Nine Ways to Include Your Child in the Kitchen

When I was a small tot, my mother cleaned out one of the bottom drawers in the kitchen and filled it with kitchen things I was allowed to play with- plastic measuring cups and spoons, a wooden spoon, a few plastic cookie cutters, toddler sized drinking cups, and empty spice bottles. While she worked in the kitchen I was allowed in the kitchen, too, and I emptied and refilled 'my' kitchen drawer over and over as a one year old. I do not remember this, but on her advice, I did the same thing for my children when they were small, and that is what they did.

My mother also emptied an entire lower cabinet and allowed me to climb in and hide in it when I was two or three. Over the years she always included me in the kitchen, gave me things to make, let me help stir, sift (oh, sifting was fun!), and mix along with her. Everything I made she praised lavishly, and by the time I was in junior high school I was cooking one family meal a week- which she would rave over, insisting that I was a much better cook than she was.

I developed my cooking skills to the point that I did some of the baking for guests, and when she had the local political group with which she was active over for a meeting, a girlfriend and I catered it (we were 14). When my foster sister and I both worked in the same tourist trap town, I would pack lunches for us each, adorable lunches with sandwiches cut into shapes, special savory vegetable dips in adorable little miniature jars saved from past Christmas baskets, and vegetables carved into radish roses and crisply thin curls of peeled carrots. I was 17, and it would be several years before I would hear of bento boxes. My mother continued to praise me, both privately and publicly, for my kitchen skills, and when I became a mother, I worked to give my children the same sense of joy and confidence in the kitchen.

I wasn't always successful- I was sometimes impatient, short, snappish, and more focused on the product than the process. Sometimes I took too much for granted and assumed they knew or could figure out things they did not intuitively understand. But there are several things we did (most of them taken from my mother), that I think worked. Here are some of them:

1. Like my mother, don't make the kitchen a hands-off place. Use common sense and lock up the things that need to be locked up- household poisons, knives, breakables, but leave space for the children to explore as well. Give them a cupboard or drawer all their own. Save your empty spice containers to put in the cupboard, add some measuring cups and spoons, a few cookie cutters, a small metal or plastic bowl, a spoon for stirring. Watch thrift shops and yard sales for child-sized safe kitchen utensils to keep in the drawer.

2. Not everything set aside for your child in the kitchen needs to be kitchen related. The first goal is mainly to make the kitchen a comfortable, happy, familiar place. If your child has something productive to do in the kitchen while you are working there, even if it is not directly connected with kitchen work, that will help accomplish your goal. This can be as large as a childsized table and chair in the corner where your little ones can sit and color or work with play-dough while you fix supper, or as small as refrigerator magnets your child can play with at his level on the refrigerator door.
We made our own refrigerator magnets- I used old flannelgraph figures from a Sunday School Class, pictures colored and cut out from coloring books, and printable items from the internet. I lamintated them, and then put magnets on the backs. The magnets were cut up pieces of old magnets distributed by businesses for free. This way we had an large collection of free magnetic toys, and my little ones could sit in the kitchen and play with them, telling and retelling stories while I listened, and conversed with them while cooking nearby.
If you are pinched for space near the fridge, you can also give them a metal cookie sheet to use with their magnets. Magnetic numbers and letters, of course, are also fun when the children are ready to work on number and letter recognition.

3. Whenever I made bread, biscuits, cookies, piecrust, or any other firm dough, I always made a little extra and let the children play with this like play dough, shaping their dough as they liked, and then I would bake it for them and let them eat the finished product.

4. Sometimes when I was mixing things up, I would set out small bowls of ingredients for my very small children to mix as they saw fit (flour, cornmeal, the salt shaker, a jar of parsley). When they were done I had to throw their concoctions out and wipe up the floor (and sometimes them), but they had a glorious time.

5. Sometimes I gave them two bowls, one of dried pasta or raisins, and one empty, and a pair of tongs or a spoon to move things from one bowl to the other, and let them work on this project, which felt satisfyingly like 'kitchen work' while I completed other tasks.

6. Tearing lettuce for a salad is a job even quite small children can do- let them help (teach them the importance of clean hands, first, of course). They can also spread softened butter on toast and sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar for cinnamon toast, help cut biscuits or take them out of a can, help pour ingredients into a bowl, help stir, and put ice cubes in glasses, among other things.

7. I looked in Montessori catalogs for child-sized tools- a cheese slicer, an egg or mushroom slicer, a little broom that really swept, and collected these things so the children could comfortably help me in the kitchen. The can use an egg slicer, which slices a boiled egg into pretty slices, very young with only a little help.

8. I had my children help with the clean-up, too. Because they were helping, I wanted to be sure we used non-toxic cleaners, so I bought a small squirt bottle, labled it just for them, and filled it with plain water when they were small. Later I added a bit of vinegar and some essential oils. They would help spray and then wipe down kitchen cabinets with this. They scrubbed the kitchen sink with baking soda and salt, and even washed plastic bowls and cups in a sink with warm water and a few drops of their own shampoo.

9. We sang together as we worked. Sometimes we made up songs about what we were doing, and sometimes we incorporated old folk songs about work (I've Been Working on the Railroad...). I looked for folk song recordings at the library, and later looked online to add to our repotoire. Many gospel songs make good working music, as well.

Take the time to let the little ones help, or work alongside you. It seems like this takes a lot of time now, and sometimes it does, but this time really pays off in rewarding benefits- not only do you get extra time to influence your children, get to know them better, and spend time with them, they are learning competence and skills. Children really like to know how to do things, and if you let them help joyfully when they are tiny and not really that much help, they are more likely to be willing helpers when they are old enough that their help actually is useful.

I have also found that as they grow, yu can have really deep conversations with your children while working alongside them at every day tasks. Something about working together really seems to bring out thoughtful conversations

Incidentally, I realized when I was all grown up that I really wasn't a better cook than my mother was after all. She had never liked cooking and wanted to encourage me to enjoy it- both so I would not hate it as she had, and also so I would cheerfully take over more of the cooking for her. I'd been had, but I was hooked, and it was too late to stop my love for cooking, baking, and experimenting with new foods, and I wanted to share that with my own children.