If you have young kids who fancy themselves chefs and like to spend time in the kitchen with you, one of your top priorities for setting up and designing your kitchen space should be to create an area where they can really tap into their culinary creativity in a safe and enjoyable way. But in order to do this, you likely need to have a few changes to your space.

To help you in doing this, here are three tips for making your kitchen friendly to young chefs. 

Keep Things Closer To The Floor

When you’re setting up a kitchen for yourself to use, it makes sense for you to keep things at a convenient level for you to use. So when you’re wanting to make your kitchen easily accessible to your kids, you’re going to want to make sure that you move certain things to be at their level. Otherwise, they could wind up needing a lot more help in the kitchen than they really should. 

Ideally, you should try to keep any plastic items or tools meant just for the kids to use in lower shelves or drawers. This way, they can easily reach them and start cooking without needing too much assistance. You could also consider putting some foods and ingredients in lower areas, too, so that your kids can really do the whole cooking process from start to finish on their own. 

Let Them Help From Start To Finish

If your kids aren’t really ready to actually take on some recipes all by themselves yet, you should see what you can do to get their help when you’re making recipes for the family. But rather than just having your kids do the easy or fun parts, you should seek to include them in all parts of cooking from start to finish. 

To get your kids to want to eat the food they’re cooking, they should choose which recipes they want to make. They can then help you get the ingredients and put the ingredients together before any of the real cooking starts. Next, they should get to participate in all aspects of cooking so that they can see the whole thing come together. 

Make Cleanup Easy

Cooking in general can be messy. But when you include your kids in the tasks, cooking can really turn your kitchen into a disaster. So if your little ones are going to help with preparing and eating the food, they should help with cleaning up as well. 

To make this easier on everyone, make sure your kids know where things go in the kitchen so that they can put things away. You can also teach them how to properly clean up messes from cooking, like spills or splatters. 

If you want to encourage your kids to cook in the kitchen with you or by themselves, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you set your kitchen up for this.

Anna Jones
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