The idea behind getting kids involved in cooking is that ownership creates buy-in - if a child helps prepare a meal, they’re more invested in it, more curious about it, more likely to try it. It makes intuitive sense, and it’s one of the most commonly recommended strategies in every picky eating article I’ve read. So for most of July I let my son help with dinner.
He is genuinely enthusiastic about this. He drags the step stool over to the counter without being asked. He likes stirring things. He’s very serious about measuring ingredients. He asked if he could be in charge of the pepper, so now he’s in charge of the pepper, and everything we eat is slightly pepperier than it used to be. That seems like a fair trade. He has also rearranged our main cutlery and kitchen utensil drawer several times. I’ve begged him to keep things I use when cooking in a consistent spot, but he just replies “I eat every day and I need my spoons where I want them.”
My daughter’s relationship with cooking is different. Where he charges in, she approaches carefully - measuring twice, moving slowly, checking with me before each step. She helped me make spaghetti and garlic breadsticks one evening, and she did a genuinely good job with the sauce.
Then came the noodles. I asked her to help drain them. The steam hit her and half the pot went into the sink. She looked to me for a reaction, and I quickly said “happens to me every time,” and she kept going without a fuss. We made do with what was left.
The breadstick dough, though, was a different problem. Every time she touched it, she had to stop and clean her hands. Not a quick wipe - a full wash with soap and water before she could continue. The dough kept sticking, she kept stopping to wash, and the breadsticks took considerably longer than they needed to.
I know exactly how she felt, because I am exactly the same way. The discomfort, the need to have hands be clean, and the inability to just push through - I’ve fought it my whole life. I’ve spent years making sure my kids never see it. My wife confirmed I’ve pulled that off. Apparently it doesn’t matter. She got it anyway.
The breadsticks, for the record, she ate without complaint. The plain ones, anyway.
My son helped me make meatballs one night. He mixed the meat with his hands (loved this), rolled them into balls (loved this), and meticulously tried to get them browned evenly all over. He was proud of them. He told his sister he made them. She was appropriately impressed.
He ate part of one meatball. He’s never eaten meatballs before. I was quietly thrilled.
My daughter watched us make them and was not interested in participating in what she apparently considered a culinary trap. She moved the meatball around her plate for a while, then went back to her plain spaghetti noodles. We didn’t push it.
The next week, meatballs again - but we were short on time and he didn’t help make them. He ate zero meatballs.
On night we made tacos together. He helped season the meat, picked out toppings, assembled his own. He ate the cheese and the shell and left the meat in a pile.
My daughter agreed to put cheese on her taco. Then declared it had too much cheese to eat. We separated the cheese and meat for a second attempt - plain taco, just meat. She took one small bite, thought about it, and said: “Dad, I think I’m just not a meat girl.”
This from the girl who spent a year eating Bifi sticks by the box.
We made a simple pasta sauce from scratch - real tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, nothing hidden. She helped make all of it. At her insistence, this sauce went into a separate bowl from the plain noodles. She tried two of the tiniest, lonely drops of red sauce onto a single noodle, then ate the rest of the noodles plain.
Here’s the problem I keep running into with the cooking involvement strategy, and it applies to almost everything I’ve tried: he goes through phases. Some weeks he’s in a trying mode - he’ll put things in his mouth, decide he doesn’t like them, but he engages. Other weeks nothing is getting past the inspection stage regardless of how it was made or who made it. Which means I genuinely can’t tell whether the meatball happened because he helped make it or because that happened to be a trying week. It could be a data point for the cooking theory. It could just be noise.
After a month of this, here’s where I’ve landed: cooking involvement helps in the moment, sometimes. There’s a novelty and pride effect that occasionally tips him toward trying something. But it’s not reliable, it doesn’t generalize, and it’s heavily dependent on his mood and whether he was involved that specific day.
I’m going to keep letting them help cook. Both of them enjoy it, though for different reasons - he likes the chaos of it, she likes being next to me. Neither of them seems to eat more because of it. For him there’s at least a maybe. For her, cooking together appears to be entirely separate from the question of whether she’ll eat the result. She’ll help make the sauce and then ask for plain pasta noodles. Every time.
Next I’m going to try a reward system. A sticker chart. I feel mildly embarrassed about this, but I’m past the point of caring whether the strategy is cool. If stickers work, we’re doing stickers.