You may be asking yourself, “Why should I cook with my toddler? Is it really worth it?”
While cooking with your toddler isn’t a requirement and your child is not going to suffer if you don’t, there are also many benefits of cooking with your toddler:
Helps foster a healthy relationship with food: Being involved with cooking early on provides additional opportunities for kids to learn about the different foods they eat and what goes into cooking their food. This can help build the foundation for a healthy relationship with food.
Increases food exposure, interest, and acceptance: Your toddler cooking with you increases their exposure to different types of foods, which in turn will help to increase their interest in and acceptance of the food, Having my kids help with cooking has also led to an increase in the types of and amount of vegetables they eat as “stolen” raw veggies from the cutting board seem to taste better.
Builds self-confidence: Successfully cooking or baking (even if they only helped a little) can help build a positive self-esteem. After some initial prompting, my older toddler now proudly announces to my husband whenever he helped cooked and which parts he helped with.
Increased family bonding: Food is an important part of our daily lives and cooking with our toddlers create an opportunity for fun family bonding.
Promotes fine motor skills development and refinement: Each cooking skill requires some level of fine motor skills. Each time your toddler completes these skills, either through cooking or completing fine motor activities, they are practicing the skills. This practice helps to further develop and refine their fine motor skills.
Teaches math and science skills: Cooking and baking teaches math skills through numbers and fractions with the different measurements, and teaches science skills such as learning about how the properties of the food changes with the addition of other ingredients and temperature (hot vs cold).
Fosters language skills and early literacy development: Talking with your toddler while cooking and about the dish you are making, helps to develop their language skills. Additionally, having them look at the recipe with you can help with their early literacy or reading development.
Provides sensory based learning and development: Feeling and exploring the different foods with their hands creates sensory rich experiences for them.
Teaches important life skills early on: Cooking is an important life skill that unfortunately not everyone learns. Learning to cook early on can help create a positive relationship with cooking and set your toddler up for success when they become an adult (crazy to imagine, right?!)
Provides screen free fun!
So, why not give it a try?