Do you cook with you kids? From scratch? As parents, most of us appreciate the benefits of cooking with our kids and passing on our culinary skills to them at a young age. In fact, 94% of parents believe cooking is a vital life skill, with 95% believing home cooking is the healthier option. Knowing these stats, it is surprising that 6/10 parents never cook with their kids from scratch. Leading to 45% of 16 year old never having cooked a family meal. Quite surprising really.
This research, which was commissioned by Hubbub and Unilever, found that the reason parents give for not sharing their cooking expertise is lack of time (59%). 83% wish they had more time and 68% wished that the children’s grandparents would do more cooking with them.
So why not challenge the grandparents to #CookSomethingGrand with the kids?
Here are some tips from Kids Kitchen on how to make cooking with kids a breeze.
- Theme the cooking session: theming foods or mealtimes on colours, shapes, favourite book or TV characters.
- Make the cooking experience fun: don’t focus on the mess and try to be relaxed. To make things easier, pre-weigh ingredients for younger kids and make sure everything is to hand.
- Be creative: even outside the kitchen you can make cooking fun by playing food-related games and by using food playsets, apps, or TV programmes to arouse their interest in food.
- Put them in charge: give kids responsibility in the kitchen when you cook. Even from a young age, kids can help mix ingredients, grate cheese, crack eggs, roll pastry, and much more. Getting the kids involved means that they are more likely to try the finished product.
- Encourage them with lots of praise: children enjoy showing people what they’ve made, especially when it’s enthusiastically eaten. If you can’t share their dish at family mealtimes, why not create a special scrap-cookbook with pictures of their efforts alongside the recipe? Give your kids their own kit (apron, spoon, knife, chef hat, etc.) to inspire their enthusiasm.
- Stimulate their creativity: let them create art from food. Try giving the kids vegetables and fruit to create their own edible pictures or use fruit and vegetables as an art activity in itself, eg potato printing, using beetroot “dye”, making pasta necklaces etc.
- Sense of control: Letting children choose their own recipe book or looking at yours and choosing a recipe to make together is a great way of encouraging kids to experiment with food and cooking.
Are you going to get the grandparents cooking with your kids?
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.