5 Ways Cooking Builds Resilience in Children

Cooking poses various challenges and setbacks; from forgetting to put baking powder in the cupcakes, making the pizza base and realising that you have run out of tomato puree, burnt toast, the list can go on! The big emotions associated with these are valid but the ability recover from challenges and setbacks is an essential life skill.

Resilience is the ability to adapt in difficult situations. Cooking provides a banquet of opportunities to build resilience in children. Clumsy Kobe, one of The Genius Gang, loves cooking but is very accident prone! Cooking is a great way for him to learn the skills to develop resiliency, here's how:

1. Lets children take 'healthy' risks

Cooking is full of 'healthy' risks; ranging from, learning about the importance of hand hygiene to using sharp tools like vegetable peelers and knives safely.

2. Teaches children to manage their emotions

Cooking has been proven to make children happier. Cooking sparks conversations, helps bonding & focuses the mind on achievement.

Cooking develops self-awareness, self-management and social awareness. These skills allow children to recognise and cope with their emotions. Challenge for children: Make homemade pizza faces to describe a situation

3. Teaches children to bounce back from disappointment

Minor disasters happen from time to time when cooking.

This could be forgetting to put the baking powder in the cupcakes. Cooking teaches children that when things go awry, they have the power to be flexible to keep going to achieve a good outcome regardless. Challenge for children: the cupcakes have turned out a lot flatter than expected, can we turn them into mini fruit flans?

4. Develops problem-solving skills

Cooking gives children the opportunity to come up with solutions to a problem when they encounter a new challenge. Children can brainstorm ideas, weigh the pros and cons of each to solve a problem.

Challenge for children: "What can we use as a pizza base when we have run out of flour but still want to make a pizza?

5. Teaches children to keep working on their skills

Cooking encourages children to keep practicing their skills with the understanding that they can and will get better. This is a great way of developing a child's confidence.

Challenge for children: '' Great job, those pancakes are delicious! Let's have another go on Saturday for breakfast, this time, we will try using a ladle for the pancake batter'

Little Genius Club is passionate about promoting healthy eating and educating children. Our cooking kits are designed to help children develop life-skills and help children gain an of understanding how food impacts their brain and body health, while providing lots of opportunity for educational fun.

Have you meet the rest of Little Genius Club's Genius Gang? Their amazing discoveries in the kitchen and beyond are all helping to ignite their inner creativity and innovation. There is a banquet of life skills learnt from the learning activities that the Genius Gang get their hands into; everyone can get a slice of the pie!