Cooking and helping in the kitchen with age-appropriate tasks is beneficial for children of all ages. Research indicates that this activity promotes the development of cooking skills, facilitates increased responsibility and enhances self-esteem. Activities in the kitchen allow for numerous opportunities to improve sensory-motor skills, cognition, and emotional regulation. Motor planning, fine motor coordination, eye-hand coordination, executive function, sensory integration, and sequencing are only some of the skills targeted while cooking.
Playing with ingredients is a multi-sensory experience for children. All senses are engaged when cooking. Hands, eyes, nose, ears and tongue in-tuned for the brain to interpret the outside world via the input being received while touching, smelling, etc… Sensory integration skills are necessary for children of all ages to interpret the stimuli received from the world and to respond to it accordingly. Some children may require increased exposure to these stimulus to understand them. To accomplish this children must be allowed to purposefuly play with the food and the ingredients (Ex, water & flour).
Evidence also suggest that children who participate in the process of cooking are more willing to try the food they helped prepare. This opportunity could be used to introduce non-favorite textures, non-preferred foods or even to promote vegetables intake. This may lead to learning healthier eating habits at a young age. Cooking is also a great opportunity to introduce or practice counting, adding, measuring, making decisions, understanding the concept of cause and effect and many more academic concepts that are fundamental for children to understand and learn.
Cooking also offers an opportunity to increase self-esteem, confidence and a feeling of self accomplishment which is beneficial for children at any age. The process is relatively short and it ends with a satisfactory result, which is the seeing the dish that have been prepared. Achieving the goal of preparing a recipe increases the individual’s feeling of independence. This is important to enhance self-esteem, and self-confidence in children.
The goal of occupational therapy is enhancing the necessary skills of the individual to to participate in age appropriate and meaningful occupations in life. The most important occupation for children is play. This is why we have developed the program “Learning in the Kitchen”. This is a fun way to promote cognitive, emotional, social and motor skills growth while playing, learning, cooking and enhancing independence.
By Margarita Cunha, MSOT
Occupational Therapist
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3868269/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1499404619300776
