How To Make Cooking With Your Toddler Fun

• As I work outside the home, my time in the evenings with Clara is limited. Having her help me make dinner means we get more quality time together
• Learning about the food we eat and where it comes from means learning about different nutrients, growing seasons, types of foods, the cultures they come from, how food gets from the ground to our plates and so much more
• We learn measuring, portion sizes, ratios, about different food textures and tastes – how things react when you mix them and more. Cooking is real life science!
• Clara develops the ability to use so many different tools (measuring cups, pouring, stirring, knife skills, putting veggies on kebabs, etc) which develops fine motor skills and dexterity
• It’s a life skill! We all need to eat to survive and giving her the tools to feed herself now and in the future will pay dividends as she grows
• Promotes healthy eating – I often find her ‘sneaking’ foods when we are cooking dinner together that I can NEVER get her to eat at the table. Anytime I can sneak extra veggies into my daughter without a fight I will take it!

How to make cooking with your toddler fun

Be prepared for messes – and be realistic about results

Matching mama and daughter aprons help keep the mess off our clothes! There are tons of cute aprons out there (Like this one) or you can even make your own. Also remember, this will not go as smoothly as it would if you were cooking on your own. Flour will get everywhere, veggies will go flying, you may find half eaten carrot sticks in your stir-fry and it will take WAY longer to make your recipe than normal. It’s all part of the learning process – embrace the chaos!

Pick age appropriate recipes and activities

Clara loves to help me bake, but I’ve learned (the hard way) that she will always want to ‘taste test’ the batter of whatever it is I’m making. I’m now careful to only have her help me bake recipes that would be safe to eat raw, so no muffin batters for us anymore. We love to make bread in our bread machine and recipes like these biscuits are great!

Also remember, that a 1.5-year-old and a 4-year-old can probably do very different activities. A smaller child might be best at mixing or ‘counting cups’ of recipe ingredients. A 4-year-old might be able to crack eggs, use veggie peelers, or even chop ingredients.

Prep your recipes if needed

For the biscuit recipe above I pre-grate the cheese before I get Clara’s help so she isn’t catching her fingers on the box grater. Sometimes I’ll even pre-measure the liquids so its super easy for her to pour into the batter.

Use kid friendly tools

This one has helped us a lot! I now often look for recipes with ingredients measured in weights – particularly for baking where ingredient amounts need to be so precise. I have an inexpensive kitchen scale (Like this one) and that way when measuring out ingredients for baking, Clara can just keep adding ‘scoops’ of flour or sugar until the correct amount has been added. No more having to carefully scoop and level off ingredients before giving it to Clara to dump into the bowl (and having her dump half all over the counter in the process and then having to start all over!).

Get kids up to counter height

For a long time, I just sat Clara on the counter so she could see and help out with what I was doing, but she has gotten way to active and mobile for me to be able to keep an eye on her AND cook at the same time! There are a bunch of different options out there to help get kids up to counter height safely – here are a few!

A pricey option is to invest in a learning tower.

There are some other brands out there, and depending on where you live, you might be able to find something more reasonably priced.

You can also hack your own learning tower! Here is a great tutorial, using an Ikea step stool as the base. This is a cheap and easy way to build your own learning tower.

We actually decided to just use an un-modified Ikea step stool. We had purchased it with the intent of building it into our own learning tower, but decided to give it a try without adding on the railing, knowing we could always add the railing later if we determined we needed it. Dashing Dad has mentioned before that we like to let kids take some risks – with appropriate supervision and control measures in place – it helps them learn. It likely depends on your kid whether this is a good option for you, but its been working out well for us. Clara is very careful on the stool and we only allow her to use it with our direct supervision. When we aren’t actively playing at the counter, we put the stool away.

Don’t force it

When I’m in the kitchen, I don’t force Clara to help me – even if the cooking I’m doing was planned specifically with her in mind. If Clara wants to help that’s great! And if she gets bored halfway through and wants to go play with her other toys, that’s ok too. And if she isn’t interested in helping that day, also ok! I’ll probably get everything done faster and with less mess, so its a win for me too. I want to foster a love of the kitchen, so I’m happy to let her learn and be interested at her own pace.

I also give Clara the opportunity to ‘cook’ when its not safe for her to actually help me. Clara has a play kitchen and play food that are in the kitchen nearby where I cook. We use to keep her play kitchen downstairs in her playroom and she barely ever used it. Now that it’s in the same area I cook in, she often plays cooking while I’m at the stove!

Cooking with toddlers can be fun

My biggest tip is to MAKE IT FUN! I personally LOVE cooking and baking and LOVE being in the kitchen, so bringing Clara into the kitchen with me makes a lot of sense.

I’ll list some of the tools and utensils Clara loves using in the kitchen below – most of these you probably already have in your own house, but hopefully it will help you get some ideas of age appropriate activities. Now get out there and have fun in the kitchen!

• Plastic Mixing Bowls Won’t break and the handles make it easy for your little one to hold onto the bowl – fun colors are a bonus!
• Whisks Are great for mixing!
• Cookie cutters Are good for taking the crusts off of sandwiches, baking, etc.

Share your great kid friendly recipes in the comments!