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Lenona Lenona is offline
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Default Slate: "How young can a child be and still learn how to cook?"

(Offhand, I didn't see this article in this group.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/f....single.htm l

First 2/5 or so:

By Nicholas Day - Posted Thursday, March 1, 2012, at 8:30 AM ET

If this article ends abruptly, it is because the child welfare
authorities are at the door: A preschooler in our house is chopping
carrots.

A few weeks ago in the New York Times, a mother wrote about how her
sons, ages 10 and 14, each cook dinner one night a week. It was a
lovely story, but instead of reading it and thinking, OK—only seven
more years, I thought, I can do better than that.

My son may be only 3, and barely 3, but he already wants to cook
dinner. There’s a surprising amount he can accomplish in the kitchen:
wash vegetables, destem mushrooms, crack eggs, knead dough, consume
enormous quantities of said dough. But he wants to do more. This is
logical: The kitchen is where we spend the most time, and like any
child, he can sense what his parents are excited about. He wants to
cook because we care about cooking. I want him to cook for the same
reason. I’m not pushing him; he’s pushing himself.

I’m not talking about the saffron-foaming, Iron Chef sort of kids’
cooking. When I need help in the kitchen, it is rarely because the
saffron needs foaming. I’m talking about the actual work of getting
dinner on the table.

You are cringing. I can see you cringing from here. You are thinking:
This is a very, very bad idea.

But wait: I can cite a famous dead academic! The great, tubercular
Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed the concept of “a zone of
proximal development,” for the work a child is not quite able to do on
his own. With the guidance of someone more skilled, though, he soon
can. With the exception of the oven, and a lot of the stove, much of
cooking amounts to a zone of proximal development, even for a
preschooler.

What’s surprising, or at least surprising to some of us, is how few
people have treated it this way. Advice about what children can do in
the kitchen usually devolves into advice about what they can’t do. It
answers only questions that no parent would ask: “According to the
University of Illinois, deep fryers are highly dangerous and children
should not be in the kitchen when deep fryers are in use.”

Almost no one has a good answer to the question of when children can
make a real contribution in the kitchen—the actual work of getting
dinner on the table. Instead, cookbooks for children seem to treat the
eighth birthday as endowing some sort of mystical kitchen
capabilities. But.......

(snip)


Lenona.