How To Teach Toddler Safe Knife Skills

Aug 30, 2018

3 min read

I’m lucky to be married to a woman that thoroughly enjoys cooking, and loves getting our daughter involved. In this post Dashing Mom will show you How To Teach Toddler Safe Knife Skills, enjoy!

–Dashing Dad

I’ve mentioned before that I love to get Clara to help me in the kitchen! One of the things we get Clara to help with is prepping veggies. It didn’t happen over night, but Clara can now help chop some of the fruits and veggies we use on a daily basis using age appropriate knives.

I’d like to start out this post by saying that I’m just outlining our personal experiences and plans for cooking with Clara in the kitchen. Everyone should judge their own cooking skills, comfort levels and kids abilities for themselves before arming their children with knives! Knife safety is a serious and important topic and I’m in no way advising you on how you should proceed in your own house, but I am hopefully providing some tips and tricks on how to safely and carefully introduce knives to your kids.

Read This: 6 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

Getting Kids Started With Knives

We started around 1 year old, when Clara got this neat kitchen set for her birthday! (Thanks Auntie Cathy and Uncle Murray!)

Clara was safely able to navigate cutting up the plastic fruits and veggies with the provided knife, cutting board and food that was velcroed together! And she loved it….. anytime she successfully managed to get the knife in the right spot and separate the food pieces she would giggle with joy!

She loved cutting these up so much

Since then we have moved on to more advanced knife skills. She now regularly helps to chop up bananas and other soft foods (strawberries, avocado,etc) with a butter knife or a spreader like this.

She also helps to butter bread, or spread almond butter on her banana slices – she loves spreading!

Read This: How To Make Cooking With Your Toddler Fun

Look at those chubby little wrists! 🙂

Learning how to grasp a knife is all part of the process!

Moving On To Other Knife Styles

Once she developed more confidence in those skills we introduced her to this style of knife:

Using two hands like a pro

There are a few different styles out there, but this style of knife is good because it is fairly dull (no super sharp edges) and uses both hands on the handle for Clara to push down on, keeping little fingers away from the sharp bits! Because it isn’t super sharp it needs to be used on relatively soft foods, but can be used on a wider variety than her current butter knife. Clara can help to cut cucumber, zucchini, potatoes and more. Plus the crinkle cut shapes are so fun!

Once we are sure she is comfortable, confident and possesses the safety skills and understanding of how to use a knife properly, she will graduate to a nylon knife, which is more of a traditional knife style. This is where her knife skills will really take off.

We can also add in some safety gloves if we think it is needed during the learning phase!