What I realized as I made my nine year old cook dinner!

Binisha Shrestha
4 min readMay 12, 2020

Sometimes setting the rules does helps!

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Most of my friends know how my nine-year old boy is so fond of cooking and trying new recipes, watching those zillion YouTube videos and this quarantine life was a boon for doing those chores he likes. “Lay the blade sideways, then press down hard and the skin comes right of”. I watch as my son struggles to peel each tiny piece of skin off a garlic clove and then begrudgingly, he turns to the cutting board to try my method.

“Mom, I want to bake a cake!” He’d constantly plead to do things his way whenever I am in the kitchen as he’s been watching me spend two hours prepping, cooking, serving, and cleaning up from a dinner where I made six different dishes to please our friends like family of five. I sighed.

“Not right now, honey, I just finished cleaning up and it’ll be too much of a mess.” As if it were the answer he was expecting, he wandered off, probably to watch another episode of some annoying teensy show on Netflix.

Don’t get me wrong, I often let my son help me in the kitchen. I’m a pretty decent cook I let him do things I deemed acceptable for a nine-year-old, simple things like ingredient gathering, pouring, and mixing. I even let him to crack the eggs in spite of getting shells in the batter at first. I let him wash the bowls because he does a thorough job. In the beginning , I didn’t let him use the stove top or oven because he might get burned, but later he was good enough to do so as well.

I cannot think of a time that I have ever sat still in my kitchen. This lockdown has left us with so much free time, having to set aside all the school home-works and school-time for over a month now. My son, Praayush, is preparing his favorite- rice and fried potatoes with green beans- and I watch as he carefully minces garlic as I tell him to. I’m amazed he knows how to cook and that he’s old enough to do so. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was childproofing our kitchen, back in America with safety handles and knobs on the stove to prevent him from burning his tiny hands? And when did I grow old enough to muse “wasn’t it just yesterday…”?

Dinner has always been a special time for my family and home-cooked meals provided the glue that held all of us together as I decide to make a norm of how busy we are, we will have one meal together. Amidst the chaos, dinnertime was an aspect of our lives that remained unchanged. Of my two kids, Praayush being the eldest, has always been the least resistant to change and fittingly, the listener and the keeper of family traditions. Even though at the tender age of eight we moved from America to Nepal, he’d constantly remind me of rituals, we used to do, make shopping lists, taking care of his sister, asking me if I locked our main gate properly, if I put off the light at our corridors and he’d not ever complain me when there was no hot water when he showered, even though he was used to all the comfort back in America.

For him, and really for all of us, dinnertime was a time to connect as a family. No TV and cellphones were allowed. Even when me and my husband’s work schedules were different, we came back in different times, but a meal was always waiting. Though I learnt to handle the kitchen after only I had kids, cooking for them was my way of keeping us together, showing them love.

Now as I see him easily prepare a hot cup of tea, after I come back home, it makes me feel proud that my son will have these skills, this confidence in himself, for the rest of his life. And that, to me, is worth all the wasted eggs, the spilled milk, the messy kitchen.

So, dear parents, I encourage you to really stop and think when your children ask to do something (not just in the kitchen) that might result in them learning a new life skill.

Because for all the time and energy you may have to put in upfront, there is a huge payoff at the end. I know this because tomorrow I have an early morning zoom meeting — and I’m sitting here writing this article. Because guess what?

The dinner is being handled. My younger one will be fed and taken care of. And if I’m really good, he might even let me be the tester or clip off the note under the closed door — Mom, dinner is ready.

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Binisha Shrestha

Mama to two small people. Wife to a larger person. Entrepreneur/blogger/activist —Humble as ever but aware of my value!