Why Kids Should Learn to Cook

As more and more emphasis is placed on eating whole foods and having meals at home, some people may be eager to embrace this home-cooking lifestyle, but aren’t sure where to begin. After decades of eating gourmet food at restaurants and heating up frozen dinners at home, many families just don’t know how to cook. Or their knowledge of cooking may be flawed – perhaps they think that cooking means hours of elaborate preparation and expensive grocery shopping trips. Before you can teach your child to cook, you have to teach them where their food comes from in the first place. That means helping them to raise pets and animals at home, buying a large chicken feeder so that they can raise the chickens and hens before they are cooked at home. You can also get smaller animals for them to take care of and learn where their meat comes from. Teaching your kids about the different plants and starting growing veggies and fruit in the garden can also be a huge stepping stone to why they should learn to cook. All of this is about sending your children into the world with the knowledge they need!

So teaching our children to cook helps prepare them for the future. Giving them these skills may help prevent them from getting stuck when necessity or principles call them to cook their own food.

Here are some other reasons why it’s a good idea to teach your children to cook.

Do the Math

It’s nearly impossible to cook without doing some math. Whether you’re cutting a whole recipe in half or just measuring out cups of flour, it’s a great way to give your kids a jump-start on math skills. Cooking may help children see that math has a practical application in the real world – perhaps they’ll see that it’s not as abstract as they think!

An Anti-Obesity Weapon

In the US and Europe, obesity among children has become problematic, even being called an obesity epidemic by some. Teaching children to cook encompasses such vital information as nutritional content, food preparation, and calorie information.

Many children (and many adults, too!) simply don’t know how to prepare healthy food, or prepare foods in healthy ways. For instance, if they are not taught proper cooking skills, kids may think that the only way to prepare potatoes is in the form of greasy fries. Learning to cook, they can pick up important information and skills, such as how to make oven fries, and/or how to incorporate sweet potatoes in various dishes as well as white potatoes.

Appreciation

Teaching children to cook is a powerful learning experience, yet children do not necessarily feel like they’re learning anything major. After all, learning to cook can be a lot of fun. The lessons are big, though – children who know how to cook understand what goes into food preparation. They may have a better idea of the fact that food doesn’t just happen.

Nutritional Control

As your children learn to cook, they are learning a powerful tool to take control of their own health. It’s been said that your food can be your medicine, and if your children learn how to prepare foods, they can give their body just what it needs nutritionally, both now and in the future.

Willow Stevens

Willow is a mother of six who begins to feel the empty nest, with faer oldest child living with his long-time girlfriend in another state, and the next three begin their talks about jobs and the excitement of college and living alone. Willow started couponing in 2007 to save their family some money on the grocery budget. That's how Freetail Therapy was born, so that fae could share their knowledge of saving money with others. Though the site has become so much more since then, and now includes homeschooling and homesteading info, Willow still does it all on a budget and shares how. Willow enjoys snagging freebies, snuggling with their dog, Xander, drinking decaf coffee, gardening, cannabis and of course, their large frugal family.

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