You might not know it, but your best kitchen assistants are not the Thermomix or the airfryer, but the little hands in the next room tapping away on Minecraft or twiddling their thumbs on TikTok.
Not only is cajoling kids into the kitchen an effective way to get them off devices, it can speed up your dinnertime hustle with an efficient brigade of sous chefs and apprentices. Over time, food will land on the table sooner – and more of it will be eaten.
If parenthood is planned obsolescence, then setting your children up with the skills and confidence to cook is not just a “nice-to-have” but a need. Getting kids into the kitchen is really all about flying hours, and the sooner you get them into the cockpit, the better.
Keep them safe, but also engaged
As caregivers, our role in the kitchen is to be their “grown-up eyeballs”, until their own brains develop enough to sense danger, calculate risk, and carry themselves with confidence. The sooner you get them in the kitchen, the faster this happens. Hot and sharp are the two dangers you want them to be cognisant of – at first explicitly “HOT!” when they see a flame or you’re carrying an oven tray, “SHARP!” where knives and scissors are involved.
This doesn’t mean that they should be kept away from said sharp things, mind you. The sooner they start chopping at things, the sooner their skills sharpen. I’ll never forget the primary-school aged kids I encountered in Tilba Tilba, on the south coast of NSW, while helping my friend Paul West, host of River Cottage Australia, on his first community salami-making day. These kids were wielding chef’s knives like pros. I asked their father, the local postie, how he’d done it and he said: “patience”. And that’s it. If you can afford the time and supervision early, on the other end, you’ll be able outsource kitchen tasks to your eager apprentices.
Babies, toddlers and preschoolers (0-4 years old)
A baby strapped to your personage, or bobbing about in a bouncer or highchair with line-of-sight while you prep, is a good place to start. Give them a soft ingredient, like a blanched broccoli floret, for their pudgy fingers to squash. It exposes them to the green stuff for tonight’s dinner while also building fine-motor skills.
With their growing sense of independence, toddlers love feeling like mini sous-chefs (“I do it, I do it!”). Depending on their dexterity, let them drain and stir ingredients, pod beans, or use safety scissors to chop soft herbs. Hand them a butter knife and something easy to cut, with a flat surface – like a wedge of avocado or a lengthwise-halved cucumber – and watch their knife-skills grow. At this stage, giving toddlers a sense of responsibility in the kitchen is a great way to keep them busy, while exposing them to the stuff they’ll touch, and are therefore more likely to eat.
You might be wondering if it’s worth getting one of those learning towers (a riser with guard rails) at this age, to which I would say yes and no. Yes, if you have multiple smaller tackers about, and having one of them “penned in” at the kitchen bench will give you peace of mind. But if you think you’ll be able to supervise more carefully, just use a foldaway step. More confident four- or five-year-olds can sit on the kitchen bench for a better view.
For adults, the key is to practise non-attachment to the outcome. Everything might end up a little more hodge-podge than if you’d done it yourself. But it got done, and building kitchen confidence in your little ones is far more important than whether the carrots are perfect batons.
Primary school age (5-11 years old)
As children grow to school-age, the ideal kitchen becomes a place of trial, error and experimentation without fear of assessment. Continue to give them tasks in the kitchen: they could be rasping ingredients on the box grater, helping to fold dumplings, , peeling veg for salads, soups and stews, or flipping pancakes and fritters.
By eight to 10 years old, your kids could be on dinner duty once a week, planning the ingredients they need, helping prep, and – if they’re confident and enthusiastic enough – following through with cooking and serving. Thanks to competitive cooking shows, this generation is far more au fait with “plating up” and “hero ingredients” than ever before. As adults, we can fill in the gaps like identifying what ingredients are in season, using up every skerrick of the vegetable crisper, and repurposing leftovers.
Teenagers (12-17 years old)
Although they might want to be treated as an adult, a teen is like an artichoke – underneath all those complex layers is a tender heart. The kitchen can become a place for non-confrontational conversation and communication, side-by-side at the bench.
Research has shown there are many benefits to sitting down to a dinner together as a family – and the meal does not need to be elaborate. Choosing one meal in the week for your teen to cook and prepare is a sure-fire way of conveying how you value them as an individual, but subtle enough not to elicit the usual groans and eye-rolls.
In the end, it’s not a matter of “getting” kids into the kitchen as much as it is in “letting” them be there. Your kids want to be where you are; they want to feel as if they’re being entrusted with tasks because you believe they’re capable, and their contribution is valued.
The recipes you share will stay with them for life; your chicken cacciatore or your dad’s masala dal will become grandma’s and great-grandpa’s. The flavours, sights and smells from the communal kitchen will be the threads binding the family together, leaving indelible links in oil-spattered pages, and recipe steps committed to memory – along with the moments of connection that will be remembered long after the final spoon has been washed (incidentally, also an ideal job to entrust them with).