News and Events

The children in The Family Place Child Care Center are excited on cooking class days, even if most of them don’t quite distinguish yet cooking from playing. Salads, stews, bread and the occasional batch of cookies have all had a turn on the menu – made by our participants ages three and under.

“It’s important for them to learn where food comes from,” says Margo O’Day, the kitchen supervisor at The Family Place. “Potatoes grow in the ground – french fries aren’t what potatoes start out as. Some of them don’t know that yet.”

It certainly makes sense to teach cooking to their parents. In our on-site commercial kitchen, participants in our Families Learning Together program learn how to budget for groceries, shop for healthy food and cook nutritious meals. But why, you might ask, do we teach cooking to children, some of whom can’t yet pronounce “measuring spoon?”

“My own kids always knew where vegetables came from,” says O’Day. “We’d grow carrots, spinach, lettuce, and they’d help me pick it and cook it. It’s a way of teaching them to take care of themselves. And, they love it. They have so much fun.”

In our age of frozen dinners and fast food, a connection to the origin of food is a vital component to healthy living. This applies not only to families who may find it easy to cook and eat together on a daily basis, but also to families who are challenged by the prospect of creating a healthy meal and gathering to consume it. This ritual, though, of cooking and eating as a family, has been shown to promote positive relationships between parents and children, and to increase the chances of a child staying healthier, getting better grades in school and staying away from drugs and alcohol.

Margo isn’t the only cooking teacher in the preschool classrooms. Our Families Learning Together participants are proving to be adept teachers when it comes to showing their children how to measure and mix. Here we find another benefit. These are parents who have had to learn to feel pride in their parenting skills and recognize when the connections between them and their children are strong and alive. Watching the parents and children commune over the mixing bowl is a lesson in the mutually beneficial nature of a classroom – or kitchen.