Will you be cooking with kids this summer? Preparing food together is a great way to work on math and science concepts, strengthen independent living skills, and enjoy some quality time. It's also a great way to make a mess, struggle with control issues, and reinforce communication problems. For many kids with special needs and their families, cooking together takes a some preparation.
One thing that helps is to adapt your recipes to make them easier for your child to follow. The apple pie recipe from the book Breaking Bread, Nourishing Connections gives a good idea for using pictures to guide a reading-challenged child through the steps of baking. Try doing the same for any of your recipes, maybe having your child help you cut pictures out of magazines to add to the illustrations.
If your child can read, but not at the level of language (or smallness of type) in a regular cookbook, type or print out the instructions in simpler language and larger lettering. You may want to laminate the page or put it in a sheet protector so that it will survive being handled by wet and sticky hands. A notebook full of these kid-friendly recipes, with your child's name on it, can make a young cook feel like a master chef.
For your child, the problem may not be so much cooking safely but finding something that's safe to eat. Find something fun to bake for your child with food restrictions in these categories on this Parenting Special Needs site:
The hardest thing about cooking with kids may be to remember that the goal is fun, not perfection. That's a hard one for me to remember, anyway -- I have a difficult time letting kids do anything but tip in the cup- or spoonful of ingredients I've carefully measured. Have you had good experiences cooking with kids, or do you struggle, too? Share your successes and disasters in the comments.
My tactile sensitive daughter has helped me bake in some form or another since she was four. She always mixes the brownies that we must take to all family functions because the mix is absolutely delicious. Now that she is 6, I even let her crack the eggs (into a mixing cup set into a secondary bowl) She must have had her head swell with all of the compliments, because one day when she was 5, I said I needed to make brownies for work. She sighed and set down her toys. “You better let me do it Mom. I make the best brownies you ever had in your whole life!”
I’m hoping to try cooking with my son this summer. We’ve got a few issues to overcome. First, he seems to have a bad aim when it comes to dumping flour or sugar or any other ingredient into a bowl. I can cope with that, and hope he’ll get the hang of it soon.
The second issue I haven’t heard of anywhere else. If we make something cute, or in any way emotionally appealing, my son cannot possibly imagine eating it or cutting it or changing it in any manner. Our answer has been to go digital – take pictures. We have photos of gummy bears, cookies, watermelons (a particular favourite), cakes… I hope that mentioning it here means it’ll help someone else whose kid can’t bear to ‘hurt’ that cute bunny made out of fruit at summer camp…