How do you get young children to get more involved in the kitchen, with the goal of hopefully getting them to be better eaters overall? A classic parenting conundrum!
A mom wrote in, asking for advice on how to get her toddler and preschooler to help out in the kitchen. She asked for any recommended “tips, tricks, or recipes.” Writer and mom-of-two Samantha Cooper weighs in with some advice on the topic.
A Mamas Uncut fan asks:
“I want my toddler and preschooler to start helping me in the kitchen. Hoping this will help them become better eaters. Any tips, tricks, or recipes recommend?”
– Mamas Uncut Community Member
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Advice from Samantha Cooper
Having younger children help in the kitchen is something that can be the pride of many parents. Allowing children to help in the kitchen can come with its own set of trials, but many are easy to work around. Teaching proper kitchen hygiene is very important, especially learning that raw meats can make a person quite sick. Teaching handwashing is highly imperative as well. We worked out way into the idea that we don’t mix cooked and uncooked meats and that we keep meats and vegetables separate.
We started very simple and worked our way to having dull kitchen utensils for our children, including a small knife and blunt kitchen shears. This really incorporated the kids even more and we bundled these gifts with their own cutting board as a special gift.
Easy to cook recipes with things as easy as using a cookie cutter on a sandwich to create fun shapes are great starters for getting kids involved in the kitchen. We have learned that our boys eat a lot better when they have helped to prepare the meal and they are also more willing to try new things such as vegetables and a wider variety of meats. From this simple thing we have worked our way up to the kids helping with making salads from things we grow and even started our own little kitchen herb garden to harvest and use the ingredients in our home cooking. These simple steps can make a huge difference in not only the diet choices that a toddler has but leads to a path of a better diet as an older child, teen and even adult.
[Images via Envato Elements.]
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