Overview: If you’ve got budding chefs in your family, the most trusted names in cooking offer rich resources for them and for you. The Food Network, America’s Test Kitchen, and PBS are among the best choices for recipes and cooking science for kids.
Cooking is both fun and a useful life skill, and in recent years, some great resources have been developed specifically for kids. Yet like everything else on the internet, finding a trusted source can be difficult. Here are three sites we like, with guidance on finding more.
1. America’s Test Kitchen
America’s Test Kitchen, or ATK as it’s known to fans, is strongly focused on the science of food. Viewers learn how to prepare a recipe as well as the reasons why that recipe works better than others.
Its kids’ site, though, is where it really shines. ATK not only offers recipes kids can easily prepare with minimal help from adults, but science activities as well — ingredient tips, quizzes, educational articles, and a lot more. Even if you don’t have an aspiring chef in the family, you may want to keep it in your bookmarks for rainy days when you’re short of crafting ideas.
ATK also has a show on PBS available on streaming platforms for families to watch, as well as a magazine, Cook’s Country, that’s fairly well rounded and geared toward older readers. We recommend watching on a tablet to make it easy to cook along.
2. Cooking With Kids from PBS
PBS Kids is one of the most respected educational brands out there, and this extends to their cooking site. Unlike ATK, this is specifically a recipe site, with hundreds of recipes to try out from cuisines around the world, sorted under a “Cooking With Kids” theme.
Probably the most useful feature sits at the top of the site. PBS offers a recipe guide that you can easily click through to find ideas for young chefs, which can be sorted by course, occasion, type of cuisine, and theme.
Some recipes require the help of an adult, especially if younger kids are looking for something to cook. And some recipes have ingredients that may challenge younger palates. But for kids who have a strong interest in cooking, it’s a site that will grow with their passion.
3. Food Network’s Cooking With Kids
Straddling the line between serious cooking and the fun crafts-style food you’ll see on Instagram, Food Network’s kids page is useful for both rainy days and teaching the life skills kids need. The site itself is a mix of kid-friendly recipes, articles for parents about better food choices in a world full of snacks, cute food ideas, and articles on teaching basic cookery like knife skills. It’s one of the more video-oriented sites, making it useful if you like to cook along.
For the Truly Obsessed
If your family would like to go deeper into the world of cooking for kids, we recommend looking for kid-friendly cooking classes online, such as these recommendations from Spruce Eats. YouTube can also be a useful source of information, but remember that YouTube is driven by clicks and gimmicks. It may be hard to separate the caviar from the crumbs.
If you choose to explore YouTube’s cooking channels, we recommend using parental controls and teaching kids what they need to know to stay safe on the site.
Screen Time Has Your Back
At Screen Time, we want to help you guide your kids toward better digital decisions. The internet is a rich resource for educational content, wholesome entertainment, and family fun, and we’ll help you find them. But we also know that unhealthy content and too much screen time can be harmful to kids.
Our goal is to help families find the digital sweet spot — the right balance of screen time and time spent doing other healthy activities, like pursuing hobbies and exploring the outdoors. We offer parental monitoring software to help families find that balance because we know that busy parents can often use a helping hand.
To learn more about what Screen Time can do for your family, follow our blog or try Screen Time for free.
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