The Gift of Teaching Your Teens to Cook

Most parents work in some capacity these days and even if they don’t, life is busy. Sometimes it is just easier to do things yourself rather than ask your teen for help, such as providing all the meals and food daily. 

Many parents see this as their job or one of the basic functions that they are required to do for their teen each day. However, one of the greatest gifts or life skills you can transfer to your teen is an interest in healthy food (without being obsessed), an understanding of food budgeting and sourcing, as well as the ability to cook at least basic items such as an egg, spaghetti bolognese, grilled salmon and perhaps a homemade pizza loaded with veggies. 

A recommendation I make to clients, is in the primary years, taking your child to the supermarket at least once a week and asking them to name or choose food, particularly fruit and vegetables (stay out of the lolly and chocolate aisle!).  Getting them to help with chopping, mixing and stirring as part of meal preparation is a fun way to get them connecting with cooking. 

In years 7-10, start asking your teen to help decide what to eat a few nights a week and discuss with them what processed versus unprocessed foods are. In the holidays, encourage them to cook a meal end to end for the family. 

By years 10-12, you can encourage them to find a recipe, work out a budget, purchase the food and cook for the family ideally once per week. The school holidays are a great time to start this. 

The goal is by the end of school your teen can make approximately three breakfast type meals and three dinner meals. Note, the dinner meals can be recycled for lunch, because who doesn’t love leftovers!

Research shows that learning cooking skills in high school has a huge positive influence on healthy food intake and nutrition knowledge (Bailey, CJ et al., 2019) and should, in theory reduce the reliance on take-away meals and UberEats although this has not actually been studied.  Youth aged 18-34 are the largest consumers of meals via UberEats and some of the issues with this are a high calorie intake (approximately 1/3 more than what you would consume in a home cooked meal), quality control of ingredients (e.g., type of protein and oils used) and of course cost. 

A Deakin University student did a really interesting experiment of eating only UberEats meals for one week then cooking the exact same meals the following week https://this.deakin.edu.au/self-improvement/can-you-sustain-a-diet-of-only-eating-ubereats. The cost difference was significant with the weekly cooking costing $79.35 and for the exact same meals via Uber eats $157.49. UberEats is NOT budget friendly! I’m not suggesting you never have take out or convenience meals but it should be a treat rather than the norm when a parent is not available to provide food. If you don’t have time or capacity to teach your teen to cook, then consider a cooking class as a gift for birthday or holiday season. There are plenty of great schools around that offer teen specific classes. 

Edwina Ekins is a qualified practising Nutritionist, Nutritional scientist, food blogger and educator with a Master’s in nutrition from Deakin University. She is currently doing a Masters of Youth Mental Health via Melbourne University.