Cooking with children

The benefits of cooking with children

Cooking with your child from a young age can offer a wide range of valuable learning opportunities. Giving children the chance to explore food in a safe and fun way outside of meal times may help reduce anxiety around food. Children are much more likely to try new foods if they have seen where it comes from and helped with the preparation. Having repeated positive experiences during food activities can increase a child’s confidence around food, and help to ensure healthy eating habits in later life.

Cooking can help to develop many skills

• Coordination – chopping stirring, squeezing, mashing, mixing, tearing
• Fine motor skills – sprinkling, spooning, spreading, cutting, kneading
• Independence – carrying out tasks on their own, weighing out and washing fruit and vegetables
• Cognitive development – thinking, problem-solving, and creativity
• Cause and effect
• Language and Numeracy

Remember cooking together with your little one can also be a lot of fun!

Top Tips!

• Before children start cooking, prepare fruit and vegetables so they are easier to handle. Cutting food to create a flat base makes it more stable and safer for children to continue preparing.
• Soft or tinned fruit/veg can be useful to begin with when using knives for the first time.
• Pre-wash fruit/veg, even if children will have a go at this themselves.
• Young children have short attention spans, they may like to wander away to do something else then return – just make sure they wash their hands!
• Try providing 1 ingredient at a time and role model what you expect the child to do.
• Try using action words when carrying out tasks to support their language development.