Teach Your Kid to Cook
Here’s how to introduce them to the kitchen at every age
Jill Santopietro is a chef and the founder of the Children’s Food Lab, where she teaches cooking to kids ages 4 to 14. Given her profession, she was used to making meals — lots of them — with kids. But then the pandemic hit. She, her two young children, and husband began quarantining. She was working full-time, schooling, and making (and cleaning up after) every meal, every day. She began to feel she might lose it.
“I became a short-order cook,” she said. “One kid wanted a grilled cheese, and the other wanted a sandwich. It was a lot, even for me. It interrupted my day, and by the time I cleaned up, it was an hour lost. And then it started again with snacks and dinner. It was never-ending.”
Even for the most seasoned chef, the stress of attempting to support children in remote learning while balancing the demands of full-time work and maintaining the household — cleaning, laundry, shopping, and making three meals a day for several different appetites and tastes—has become unsustainable. And while all parents are under stress, studies have shown that it’s especially moms who are doing the 24/7 child care while trying to hold down a job. It’s not surprising that “mom rage” is on the rise.
What if there were a way to relieve at least some of the cooking and cleaning stress? And what if you could engage your kids and build self-esteem, literacy, and math skills at the same time? Stop dreaming: It’s called cooking. And more kids need to start doing it, not only to help support their hard-working parents but because they will also gain crucial life skills. (And they might just enjoy it, too.)
“It used to be normal that kids were helping with cooking and cleanup,” said Sara Kate Gillingham, who founded The Dynamite Shop, a cooking school for tweens and teens, back in 2018 with her friend and fellow food writer Dana Bowen. “Perhaps in some households, this is still the case. Perhaps it’s because we have moved away from multigenerational living, but something has happened where children are not asked to participate in the cooking process, and we wanted to change that.”
‘Perhaps it’s because we have moved away from multi-generational…
