Consequences of Cooking with Kids: Eating the Same but Behaving Better

It is widely assumed that involving children in meal preparation is associated with better family nutrition. This is more often anecdotally made than empirically shown. A survey study of 179 families showed that while involving children in meal preparation is associated with kids eating more vegetables (F (1, 146) = 12.79, p = .000), it is generally unrelated to how often they eat salad (p = .72), fruit (p = .15) or even deserts (p = .42) and prepared foods (p = .49). Importantly, however, involving kids in cooking was found to be related to various beneficial behavioral outcomes, such as their acceptance of variety (e.g frequency with which child eats a variety of foods, F (1,145 = 9.68, p = .002) and numerous measures of family cohesion (such as remaining at the table until everyone is through eating dinner, F (1, 143 = 6.43, p = .01). In contrast to common wisdom, these findings suggest that involving kids in meal preparation is related more to how families eat than to what they eat.