Spending time with your family is a great way to strengthen your bonds and get to know each other even better. A great activity to do as a family is cooking. Whether it’s flipping pancakes or preparing spaghetti bolognaise, cooking can bring people together. When cooking with your kids, it gives them the opportunity to learn, grow, and spend time with you. Here are the great benefits to cooking with your children:
Eating More Healthy Foods
Many parents struggle with getting their kids to eat healthily and get all their nutrients. Cooking meals together can help them not only learn to love cooking healthy foods but eating them as well. By cooking it themselves, they’re more likely to enjoy the healthy food they usually turn their nose up at; like the zucchini that they’ve just grated into their bolognaise. Cooking will also help them develop healthy eating habits for life. By getting in the habit of cooking their own meals, they’ll be less likely to order unhealthy takeout late in life.
Connecting As a Family
It can be difficult to find time as a family. However, cooking gives you time to connect as a family. When you do things together, rather than different things in the same house, it’s amazing what conversations spontaneously come from your children. Making dinner together can help you bond and learn more about each other while making a delicious meal for one another.
Increasing Confidence
Cooking isn’t always an easy task, but the outcome of giving it your best shot is amazing. Even if the meal doesn’t come out exactly like the recipe says or you mess up a little along the way, it can help build confidence once you have successfully cooked a meal. Picture the smiles on your kids’ faces when you eat the first meal they have cooked! Helping your child learn to cook can boost your confidence as a parent as well.
The Feeling of Creating Value
Cooking, especially for children, promotes a feeling of creating value. When they are included in mealtime, they are able to collaborate with you for meal preparation, selecting recipes, helping create the shopping list, and even finding groceries in the store or at the farmers market. By offering them the opportunity to put in their input and critique, they feel as though they are creating value. By letting you kids be “in charge” of details, they feel invested in the value of the meal they’re creating.
Building Responsibility and Life Skills
Teaching your kids to cook builds responsibility and life skills that they can take with them as they grow up––to other peoples’ houses as well as when they move out of home or one day get married. Cooking teaches focus and attention, reading skills, mathematical skills, fine motor skills, and more.