Activity:
Your kid’s goal is to plan the menu for one dinner this week. Your involvement depends on their age. Because my kids are little, we’ll look at pictures and figure out a balanced menu together, but I’ll lean heavily on their input and simply make suggestions as we go. I’ll then work with them in the kitchen on the actual food prep. I love kid-oriented cookbooks for this because they break down which steps are best managed by the kids themselves.
Rationale:
Unlike most of our activities so far, this activity is asking your child to take on some of the labor of the family unit, and in doing so, to feel specific and targeted empathy for you.
Much has been made of cooking during the pandemic. On one hand people have taken up baking to the point of yeast and flour shortages; on the other, a growing chorus of home cooks are confessing their culinary fatigue. Helen Rosner’s recent meditation in The New Yorker on “The Joylessness of Cooking” struck a chord with me, as someone who loved to cook until perhaps even last month. One particularly stressful November week, during which both my husband and I were snowed under by work, we failed to plan any dinners at all, leaving us to scour the kitchen every night in a race to come up with something—anything—in the last hour before kid bedtime. At a cultural moment when cooking has come to feel particularly exhausting and demoralizing, then, it’s perhaps more relevant than ever that in the U.S., women do the vast majority of grocery shopping and meal prepping. A recent PEW study suggests that more than 70% of women handle both chores in their households. As Anne Helen Peterson recently wrote, moms do most of the family labor, which is both invisible and exponentially increased during the holiday season.
For this activity, then, we’re asking our kids to practice perspective-taking by taking our perspective. By planning a meal, they’re performing some of the labor of the family unit, and that labor is also being rendered visible. This is also a good opportunity to chat about all of the work that goes into making your family happy, how that labor is divided, and, perhaps, how they can help going forward.
Book Recommendation:
I recommend a child-focused cookbook for every family. We have gotten a lot of joy from ours, and the best preschool math in our household happens in the kitchen. We like Sesame Street Let’s Cook!, but there are many, and they all look great. Pick your favorite.
I’ll also take this opportunity to recommend Everybody Cooks Rice, by Norah Dooley & Peter J. Thornton. This book is excellent in that it shows what is similar across cultures (rice and table fellowship) while also illustrating differences (cooking technique and spicing). You can watch a read aloud here.
