A much debated topic around the world has always been around how much responsibility and amount of chores teens and children need to pick up at home. Perhaps this may not necessarily apply to your household, but your kids may find this helpful for their home.
This article was going to be called 'Getting Teens to Cook', but the more I started thinking about the subject, the more I realized that in fact, this article wasn't just about getting teens to help with a chore at home and take a load off you; it was much, much more than that.
There's only so much normal chores at home can teach teens – vacuuming, doing the dishes, etc. but cooking is a process – it's something that involves many aspects that they will need to grasp in order to enter adult life, so let's begin…
Life Lesson 1: Communication and Negotiation
In my last parenting teens article about household chores, you may have read about coming up with a 'chores roster'. One of the easiest ways to get teens especially engaged in household chores is to make up a roster for 'cooking nights'. Whether you're making one or the other, both require some communication between family members about which days who can take. The concept is as easy as it seems, however I think it teaches teens more than just responsibilities at home. The idea is that depending on how many people in a household, which the week is divided up into, and each person knows exactly when their cooking night is on. Communication, planning ahead, and negotiations – if one member cannot make one cooking night, they can just swap with someone else, are all skills your teen will need to know about as an adult, so help them start gaining these skills at home.
Life Lesson 2: Helping Others
The key reason this is a worthy topic for an entire article is because firstly, it takes off the pressure from adults. How may times have you heard teens mutter that they don't like the food put in front of them? OK, hopefully it's not a regular occurrence, but kids and teens can be quite picky, so what's the best solution? Ask THEM to cook! If you find that there is only one or two adults in the home that actually do the cooking, the way to frame this new 'cooking roster' is around the fact that your teen will be helping you, while doing some productive for everyone at the same time.
Life Lesson 3: Fostering and Encouraging Innovation
With growing popularity of shows such as My Kitchen Rules around the country, the idea of cooking has become somewhat glamourized, and, well, it works! It's a fantastic way to express ourselves, a great way to experiment (increasing innovation in teens!), and of course have something worthy come out of the exercise at the end i.e. a fed household.
The idea of cooking may be scary for some teens, but they have the entire world at their fingertips through the internet – a recipe I saw on My Kitchen Rules the other night that I searched for online came back to show me that it would take me about 15 minutes to make the dessert I was after – and boy, was it perfect! Get them to search around and be creative about what they can do with ingredients available to them at home, or plan ahead for the next grocery shop.
Cooking will bring out their innovation – I admit, every time I get my hands on a recipe, after trialling here and there, I end up tailoring it to my liking. Not always a perfect outcome, but it's something, and it teaches me every time about combinations of ingredients, and so on. Cooking can help teens understand that every 'mistake' of experimenting can actually be saved – it's also about thinking on their feet.
Life Lesson 4: Budgeting and Future Planning
The first step is, at the start of the week, or even on the weekend to go grocery shopping – this means the teens will need to budget carefully and plan for their cooking nights ahead. This will better their budgeting skills, as well as their planning skills. For teens, it's important to live one day at a time – the world has so much to offer, so helping them show that planning isn't 'scary' or 'unattainable' is a skill that will help them get closer to figuring out how they can figure out the bigger things in life. Sounds dumb, but it's true!
Life Lesson 5: Time Management
My Kitchen Rules is a show that gives a great example about the importance of time management. The way you could 'sell' the idea of cooking to your teen is by getting them to work to a time. Say dinner should be ready by 7pm, get them to start at 5.30pm and see how well they go. Of course you can help them the first couple of times, but the more they cook, the better they will become at taking time into account when cooking. Also, if your teen tends to spend little time at home, it will mean they will have to time manage their activities outside of home better so that they are back home and ready to feed the family by a specific time.
So there you have it – the Life Lessons teens can learn, just by starting at home in a controlled environment – after all, that is what parenting is all about – fostering teens skills, energy and time, in order to help them 'blossom' into wonderful adults. I wish you well on your mission to do this with the teen/s in your life, and hope you have many nights of yummy dinners at your place!
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