When you become a foster carer, you make a commitment to provide stability and love to all children in need that come into your home.
This will involve encouraging positive decisions, helping with education, and supporting mental health – all of which can be done by allowing your foster children to help out in the kitchen.
Welcoming your foster children into the kitchen has clear benefits. The simple act of cooking together will help with education, mental health, relationship building and other critical areas of life.
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This collaborative post shares 5 great reasons to cook with your foster kids.
5 reasons to cook with foster kids
1. Cooking supports education
When you first become a foster carer, you will attend a series of training sessions, which you can learn more about at fosterplus.co.uk. During these sessions, you will learn about how important education is when it comes to childhood development. A great way to provide educational opportunities to foster children is through cooking, which helps develop life skills, literacy, science, mathematics, and motor skills.
2. Cooking encourages healthy eating
Not every foster child you take care of will have been taught about the importance of healthy eating, and they may not have been provided with suitable meals. Therefore, you may need to spend time encouraging dietary changes, which can be facilitated by inviting your foster children into the kitchen.
When children are allowed to experiment in the kitchen, they have the chance to learn about the components of healthy food and explore tastes they may enjoy. As well as this, your foster child will most likely want to try any food they help cook.
3. Cooking can improve mental health
All children entering the foster system suffer some type of trauma, which can be expressed through low self-esteem, and depression. Whenever you have a foster child, it’s your duty to create a home environment designed to nurture positive mental well-being.
If you ask the experts at The Family Dinner Project, you’ll find that foster children who have the opportunity to get involved in the kitchen will begin to rebuild their confidence levels and boost their grades. As well as this, older children that are actively involved in the kitchen are said to be much less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol.
4. Cooking strengthens confidence and self-esteem
There’s a good chance that some of the children you’re responsible for will have low confidence and self-esteem levels, and they’ll need your unconditional support to start rebuilding these blocks. By welcoming your foster children into all aspects of running the kitchen including creating shopping lists, cooking, and cleaning up, you’ll provide a platform for self-esteem and confidence to grow.
5. Cooking helps form solid emotional connections
Sitting down as a family for meals has been proven to help create emotional connections, and the same goes for coming together to prepare and cook meals. All of the time spent as a family unit will be remembered forever by the children under your care. Also, by tackling activities in the kitchen together, you will all learn new information about each other, which will help foster children feel part of the family.
This is a collaborative post.
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