About a year ago a co-worker of mine explained that she had to hit the store after work. Her 12-year-old had a shopping list that needed to be filled in order for her to make dinner that night. My first thought was, Who runs that house — you or the 12-year-old? But that thought was quickly replaced by, Wait, so you don’t have to make dinner tonight? Turns out her brood of three have each been making their own dinner once a week for years now.

This got me thinking, could I somehow employ my four- and five-year-old to help out in the kitchen? It sounded like more work than benefit. Truth be told, there is a lot of Mom labor front-loaded when it comes to empowering your kids to contribute to meal prep. However, if my friend is an example of the potential, one day dinner could be as laid back as hitting the grocery store and handing over the wooden spoon.

With this in mind I started putting my kids to work. Their attitudes were great. Heck, they have always wanted to help in the kitchen. However, the execution was rough. We hear a lot about the importance of developing our little ones’ fine motor skills, but until you attempt to cut vegetables with a four-year-old, you don’t know how truly important they are!

I thought I could just pass the kid a cutting board and a butterknife and all would be fine. I was wrong. Many fruits were bruised, smushed, and made inedible before I learned that young children and adults require different tools to accomplish the same goal.

The good news is child-size kitchen tools are readily accessible online. Thanks to educational philosophies like Montessori, which place an importance on developing real world skills and hands-on learning, there are a variety of options available that take everyday tools like knives, potato peelers and dough cutters, and modify them for safe, but effective child use.

You can get a decent starter kit for around $20. I selected one that included a set of metal cookie cutter style shapes.

These aren’t necessary for food prep, but I like the whimsical option because it has made cutting slices of cheese, and meat into common shapes a fun way to help my youngest identify shapes, while motivating her to eat the harder sells, like protein.

I would love to say that my kids are slamming out lasagna and spaghetti left and right, but at their level they are still operating as sous chefs. What type of tasks can your four- to six-year-old do in the kitchen? With a kit like the one described above you can put them to work peeling soft vegetables such as zucchini or cucumber. They can slice avocado, olives, mushrooms, etc., to help you prep a salad or stir fry, and they can stir, stir, stir, when it’s time to bake.

These are great ways to start involving your kids in the kitchen. Once they have mastered the fine motor skills needed to help with these tasks, you can start teaching them new tips and tricks, like how to measure liquids, operate a can

opener and crack an egg. (Hint: don’t let them do it directly into the cake batter like I did — shells for days!)

Working on the stove can be awkward when you can barely see over it, so a great way to grow cooking skills between ages 6 and 10 is to lean hard into baking. Casseroles, biscuits, cookies, etc. These are all great options for showing the cooking process from start to finish and they don’t require your child to balance on a stool overlooking a hot stove.

My coworker’s 12-year-old began her kitchen journey at age seven. Her first recipe? A fruit pizza. Now, five years into her tenure as house chef, she is known to tackle complicated recipes like steamed bao dumplings, blueberry ricotta pancakes and beef stroganoff made entirely from scratch. Inviting your kids into the kitchen can be daunting, and messy, but it can also be rewarding, helpful — and delicious!