Cooking with Your Toddler Baby Families.com

Cooking with Your Toddler

pancakes The next meal you make, consider asking your toddler to help. Toddlers can be so much fun to cook with, and the educational value of the activity to high. In a short cooking session, you can introduce your child to language arts, math, science and life skills. And toddlers just love to help out. They get a great sense of accomplishment from doing things on their own, especially when they are “grown up” activities.

As I mentioned earlier in a previous post, I love cooking with my toddler, especially in the early morning. I’ll share some of the things I have learned about cooking with a toddler as well as how to get started, what to cook, what jobs to give your toddler and special considerations for this age range.
You also might want to check out the two previous posts: Cooking with Kids from Baby through Toddler and Cooking with Your Young Baby. You’ll find safety precautions to take in that first post.

When cooking with a toddler, I usually focus on making baked good. With baking, there is a lot of mixing, measuring and pouring, and adding toppings, all things that your toddler should be able to do with a little help. Piling flour high in a little mound inside a bowl with a spoon, also seems like a lot of fun for him to do. With baking, there is also minimum heat because you can wait until all of the prep is done to turn on the oven and add the items away from your child. Try making muffins, pizza, quick breads, yeast breads, pancakes (which can be baked or cooked in a skillet by mom or dad), frittata (a baked egg dish), baked oatmeal, biscuits, etc. You can also try making up your own hot chocolate mix, granola or snack mix (stay away from anything that could choke or cause an allergy, such as peanuts).

With a toddler, it is important to expect a little mess. Flour won’t always stay in the bowl, and your child might just try sampling the recipe before it is ready. Have a damp cloth at the ready to wipe up little spills.

Practice counting as you add teaspoons or cups of ingredients, show your toddler that you are measuring. If you are making dough, give your toddler a little piece to play with for texture and tactile sensory integration. The experience is just so much fun.

Would you like to read more about cooking with your toddler? Please leave me a comment!

Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. Starting June 1st, don’t miss her articles in the Baby Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.