How learning to cook can empower your child

Tara Hunkin (00:00):
This is the My Child Will Thrive Podcast and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, Certified Gaps Practitioner, Restorative Wellness Practitioner and Mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, or learning disabilities. My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on, research I can dig into, and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey.

Tara Hunkin (00:46):
A quick disclaimer before we get started, My Child Will Thrive, is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you. Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't blindly implement each new treatment that comes along. No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child. The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions and making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty. Now on with the show,

Tara Hunkin (01:53):
Hi everyone and welcome back to the My Child Will Thrive Podcast. I am excited to introduce you today, Katie Kimball. Katie is the national voice of healthy kids cooking. She's a blogger, a former teacher, a mom of four kids who has founded the kid. The kids cook real food eCourse, which is amazing. And her blog, kitchen stewardship, which helps families stay healthy without going crazy, which is we like, and she's on a mission to connect families around healthy food and teach every child in America and beyond to cook. So that's the great thing about the internet. You can even reach beyond that now. So, Katie, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to have you here today because one of the biggest challenges we face as parents is getting our kids to enjoy eating healthy. So it's not just to get them to eat, but they, we want them to choose it for themselves as well. So yes. Can you tell me a little bit about how you started out? Like why did you create kitchen stewardship in the first place? Your blog.

Katie Kimball (03:04):
Yeah, I mean, I was raised by a mom who cooked probably a little more from scratch then, like the rest of the kids in my generation. And so I would have said like, my Mom's an amazing cook and she makes homemade bread and stuff like at Christmas. But it was, there was still a ton of processed food and like I had never cut an a pepper or fresh garlic or anything like that in my life until I got p. Yeah, for the first time. And you know, you just like realize that this little tiny life is depending on you for every single bite. And so that was like the very beginning of me sort of making a lot of little baby steps. And by the time baby number two was born, I had spent a lot of time in the kitchen, a lot of time at the cutting board, like thinking and processing.

Katie Kimball (03:48):
And I'm a former teacher, so it's just like, it comes really naturally to me to think about teaching other people everything I'm doing. And, and other moms around me were saying like, man, it's so hard. Like if I try to eat organic, it's too expensive. If I try to like make things from scratch, I don't have time for that. And so I felt, I felt other people's tension, like pulling you in all these directions. And I, and I would think as I'm chopping or cooking, preparing food in the kitchen, like, you know, there really are some habits and techniques you can do in the kitchen that like get everything, they're budget friendly, they don't take that much time and they're really nutritious and they're good for the environment. So those are the four pillars of kitchen stewardship where we try to find those habits to kind of meet in the middle.

Katie Kimball (04:30):
And that's the not going crazy part. Like how can you be healthy without completely losing your mind, your time and your budget and still take care of your family's nutrition and the environment. So that's where kitchen stewardship sort of grew out of was me wanting to just teach other people like, you can do this, give yourself grace. Just take those baby steps instead of trying to change everything all at once, which is a pretty solid recipe for failure. And, and just watch yourself grow. And so we, we dig into research a lot and share simple recipes and techniques there.

Tara Hunkin (04:57):
That's amazing. It is amazing how many of us, even in our generation, didn't learn to cook. And so it becomes obviously if you haven't even learned yourself or you know, only have some basic skills yourself, then to then try to pass that along actually we're passing the wrong thing along to the next generation, which is, and a lot of that is driven out of the lack of time that people feel like they have to do these things. So well I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit too. But let's talk about strategies around first of all that you found to help kids eat a healthier in general.

Katie Kimball (05:37):
I like to flip this question on its head a little bit because I think a lot of times when families struggle with healthy eating, we focus on the dinner table. We focused on the food we're eating them. And there are some really good strategies too for just kind of the how and why of eating at the dinner table. But I really think that it's even more effective and more powerful to rewind a little bit and forget the dinner table all together and talk about what we do before dinner even hits the table. Are we getting the kids involved in the kitchen when number one, there's no pressure to eat. That's huge because kids feel that like, Oh mom and dad want me to eat. And it's this big power struggle and it's confusing and I don't like it. But when you're in the kitchen that pressure's not there.

Katie Kimball (06:21):
And science also tells us that any exposure to food helps sort of fill that exposure bucket. And so especially for our very slow active eaters. They might need 157 exposures to a food, let's say broccoli before they're going to eat it. And that's a lot of little pieces of broccoli to put on your kid's plate, man. 157 like I'm tired just thinking about it. But if they shop for the food, wash the food, cut the food, serve the food, the, all those counts. So you can like fill that exposure bucket much quicker with less pressure on the child. So that's the second reason. So less pressure to eat, filling that exposure bucket and then feeling a sense of ownership, right? Like kids when they're involved with making the food, there's a certain sense of like an open