I recently published my second children’s story, The Coconut Cup. It is a story about a magical kitchen where desserts compete to prove which pudding is best! The story reimagines the dessert world and as a result, it has got my kids curious and inspired to create in the kitchen.
Cooking with your kids is a fantastic way to nurture their creativity!
Ideas are unleashed by making new neural connections across our knowledge, memories, motivations, and beliefs. The more we can help our children create their unique neural network and make connections across it, the more we can help them realise their creative potential.
Cooking together helps to nurture a child’s creativity by:
- Building Creative Confidence: Baking a recipe together enables kids to experience the joy of making something they are proud of and shows them what they are creatively capable of
- Making Memories: Memories are triggered by sensory stimuli so cooking together with your child has the potential to help them create lasting and meaningful memories for the future. (I am immediately transported back to my childhood kitchen each time I taste my mum's carrot cake batter!)
- Unlocking Curiosity: New food and flavours can trigger our children’s curiosity, opening new chapters of interest and discovery
- Increasing Knowledge: Creating new dishes is a great way of bringing culinary adventure into the house, providing cultural learning opportunities
- Encouraging Experimentation: Under the right supervision (and if we are open to our kids making a mess!), the kitchen is a great place for kids to experiment with flavour, ingredients and design
- Boosting Problem-Solving Skills: When cooking with my kids, I am often having to think on my feet and adapt to make the recipe work! Kids get to observe and learn these core skills!
However, cooking isn’t just an opportunity to build our children’s creativity, it is also a great opportunity to have treasured, shared time together!
When we are 100% gleeful and absorbed in the moment, we tend to approach tasks more mindfully and have higher propensity to achieve “flow” state in our brains.
Flow helps to lower stress and quietens the judgement centre in our minds. As a result, a trusted creative space can help to make moments for our children to share thoughts buried in their subconscious.
As a result, when we create with our children, we have the opportunity to learn more about them and provide a safe outlet for them to share their thoughts and feelings.
At the end of the day, cooking with our kids is a fun activity that provides opportunity for happy adventures, relationship building, creative development and memory making.