Confidence in the Kitchen: Sharing Cooking Experiences with Your Preschool Child

The goal of this blog is to commit to regularly recording my efforts to involve my four-year-old in the kitchen to increase her confidence in cooking and to be a resource for others with similar goals. One of my jobs growing up was to help my mother with dinner.  I learned so much by watching her: basic kitchen skills, how to time things to be ready all at once, and most importantly confidence in the kitchen.  

I made some doozy recipes as a youngster including a pudding from scratch with a ¼ cup of salt in it instead of a ¼ teaspoon (this was during my grandmother’s visit- she tasted it and ran for the garbage can!).  I learned from my mistakes, and I want to pass on the confidence I gained to my four-year-old.As I began thinking about this on a more practical basis, I started searching the internet and library catalog for resources about how to cook with one’s preschooler.  The resources that I found were generalized to kids with the exception of a few articles encouraging cooking with preschoolers to develop their motor skills. 

Further, the recipes seem to be a bunch of cutesy things like open-faced peanut butter sandwiches with raisin eyes and marshmallow smiles.  There is nothing particularly wrong with these approaches, but what I want to do with my little one is to make her comfortable in the kitchen by making actual recipes that the whole family would eat without wincing.  I want to make my life easier by involving her in the kitchen instead of having to find other things for her to do, or exposing her to limitless hours of TV, and give her a confidence to try (and sometimes fail) at new things.  It takes effort on my part to involve her creatively and safely, but I’ve found that she loves her little jobs and enjoys the process.  If there’s nothing in particular that she can do, she’ll pretend with her own bowl and spoon that she’s making her own recipes.  My experience to date has been that I can keep her involved for 15-20 minutes and then she starts to peter out.  I never force her to continue.  I let her take a break and then come back to the kitchen when she’s ready.  She’s only four after all!  I do involve her in the clean-up as that’s an important part of the process even if it’s not the most fun.  Her efforts in this area aren’t always the most complete, but I can finish up the job when needed.  She’s still getting the point that the job must be considered as a whole.