Kitchen Additions to Tempt in Your Kids

Whether cooking, loading the dishwasher or simply pottering about and maintaining your kitchen’s good hygiene, you can often be the only person in your kitchen as your children relax in their rooms, or watching TV in the lounge. This can manifest itself a little on the lonely side, especially for those who work and have little time to spend with their little nippers. By adding some features your kids will love to your kitchen, you’ll be able to entice your children to spend time with you in a room that is usually devoted to domestic tasks so that you’re able to relax with – and keep an eye on – your loved ones more of the time.

Art Supplies

Children love to create, and parents love to see their kids’ creations, so your house should contain a cupboard or a drawer in which all sorts of art materials can be found. Relocating this storage space into the kitchen kills two birds with a single stone: it’ll make the kitchen table the hub of your children’s creative exploits, while also confining any mess made into a room which is probably best-suited to cleaning after messy painting sessions.

Adding soft cushions to the kitchen chairs will mean your kids are happy to plonk themselves down for creative fun, while adding some music to proceedings – perhaps through a stereo sound system or just a portable speaker – will create a fun and energetic atmosphere that can sometimes feel a little difficult to generate in a large and sterile kitchen. By having the kitchen as the space for creating art, you’ll be able to potter around performing domestic duties while watching and inspiring your kids to draw, paint, write or sculpt.

Recipes Kids Can Follow

Cooking is one of life’s essential skills and is often only developed when your children leave home to go to university or college, or to commence their life out in the real world. Kindling an interest in culinary tricks in your children while they’re younger is a fabulous way to make cooking less laborious and thankless and more of an exciting communal activity that your children are put in charge of.

The best place to start is probably baking cookies or cakes – something kids will enjoy in terms of the messy preparatory stage, the bowl-licking stage, and of course the final product. From there, find some child-friendly recipes online or invest in a kid’s cookbook, and take the back seat in meal preparation, overseeing your children as they work out what the instructions entail for a pasta bake. There’s an important aspect of supervision to this method of tempting your children into the kitchen, of course: for younger kids, it’s best to set the rule that they’re not allowed to operate dangerous equipment – that’s something for grown-ups to do!

Add a TV

Most households in the US possess at least one TV in the modern era, and this is ordinarily located in the lounge, where your children will relax after school on the couch, catching up with their favorite cartoons. When you’re in the kitchen and your children are elsewhere watching the television, you can feel a little isolated – they may not even hear you call for them. Instead, consider setting up a small TV set in the kitchen that can entertain you as well as the children, so, at the times where you may watch television, the family will spend more time in the same room.

If you’re not keen on having a TV in the kitchen, which is understandable if that’s where you take your meals as a family, then a laptop with access to Netflix or other online TV streaming sites can do the job just as well, especially if the same facilities are not available on your family’s main television set. Spending time with your children in the kitchen with the promise of entertainment can work both ways of course, as they’ll be present yet engaged in a show, but for moms who want to keep an eye on their offspring, it’s the simplest way to have your children under your supervision while you cook or clean.

Exciting New Utilities

A kitchen will have the likes of a toaster, a kettle, a built-in oven, a microwave and hobs as standard to help with your everyday cooking needs. But it’s when pushing the boat out slightly with new and exciting additions to your culinary toolkit that you may tempt your children to spend more time in the kitchen. There’s plenty out there in terms of safe and novel kitchen facilities that children will love to use; do your research to find helpful items that your kids will really appreciate.

Perhaps the best example of this sort of kitchen addition is the kind of ice products that will be a source of cooling comfort in the summer. This will especially be the case after an afternoon in the sun. From ice cream makers to shaved ice machines, click here to discover more about the range of options available to you to enhance the output of your kitchen while delighting your kids – and, in the case of ice cream makers, save you a good deal of money in the long-run, too.

Homework Central

When your kids begin to bring home some work to perform in the evenings after school – often with a lot of groaning and huffing and puffing – you’ll want to be there to help them with questions and to understand what they’re learning at that moment in time. Whether it be simple math or literacy, establishing the kitchen as the homework hub will mean that your children are there with you while you’re putting together their meals, asking you cute questions whenever they get stuck.

Adding a pot of pens and pencils to the kitchen table, as well as scrap paper and other stationery, will set up the sort of young scholar vibes that your children will learn to associate with homework time. In between the breaks in your cooking – like when a dish is bubbling over the hob, or you’ve closed the oven door for 30 minutes – you’ll be able to look over your children’s shoulders to check on how they’re performing in their homework.

The kitchen need not be a solitary place; entice your children to spend more time in the kitchen, making it your household’s chief social space, so that you get to spend more time with your nearest and dearest.

Thanks to Ana Apostolska