Summer Menu: Teach Your Kids to Cook

Cooking is a lifelong skill!

As a parent, you try your best to plan the summer for your kids: activities with friends, summer camps, family vacation, and spending time with grandparents. You also worry about keeping your children in productive yet fun activities.  One thing you can teach your children this summer is basic cooking skills. Cooking is a life skill that will boost their self-confidence, encourage better health, show them how to save time and money and enhance family relationships. Even though cooking skills is not a priority, it remains constant no matter how quick technology progresses.

As children become more independent, they can prepare simple meals such as scrambled eggs, salads and pasta for themselves. By age 12 or 14, they can even surprise you with dinner when you get home from work or you don’t feel like cooking. When they reach college age, these cooking skills will be extremely useful.  Not only will they be able to save money by cooking their own meals, but they also will avoid the weight gain many students experience from relying on fast foods and highly processed carbohydrates. 

Here are some tips to encourage your child’s enthusiasm for cooking:

1. Learn together the basics of nutrition and label-reading. For younger children, focusing on MyPlate food groups is a great place to start. Older children and teens can learn about individual nutrients on the Nutrition Facts label and how to decipher food label claims. Visit this FDA web page for support https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-facts-label/read-label-youth-outreach-materials

2. Plan with your children summer meals according to your calorie allowance visiting https://www.myplate.gov/myplate-plan. This MyPlate Plan calculator uses different formulas based on the user's age, and additional adjustment factors may be applied based on other user-entered information.

3. Find together easy, quick and healthy recipes as well as outdoor and indoor activities visiting Summer FOOD Summer MOVES website https://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/summer-food-summer-moves. The booklet and additional handouts focus on using music, games, art, and movement to motivate kids and families to choose more fruits and vegetables, choose water instead of sugary drinks, get enough physical activity every day, and to limit screen time.

4. Make together a list of ingredients for the recipes and visit the grocery store or farmers’ market and let your children select fruits and vegetables that are familiar and unfamiliar. 

5. Once in the kitchen, use children as your sous chef. As they start to become comfortable in the kitchen, assign them smaller tasks such as washing vegetables, cutting softer foods like mushrooms and zucchini, grating cheese, zesting a lemon or boiling pasta. You can also start by letting them cook foods they like. 

6. Help children complete tasks, and encourage them to practice new skills on their own.

7. Teach hygiene by going into detail about cleaning cutting boards and areas used for preparing different foods.

8. Teach temperature and time. Cooking and baking can help children understand the importance of timing and temperature.

9. Teach following directions. Learning to navigate the kitchen can build confidence and help children become masters of the kitchen.

   
   
   
   

   Ines Beltran

   Family & Consumer Sciences Agent UGA Gwinnett Extension Office