One day I walked into the kitchen after a day in the office to see my deep burgundy upholstered chairs and a brand new wooden dining table literally covered in flour. I don’t need to mention the state of the high pile run underneath. I was speechless - and that doesn’t happen very often, trust me. I think that our Au pair (a lovely, caring and clearly creative girl) saw the sheer terror in my eyes and just whispered: “I am sorry. We were making a cake with boys.” My boys, at the time 2.5 year old Vito and 4.5 year old Kai, were sitting on a kitchen top, mixing the said cake, getting it ready to put into the muffin tin. They were covered with flour from heads to toes, and they were beaming with joy :)

When I took their clothes off later and shook them up, I created a flour cloud in the garden. But they were so happy. They felt accomplished when the muffins already ended up in the oven. And they were extremely proud when they could later serve their creation for all of us to taste.

Beside acquiring life long skills so early on, there are tonnes of benefits of engaging your kids in cooking activities.

It has long been recognised in early years curriculum around the world. Montessori nurseries and forward thinking schools are investing in cooking facilities and teacher training. Countless scholar articles, blogs and professional analyses have been written to outline the benefits of exposing young people to cooking. Some of those, directly observed by me with my two boys include:

Oh, that can be a very funny one! You can get one over them here ;-) When you engage kids enough, they become little explorers themselves; they want to taste and smell absolutely anything! And apart from the fact that it is building their openness to trying different foods easily, it can give you as a parent or carer so much fun at their expense. I am sure most little kids have already tasted a lemon and millions of funny videos are in the space to prove it, but try to give them some garlic to taste, or an onion, or some real cocoa, or raw cauliflower. Their facial expressions are priceless.

Smelling fresh vegetables can also be a very interesting experience. I tried with leek, all spice, cinnamon stick, vanilla extract, melting butter, melting chocolate, cooking garlic with onions - options of exploration are endless.

Allowing children to touch the food, raw, cooked, ready or not, all sorts of ingredients that come into the dish can be a mind blowing experience for them. How often do you allow yourself to “play” with food? Well, try. See for yourself as most likely you don’t remember it too well from your early years. Put your hand in the yogurt, mix the meat with your hands, squeeze that mince beef through your fingers, break the egg with your fingers, pick up freshly cooked pasta. That’s life!

On a more serious note though, for children sensory play is one of the most pleasant and satisfying experiences. There are whole playgroups dedicated to sensory play alone! Experiencing different textures, temperature, consistencies provides some serious benefits:

• Sensory play builds nerve connections within the developing brain’s neural pathways, which trigger a child’s inclination for and ability in competing more complex learning tasks

• Sensory play supports language development, cognitive growth, motor skills, problem solving skills, and social interaction

• Sensory play aids in developing and enhancing memory functioning

• Sensory play is great for calming an anxious or frustrated child

• Sensory play helps children learn vitally important sensory attributes (hot, cold, sticky, dry, etc.)

But don’t get me wrong, it can easily turn into the very bad, or even ugly experience when they end up with a pot of yogurt on their head or when the curious hands mix that cake just a bit too vigorously and it all lands on the kitchen top and the floor, not even mentioning your own clothes.

Oh! The whole blog could be written just about that! How amazing for math skills development is cooking. Weighing, measuring, counting, understanding of size and relation of objects (big, smaller, smallest), understanding of an order (first, second, third), understanding of shape (round, square, rectangle, 3D), understanding of measuring scales (grams, kilograms, milliliters, liters and so on).

Kids don’t even know that they are learning some of the basic vital skills, physics laws and relations, but trust me, it will pay off at school later on!