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Cooking together and prioritizing health over the convenience of processed food are great ways to lead by example and help your children buy into a culture of wellness. Help your kids find new, seasonal recipes to add to your repertoire and family cookbook. Family meal preparation is an opportunity to celebrate your cultural heritage by passing down recipes. The family meal can start in the kitchen as you cook together. Following a recipe from start to finish helps build the skills for planning and completing projects. While cooking with your child, practice new vocabulary as you describe how food looks, feels, and tastes. Explaining how food changes with temperature or how certain foods can help our body be healthy provide great lessons in science. Math concepts like counting, measurement, and fractions naturally unfold when navigating a recipe with kids. There are so many lessons that can be taught while cooking. If this happens, you can try suggesting smelling a food first this may provide a bridge to tasting in the future.
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While cooking with new ingredients, some children may feel too overwhelmed to taste. The complex flavors we experience when eating food come from both taste sensations from the tongue AND smelling with the nose. Kneading dough, rinsing vegetables, and tearing lettuce all involve touching food and being comfortable with texture. This helps to build positive associations with food. You can help your child explore foods when cooking using other senses besides taste. For a hesitant eater, tasting an unfamiliar food can sometimes be intimidating. Here are five ways to enjoy cooking with your children while raising an adventurous eater along the way.Įngage other senses. Over time, cooking with your children can help build that confidence-and provide rich sensory experiences. Kids may need to have frequent joyful experiences involving food to overcome the anxiety they may have around tasting the unfamiliar. Bringing up a child who can enjoy a cantaloupe as much as a cupcake takes patience and persistence, but it does not have to feel like a chore. When it comes to raising an adventurous eater, it is not just about coaxing kids to eat their veggies.