Why Cooking With Toddlers Is One Of The Best Activities For Their Development
For some parents, the idea of cooking with kids is a nightmare. It’s a messy explosion waiting to happen, and there are plenty of safety concerns as well. However, did you know that cooking is one of the best activities you can do for your child’s development? It teaches them many valuable skills and is particularly effective when they’re a toddler.
Some of you may take some convincing, so here are some key points explaining why cooking with toddlers is beneficial:
Improves their motor skills
First of all, cooking develops your child’s fine motor skills. Give them some safe equipment to mix or beat things, and there’s a lot of hand-eye coordination involved. They learn how to use their limbs and control things with their hands and fingers. This translates to other elements of their development – like learning how to hold a pencil and write/draw.
Develops various math skills
Cooking with toddlers ensures they meet the correct math milestones by age. This activity involves lots of measuring and talking about quantities. It’s one of the easiest ways to teach your kids about counting or addition. Younger toddlers can start learning how to count to five or ten based on the ingredients in a recipe. Older toddlers get their first dose of addition as you talk about adding things to other ingredients. It’s all highly important stuff that keeps their math development at the ideal pace and prepares them for school.
Teaches them to listen and follow instructions
Speaking of school, children behave a lot better in classroom environments when they’ve been brought up in the kitchen! Why? Because cooking with kids forces them to listen and respond to instructions. You give them tasks to do and explain how to do them, then they follow. It improves their capacity to listen and follow instructions – which their first teacher will duly appreciate. They should have less difficulty listening to teachers in a school setting or responding to what they ask.
Helps them engage with their senses
The final great thing about cooking with toddlers is that it engages all five of their senses. The sooner you start teaching your children about their senses, the better. They’ll learn about touch by feeling the ingredients and understanding different shapes. Their senses of smell and taste will naturally develop by being in the kitchen and smelling or tasting different things. You develop their sense of hearing through the different noises in a kitchen environment, and their sense of sight also strengthens as they see the different food substances, cutlery, etc.
All in all, there are no downsides to cooking with toddlers – other than the mess! If you can embrace the mess, then you’ve got one of the best activities you could wish for. It gets them away from screens for a good chunk of time and encourages positive behaviors in later life. A child who grows up cooking or baking with their parents is more likely to be independent when they approach adolescence and adulthood.
