an ingredient at the wrong point in the
recipe for children to see the disastrous
results.
Beyond the various skills children learn
from cooking is the memories formed while
cooking with loved ones. Parents and
grandparents can pass down family recipes
to children. They can tell the history behind
the special chocolate covered cherry bars
that are always the most popular at family
gatherings. It also gives the intangible
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memories of cooking food together as a
family that will carry with them over the
years.
Cooking is both an essential skill for
children and one that will carry fond
memories into their adulthood. This only
happens if parents or grandparents take the
time to involve children in food preparation.
Take some time during the weekend and
start children on their culinary journey by
learning some basic recipes like baking
cookies or whipping up some pancakes. Bon
appetit!
Dan Florell, Ph.D., is an associate professor at
Eastern Kentucky University and has a private
practice, MindPsi (www.mindpsi.net). Praveena
Salins, M.D., is a pediatrician at Madison
Pediatric Associates (www.madisonpeds.com).
Story by Dan Florell, Ph.D. &
Praveena Salins, M.D./Growing Up
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