From Chaos to Connection:

How Cooking with Kids Transforms Parenting

This episode dives into one of the most transformational decisions I made as a parent—born out of pure desperation, but wow, did it change everything. If you’ve ever struggled with picky eating, the chaos of the witching hour, or just finding meaningful ways to connect with your kids, this one’s for you. Today, I’m sharing how cooking with my kids became the ultimate game-changer—not just for their eating habits, but for building confidence, connection, and even sneaking in some life skills like math and science. Trust me, this isn’t just about food—it’s about creating moments that matter. Let’s jump in!" If you’d prefer to read, find the full transcript below. If you want a shortened version, here is a recap:

Summary of Top Tips from the Podcast:

1. Involve Kids in Cooking Early
   Start as young as possible by inviting your kids into the kitchen. Use tools like a mother’s helper ladder to make it safe and fun for them to participate.

2. Remove the Mystery Around Food
   Describe foods in detail—taste, texture, smell—before asking kids to try them. This reduces fear and increases curiosity.

3. Celebrate Exploration, Not Pressure
   Let kids taste foods in a no-pressure way. Celebrate their willingness to try, even if they don’t like it.

4. Use Fun Tools to Build Engagement
   Introduce tools like salad spinners, melon ballers, and microplanes to make food prep exciting and interactive.

5. Teach Polite Food Rejection
   Show kids how to politely spit out foods they don’t like. This encourages them to try new things without fear of punishment.

6. Incorporate Learning Opportunities
   Use cooking to teach math (measuring ingredients), science (how food changes when cooked), and reading and writing (following recipes or writing them on their own).

7. Empower with Responsibility
   Trust kids with “risky” tasks like using a food processor, cooking over heat, or handling a knife (with supervision). This builds confidence and connection.

8. Celebrate Connection Through Food
   Make cooking a family activity filled with music, laughter, and shared experiences. Food becomes a source of warmth and bonding.

TRANSCROHello, hello, it's Emily from Wise and Wild and today I wanted to talk to you guys about one of the most transformational decisions I made in my house that was born totally out of a place of desperation, okay? And it is such an all-encompassing activity to involve your kids in that I want to share it with the world. I want to share it with you.

And for me, this came about when I was staying first at home with my approximately, well, my oldest son when he was like one and two, I started involving him in this activity. And later on, it became an even more powerful and important tool for me to get through the witching hour and get through the day. And I will just go ahead and share with you that I'm talking about cooking with your kids.

And I was fortunate enough to work from home. I still do work from home. Now my boys are six and eight and these tools were really, really super powerful for me, especially when they were toddlers and a little bit younger. Now they still do cook with me. And I'm often reminded of how important this is when it comes to picky eating. We recently moved internationally and my

older son who had not previously been a picky eater, started rejecting a lot of foods and a lot of his comfortable familiar foods were no longer available to him. And we really had to find new foods and figure out ways to keep him full and satisfied because you know how difficult hanger can be and how stressful it can be when you're dealing with a picky eater. And I had this huge light bulb moment because I was like,

realizing that the main reason he was never a picky eater before that is because he was exposed to so many different types of food in a non-pressure way by cooking in the kitchen with me. And there are so many different reasons why this is important, but the first one is because I want you to imagine that

you're in a French restaurant or some sort of international restaurant and they say, do you want to try our house dish? It's escargot. And what is, what is escargot? it's snails. And you're like, no, thank you. But what if the waiter had said, it's really soft, small snails that are cooked in garlic butter. The table will receive six of them. And often you scoop it up with a small fork and put it on a piece of baguette.

with some butter. ⁓ It's got like a very soft, salty, garlicky texture. And if you don't like that, you can always enjoy the garlic butter with the baguette. Right? So much of the mystery has been taken out of the situation for you, so you're more likely to be inclined to try it. Right? So often we put some food in front of our kids' faces and we just say, try it, try it. And they have no idea what to expect.

Is this going to be sour? Is this going to be sweet? Is it going to be salty? Is it going to be chewy? Is it going to be grisly? God forbid, like every child's worst nightmare. Is it going to be, well, not necessarily. Like, I guess I do love to see a child who can chew on a drumstick. ⁓ But taking away the mystery out of different foods in such a no pressure organic way will automatically make your child so much more likely to try foods. And the first way that I did this through cooking with them,

was let's say I was making some sort of stir fry for dinner. I would bring up their little mother's helper ladder next to me. If you don't have a mother's helper ladder and you have a small child in your home, I cannot recommend it enough because it allows them to stand next to you in the kitchen while you work on literally anything. And it is so easy and so fun.

I bought mine off of Etsy, but now I have seen that they become so much more popular and you can easily find them on Amazon. And so let's say I was cooking a stir fry. I might slice up a couple of peppers, a red pepper, a green pepper, some sweet onion, and whatever it is you're throwing in there, right? Some broccoli, some cauliflower, and put a little bit of each of it on their cutting board next to you.

And people have asked me many times what type of knife I recommend for children. And truthfully, ⁓ my favorite types of knives that I have given them are my duller kitchen knives. ⁓ I've also started them out with like butter knives or a simple serrated steak knife. Like I did not initially buy anything new for my kids, which I like because it forced me to be more attentive to the way they were cutting right out of the gate.

and teach them how to actually hold a knife and cut appropriately. So let's say you're cooking all of those things and you'll say, this is the red pepper. It's crunchy and sweet and it's got the skin on the outside, but you can kind of snap it in half. And would you like to taste it? This is the ripe version of the green pepper. This is a green pepper. It's not gonna be as sweet as the red pepper. Here's some sweet onion.

crunchy, and you invite them to taste anything that they want in a no pressure way. So the next time you go to a restaurant and you order chicken fajitas for the family at the Mexican restaurant, they're not gonna wonder what a red pepper is, what a green pepper is, what a cooked onion looks like. They will have already seen it. Whether or not they decided to try it, it almost doesn't matter because sight, smell, texture.

is a lot of it, just removing the mystery for them and empowering them and making food exposure a positive thing. So that's one of the main things that is literally one of the best benefits of cooking with your child is that you can expose them to so many different things. And I'll give you guys some examples of things that we like to make together. Fresh pesto sauce.

Ooh, do you want to smell this basil? Crush it between your hands. Smell the garlic. Dip your finger in the olive oil. Right? ⁓ Taste a little bit of Parmesan cheese. Do you want to taste this nice toasted pine nut? Inviting them to taste different things that are not just baking chocolate chip cookies, which I have no problem with. We try to bake those on the regular, but.

Making things like sauces with them, chimichurri is another favorite of mine. I studied abroad in Argentina ⁓ and making chimichurri and perfecting that recipe with my son has been one of our most favorite things because now my entire family loves it. I can share that with them. And in the process, both of my boys were able to taste parsley and dried oregano. And we figured out.

how much vinegar we liked versus how much olive oil. And ⁓ we all agree that we like it a lot more vinegary and less oily. And you can just invite them to smell and touch and taste all of these different things, no matter what you're making. And in full transparency, I did all of this because I'm not a particularly creative mom. You know, the thought of stocking an entire cabinet with art supplies or figuring out

kind of complicated, easy to do activities with my toddler was very overwhelming to me, but I do love to cook. And also one of the best tips I got from Hunt Gather Parent is it is super important for children to feel invited into and helpful during the rhythms and the work that takes place in the household.

And at this time, my main job was to stay home with the kids during the day. And I did all of my work at night. do a lot of administrative work for a business that my husband and I own together. And I was able to mostly work at night and be present with my kids during the day. And I'm so grateful for that. But there were so many days that the day was kind of looming ahead of me, right? You know, you've done 25 different things.

You woke up, you went for a little walk, you got out the scooters, you got out this, you read some books, you had some breakfast, you cleaned up the kitchen. You did that and you look at the clock and it's eight 30 in the morning. And I'm thinking, I cannot entertain these kids all day, nor do I want to. And I also wanted to have helpful, involved children. So inviting my kids into the kitchen just became an organic way for me to participate with them.

spend time with them without creating another activity for them to do, build their confidence, build their skills, hand-eye coordination. ⁓ There's so many benefits other than the picky eating, which I just mentioned, that I never would have predicted. So my number one tip to address picky eating and the way that we overcame this challenge of moving internationally and needing to find new foods that we loved.

is inviting my kids into the kitchen to help them find and taste and safe foods in a way that felt no pressure to them, not safe foods, foods in a way that felt safe and no pressure to them. ⁓

There are also so many other benefits to cooking with your kids. Early math skills, counting out a certain number of scoops of things if your children are small. Fractions, ⁓ early science skills, right? Let's talk about what happens to a hard-boiled egg. How does it become hard-boiled? What happens on a scientific basis, right? Then you dump it into an ice bath.

What's the point of the ice bath? How does that change things? What happens when you cook a vegetable? Why do ⁓ you dump your green beans in an ice bath after you steam them or boil them? Why does that preserve the color? There's so many interesting scientific angles that you can take this down into if you're trying to stretch these activities into filling your days as much as you can, which is what I was doing, right? I was trying to take as much out of this.

interaction and time with them as much as I humanly could. ⁓ Reading and writing, right? My older son is not a particularly interested reader or writer, but he is motivated to read a recipe and figure out a recipe that he wants to make. And one of the first things he ever wrote on his own was his homemade recipe for French toast. So you can incorporate reading and writing. ⁓ Helpfulness, confidence,

learning to follow instructions, safety, Risk. This is another super interesting aspect to involving your kids in the kitchen. Kids love to feel like they are being challenged and entrusted to take some risk. So one of the ways that you can do this and

build connection and warmth and trust between you and your child is to invite them to use the food processor with you and let them use the blade. Let them touch the blade. And this is another one of the points that I learned in hunt gather parent is they don't want to feel like they're being protected from some of the riskiest and most interesting aspects of any job. They want to feel like they're entrusted to handle things. So let's say you're making

fresh salsa in the food processor. It might look something like this. Here's the base of the food processor. Then we pick up the canister or whatever the biggest part is, the cup, and we put it on the bottom, twist it to the side until you hear it click. Okay, now here's the blade. You're gonna pick up the blade by the middle part right here. You don't touch.

these very sharp side metal blades because it will cut you. That's the part that spins around really, really, really fast to pulse and crush all of this food and slice all of this food into tiny little pieces. So you take that, hold it here, and you set it right down on the middle. Wow, well done. I knew that you could handle that. And then you take this part, this is the top, you put it on like this and you clip it, but we won't do that yet. Let's put our ingredients in. Okay, first we're gonna add some cherry tomatoes.

You go through your list of ingredients. Do you want to taste some fresh cilantro? Do you want to squeeze the lime? Right? There's so many fun steps involved in making something like fresh salsa and it tastes so good. Now you're going to clip the top on and press the button. If you press this button, it's going to hold it. The blade will stay, keep going on and on and on. And this one's called pulse, right? And you do that when you want to stop and go. So let's do some stop and go pulsing. Show me what that looks like. So that

really allows them to feel like they are genuinely contributing and builds the confidence that you trust them with these certain types of activities. It's so much more meaningful for them. ⁓

In addition to, let me think, I'm trying to think of food processors, the blender, right? They can put things out into the blender. You show them the blade at the bottom. Obviously you're showing them how to use knives in a safe way, but anything that is safe and feels high risk, they're going to feel more interested in participating in. Another one of the things that you can do with your kids if you have trouble with greens,

is you guys can start by making smoothies together and gradually add a small amount of greens so that they see that often something like spinach will be flavorless in their smoothie. ⁓ Can you taste it? you can't taste it. It still tastes like strawberries and yogurt. Perfect. How about next time we'll add a little bit of more. Let's look up why the spinach is green. What does the green do for you, right? You can make it more meaningful about why they need to eat their vegetables.

⁓ One of my next absolute favorite things that I love to do with my kids in the kitchen is bust out the salad spinner. And this was a discovery because ⁓ often, I mean, guys, cooking with my kids in the kitchen was literally how I survived the witching hour. I usually like to reserve like TV time for around three o'clock when I get a dip in my energy and I need a minute. And so by the time it's dinner time,

I've already used up my screen time and I want my kids to be active and be with me or not in the very least sitting and watching a TV show. But ⁓ it's usually when they needed me the most. I'm sure that you guys can relate. There's that time of day when the baby is crying and the toddler is whining and everyone's kind of flailing all around the floor and needing you and you're trying to make dinner and it's extremely stressful. And having that mother's helper ladder really saved me.

during this time. And eventually when my second son could walk, I got a second one and they were able to just stay side by side and do their individual work. But one of the things that we discovered early on is the salad spinner on the floor can literally provide endless joys. Okay, you can put bouncy balls in there and spin it around and watch them bounce around the edges of the salad spinner. You can do a mini car wash in there with

cars and water and soap. You can put tiny baby dolls in there. You can put tiny animals in there and wash them and rinse them and repeat. But my absolute favorite trick with the salad spinner has to do with picky eating. And that is every time I had them wash a vegetable and they wash it in the salad spinner by themselves, they would end up tasting it by themselves. I have so many memories of my younger son.

just stuffing handfuls of arugula in his mouth straight from the salad spinner because they love the independence and the autonomy and tasting something without anyone telling them to. So a super fun activity is to pick a green, watch a short video on how it grows together, talk about how it's good for the body. You can talk about dandelion greens, kale.

Arugula the difference between bitter greens and not bitter greens. You can check how cauliflower grows broccoli grows ⁓ Have them wash it in the salad spinner chop it a first Sorry first chop it up together and then have them wash it in the salads spinner And then if they're not tasting it on their own invite them to taste it. Okay so the salad spinner I I like the big OX01 because I feel like you can get the most Action out of that bad boy

But honestly, the spinning effect of any sort of salad spinner is a lot of entertainment for a toddler. And honestly, my eight year old still plays with it. So there you go. Super simple tools that you can also use beyond the salad spinner. Melon ballers, ice cream scoops, citrus juicers, invite them to squeeze. The lemon over your salad, the lemon in their water. My kids love a microplane, they can shred their.

Parmesan cheese over their Caesar salad. ⁓ A cheese grater if you need more grated cheese. We also love to use a cheese grater to make homemade hash browns. The can opener. They love ⁓ making little worms out of the garlic press because of course they managed to turn it into something disgusting. It is hilarious to them.

⁓ Funny things like cutting open a melon and letting them feel the seeds and talk about how slimy they are ⁓ It's interesting how something being slimy is not threatening to a child when they've discovered it on their own like just the other day my son was helping me to slice mushrooms and He's like, ⁓ why do even eat mushrooms? They're so slimy and disgusting, right? He was washing them and slicing them for me because I was running late for dinner

And since he had encountered mushrooms so many times on his own in the kitchen, the fact that they were slimy wasn't offensive to him. But I'm pretty certain that if I had just made chicken with mushrooms and tried to make him eat it, he would have been completely repulsed by it. And I'm not saying he doesn't ever reject these foods. mean,

The kids are just like us. Sometimes they're in their mood for certain things and sometimes they aren't. And sometimes things bother them and sometimes they don't. ⁓ A super important aspect to this is to celebrate any time they taste a new food and any time they're helpful with you. I love spending time with you. Thank you so much for your help with this. Our salsa came out delicious. It tastes better because we made it together, right? ⁓

My last tip for picky eaters, and honestly, I think this is one of the most important ones, or my last tip, honestly, I guess I would say for building a confident leader, is teach them how to spit out their foods politely. I cannot tell you how often I hear a child getting scolded, don't spit that out, that's rude. What are you doing? Use your napkin.

But it makes me so sad because likely no one ever showed them how to spit something out if they don't like it. And then they're getting in trouble for it. And the reason this is so damaging is because it's going to make them less likely to try a food that feels unsure to them the next time. And also because they likely still don't know what to do. So that will really...

Adversely affect your child if they already struggle with trying new foods So one of the things you want to do if you're cooking with them in a kitchen or at a restaurant is say if you try something you don't like You know in my home I would just say you can spit it out and put it on the corner of your cutting board or here's a paper towel You can spit it out into there Here's a napkin just the other day. I had to remind them Here's your napkin. If you taste something that you don't like you're gonna bring your napkin up to your mouth

spit it out very politely in your napkin and fold it over and put it on your lap. We are in a stage right now where textures are really bothering us. So if anyone gets a chewy bite of anything, they're spitting it out and putting it in the napkin. And what I found is when I react to them in a harsh way and I'm like, what are you doing? Yeah, there's a chewy bite. Like who cares? They will not take another bite. But if I say, ⁓ chewy bite. Okay, you got that one out.

Are you gonna continue eating? Sometimes it takes them a minute to regroup and continue taking a bite. So I think you guys get the idea. I love this topic and I love the idea of families cooking together. They say home is where the heart is, but I really feel like it's home is where the kitchen is, where we can all be together and put on music and.

together and have snacks together and be together while we're doing homework or crafting and it's just food is connection and it's so stressful. It's so stressful when food is not connection but it's begging and picky eating and arguments and you know I have tried the methodology where it's

put out the plate of cookies and let them have as many as they want, but that did not work well in our family. That did not help to create a balanced relationship with sugar. ⁓ What has helped with picky eating is this, is inviting my kids into the kitchen to try as many foods as they want in a no pressure way. ⁓ spending time with them as a result, boosting their confidence as a result.

incorporating math and science and playfulness and salads, bin or car washes and understanding how fruits and vegetables grow and learning how to cut them, learning how to wash them and creating their own organic love for certain types of foods because we've made them together. And so I hope this is helpful to you guys.

I hope that you will try making chimichurri, fresh salsa, fresh pesto, and just take a moment to slow down and remember that.

Food can be empowerment, warmth, and connection. And it can also be an amazing tool, spending time in the kitchen together can be an amazing tool to get through your day and inspire confidence and helpfulness if you're home with your kids, like I was when I discovered the joy in all of this.

Alright guys, thank you so much for listening. I genuinely know there are a million resources out there and I cannot thank you enough for spending your time with me. ⁓ If this was helpful to you or you have a question, please message me. My email is haywiseandwild at gmail.com or you can find me on Instagram at at wise and why at sorry at haywise and wild.

All right, big hug to you and your families. If you try any of these suggestions, please let me know. It would mean the world to me.