Five Ways To Get Kids Cooking In The Kitchen

 
  

This post is brought to you by Healthy Active Kids

If you’ve got primary school aged children who DON’T help much with the cooking, you are not alone.

A recent survey by Healthy Active Kids – a joint project of Nestlé and the Australian Institute of Sport – has found that 27% of children NEVER help with cooking whilst only 32% of kids help just once a week.

And the major reason is that parents feel they’re too busy to get the kids involved.

Yikes! That’s not good, is it?

You can find more about the study on the infographic.

The Number One Reason To Get Kids Cooking?

Once you’ve got them trained up, making family meals is a lot less work for you.

Yes, put in some effort early and you can sit back with a nice glass of wine whilst the offspring knock up a spaghetti carbonara, Thai beef salad or perhaps pie, beans and chips.

Five Ways To Get Kids Cooking

Start young

Get that baby’s highchair into the kitchen and give it a wooden spoon and a pan to thump.  My kids started off helping me bake cakes. This created a terrible mess, but the bonus is that they learn to tidy up too.

Starting young also means watching TV cooking shows together.

Make it fun

Creating some space in family life to spend time in the kitchen means everyone is less stressed.

Perhaps this would only wok at the weekends in your family – that’s often the case in mine.

If family life is mad in term times (is that really the life you want) then take time to cook during holidays.

Be consistent

As usual, consistency is the key to making permanent changes and improvements in family life.

It’s a drag, isn’t it? But 100% true.

Keep at it with the safe chopping knives, the fresh fruit and veggies, the simple instructions. Keep at it with gradually increasing your kids’ competency and with giving them more responsibility.

Mothering, I have found, is a marathon never a sprint.

Choose easy recipes

Check out my recipes section for family-friendly food. My teenager still loves making American Sloppy Joes as taught to us by our American au pair long ago.

The twins are  a dab hand with the Healthy Wholemeal Pancakes. 

Even very young children can help make a kid-friendly smoothie – voila, breakfast!

You can find some simple ones over on the Healthy Active Kids website here.

This breakfast bircher muesli looks great.

So do these apricot and oat muffins.

Praise, praise, praise

Praise them for their skill, praise them for being so grown up and helpful, praise them for doing the washing up most of all.

And I don’t mean in a false way, I mean in a fun way. Lie on the ground and wave your legs in the air with joy.

All kids love to connect with us and to share funny moments. Make your praise fun to!

Healthy Active Kids Website

There’s lots of interesting stuff to read and some fun activities too. Check out the games page. My kids enjoyed the true or false games on the Families section. 

Do your kids cook??

What’s their signature dish? 

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