Episode 58: Kids Cooking Dinner? Teach Your Kids To Cook an Entire Meal…By Themselves!

Imagine with me…your kids can take over a whole dinner meal and cook it themselves while you get something else done!

It’s a dream that has become reality times three for me here at the Kids Cook Real Food^™ household.

I realized I’ve shared the process we used to gradually release cooking responsibility and teach our kids to cook a whole dinner by themselves many times on other podcasts when I’m the guest. It’s about time I share it with you as well!

It’s a multi-step process:

• Let the kids watch you make a recipe.
• Watch them make the recipe while you’re there with reminders.
• Let them make the same recipe while you’re available in the house for questions.
• Then they can make that recipe with zero help from you.
• For 3-9 months, the kids should make the same recipe weekly to learn it to a mastery level.
• Then in the second year of kid’s cooking night (or second phase), you can let them make their old favorite every other week. In the interim weeks, they need to try other recipes.

This allows them to take on the physical labor of cooking first, then gradually ease into the mental load portion as you help them meal plan side-by-side.

We’ve used this process with three kids so far, and the fourth won’t be far behind!

You can watch Paul and Leah’s “old favorite recipe” for pizza right here. This is a great one to watch with your kids as it has Paul’s early teenage creativity stamped all over it.

Can’t see the video? Watch Kids Cooking Dinner here on YouTube!

No time for the video? Here are the notes!

Kids Cooking Dinner? Start a Kids Cooking Night

• 1:13: Today we’re going to talk today about the process that we’ve used here in the Kids Cook Real Food^™ household of gradually releasing responsibility and teaching kids to make an entire meal for themselves and then shifting into meal planning. This is a multi-step, multi-year process.
• 2:34: When my own kids first started making a whole meal by themselves, it actually grew more out of desperation than me trying to be a good and intentional parent and passing on life skills to them.
• 5:12: Part of why making dinner is hard is that it’s a constantly shifting task. You don’t make the exact same thing every night, you need to choose each meal and plan out the preparation and timing every day.

3 Step System for Teaching Kids to Cook Dinner

• • 5:46: Once we’d decided that Paul and Leah would make dinner on Sundays, the first step of our strategic plan was that they would always make pizza, every time.
  • 5:56: A few weeks before youth group started I began my three-part system to get them prepared to cook dinner by themselves.
  • 6:03: First, they watched me make pizza while I narrated all the steps out loud.
  • 6:07: The next time, I watched them and gave them reminders, tips, and tricks.
  • 6:16: Then they got to do it by themselves without my assistance.
  • 6:26: By the end of the school year, they’d mastered making pizza!
  • 6:36: All of parenting is a gradual release of responsibility. We’re letting out the apron strings and gradually giving the child more and more responsibility until they’re leaving home as adults.

• 6:59: During the second year of this plan, the kids made their mastered pizza recipe every other week and they got to plan something different the other weeks. It could be a family favorite they’d seen me make a million times or something new. Leah likes trying new things so she was often the one picking brand-new recipes while Paul chose old favorites like cheeseburger soup or pinto gallo.
• 7:34: When child #3 was 12, we started this same process with him. His chosen meal was making tacos. Within a few months, he had it mastered.

Parenting Is a Gradual Release of Responsibility

• 7:53: One of the ways we intentionally hand off responsibility to our kids is that every year on their baptism anniversary we give them a new privilege and a new responsibility. Some responsibilities have included taking out the trash, wiping the table after dinner, or making dinner one night a week. Privileges have included having a friend sleepover, being able to cross the street by yourself, or getting social media.
• 10:29: My kids have really owned their “kids cook dinner night.” They know exactly how long it takes to make the meals they’ve mastered, they have organized the different meal components so they’re ready simultaneously, and they even know when they can play cards for a few minutes while the pizza cooks. You can see Paul and Leah’s pizza recipe here along with their entire process. (They filmed and edited the entire video themselves!)
• 12:20: Once they get to the point of planning every other week, we discuss meal planning steps like choosing a recipe, checking that they have all their ingredients, etc. This teaches skills of planning ahead, coordination, and forward-thinking. As they practice and learn from their mistakes they become better problem solvers and more confident in the kitchen.
• 13:22: John made something new a few weeks ago and I really expected him to have a lot of questions and need help. He did amazingly and I was really impressed. This is what happens when you teach kids skills in the kitchen instead of just teaching recipes.

• 14:52: Paul is 19 now, starting his own business and living at home. Part of his contract is that while he’s at home, he needs to continue cooking one meal a week. If you’re keeping track, that means we now have 3 dinners a week being cooked by Kimball kids.
• 15:09: Just a few weeks ago, Gabe (#4) requested that for his new responsibility, he could be John’s sous chef every week, so now he’s learning alongside John.

Physical vs. Mental Load of Kids Cooking Dinner

• 16:27: Part of the reason this plan works so well is because we focus on the skills of mastering a recipe and planning separately. For a whole year, they don’t need to worry about the planning at all. They just show up and cook.
• 17:05: When they begin adding in the planning aspect, we help them out quite a bit at the beginning to make sure they have everything they need, get the meat out of the freezer, and start on time.
• 17:37: These future casting and planning skills will carry over into other areas of life as well as when they navigate high school, grow into adulthood, get a job, buy a house, plan big projects, etc.
• 18:16: Remember this is a gradual release of responsibility, it doesn’t happen completely smoothly over a few weeks.
• 18:51: We can’t fully expect to dump the entire physical and mental load of cooking onto our kids at the same time. The mental load is a big deal. So we keep the mental, they start with just the physical labor, then we slowly pass off some of that mental load of meal planning, and eventually, they can take over the full mental load.
• 19:15: We say cooking is hard because it has so much mental load. If it’s hard for us to carry, that’s probably a clue telling us that our kids won’t be ready until they’re in their teens, maybe even their later teens, and we’ll need to hand it over gradually.
• 19:46: If you have younger kids, I would encourage you to have a dedicated night where they are the sous chef, where they are the helper. Before passing on a whole meal to them, you could switch so that you become the sous chef and they become the lead chef or something like that.

There are always ways to slowly and gradually pass off different parts of the process to kids so that we’re not overwhelming them. -Katie Kimball, KCRF Creator

Resources We Mention for Kids Cooking Dinner

• Get started teaching your kids to cook
• Some of Paul’s favorite recipes to make: cheeseburger soup or pinto gallo
• You can see Paul and Leah’s pizza recipe here along with their entire process. (They filmed and edited the entire video themselves!)
• Teach kids skills in the kitchen instead of just teaching recipes