Little ones love playing pretend and, especially, playing kitchen because they want to emulate their adults. I’m a big fan of getting my kiddo involved in what I’m doing around the house, including preparing food. Children learn and have fun while helping out.
When you feel your child is ready, getting your little one to help out around the kitchen can be a great way to give them more responsibility – with supervision – and spend more time together. If you have older kiddos, even better. It can be a group activity!
Stepping Up
When my son started wanting to participate in the kitchen, my first concern was finding a way for him to safely reach the counter. We found a wood kitchen tower, which creates a standing platform with a guardrail. Ours is collapsible, so we can store it out of the way in our small apartment. Kitchen towers can be a bit pricey, ranging from $100 to over $200, but I’ve found them on Facebook Marketplace for much less
The tower allows bubba to climb up and down on his own during kitchen prep. He also isn’t shy about letting us know when he wants to get his tower out. The tower has been instrumental in getting my son involved in the kitchen. Even when he was still too little to be involved in a lot of the cooking, he just loved being able to see what we were doing.
Baking was our first kitchen activity (outside of helping with dishes/splashing around in the sink), starting with cornbread.. He helped pour in the measuring cup of milk and the mix. He helped stir the ingredients together. We were able to watch with the oven light as it all came together. When it was done and ready to eat, he squeezed honey all over the bread that he helped make.
(Childproof) Knives Out!
Once our son got more comfortable around the kitchen, we introduced a set of childproof knives. The set came with a couple plastic knives that look like regular kitchen knives. It also included one wooden chopper and one metal crinkle vegetable chopper. These tools were easy for him to hold, and he got busy!
Now that he is a bit older and has handled those childproof tools, we’ve moved on to more conventional looking – but still safe – tools. I started out just giving him vegetable scraps to practice with. I realized he was a lot more likely to eat his fruit if he had cut it up himself. Once we caught on to that, we encouraged him to help with dinner every night!
All we had to say: “You made it yourself! You know it’s going to taste good!”
Go Easy
Finding ways to keep those kiddos active, involved and learning is always a plus. But we all have a lot on our plate just surviving in 2026 as parents of little ones. It’s okay to admit feeling exhausted.
Combining a required task with your kiddo isn’t always conducive to the amount of available time. Maybe your day was really stressful and long, and you just want to get dinner out of the way. That’s ok, too! Work up to involving your little ones.
There is a lot of pressure on parents. So I just want to say: You’re doing a great job.
Sophie Hamel is a freelance writer and works in advocacy for victims of interpersonal violence. Her son is two-and-a-half years old.
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