Why Kids Need Knife Skills

Once I stumbled across some comments on an older blog post about letting kids help in the kitchen. Commenters insisted that they would never let their kids use knives, or would limit them to only butter knives or dull cutting utensils until at least age twelve.

Different strokes for different folks and all that, but my kids have been using a variety of knives and learning to cook since they were toddlers. In my view, kids can learn valuable lessons when allowed to take risks.

Of course, parental judgment is good and necessary. But what if we prepared kids with skills and safe limits rather than saying “no”?

Is It Safe for Kids to Learn Knife Skills?

I must confess, I used to err very much on the side of caution when it came to kids and knives, until I started finding research that delaying a child’s ability to learn to use sharp objects like knives can actually interfere with their psychological development and is akin to “delaying potty training until school age.”

What was that?

I was surprised too, but after some research and careful trial with my research team (aka my kids) in our lab (aka my kitchen), I have to agree that not only are kids capable of using “real knives” at a much younger age than I expected but that there do seem to be some psychological benefits as well.

Knives = Bad, TV = Safe?

This is the other surprising disconnect that I’ve noticed in recent years that has become more and more apparent… we shelter our children from important real life skills that have a small element of danger (like using a knife safely, climbing trees, playing outside by themselves, or riding a bike to the park) but give them easy access to “safe” things that are proven to be very harmful developmentally (like too much screen time, a sedentary lifestyle, etc).

Our kids can work an iPad like a pro but not use a kitchen knife (except for that they probably can, we just don’t let them). They can dominate at Candy Crush  but can’t do common household tasks like mopping a floor, loading a dishwasher, and doing laundry.

We limit kids from any task where they could get hurt, make a mess, or that we could “do more quickly.” Then we wonder why they balk when we eventually expect them to help out and why they lack the desire to do these things themselves.

Benefits of Letting Kids Use Knives

As parents, it is easy to see knives as a dangerous object just waiting to remove the finger/hand/arm of our children or lead them to certain impalement, but objectively, a knife is just a common and very useful kitchen tool. Yes, it can lead to harm if used incorrectly, but then so can a stove, oven, spiral slicer, vegetable peeler, or broom handle in the wrong hands.

On the flip side, a kitchen knife (and other common tools that we often shield a child from) doesn’t just represent a kitchen tool, but a step on the road to independence.

As parents, we have to ask at the end of the day: is our real job is to keep our children “safe” at all times or to raise them to be independent and capable adults? I’d argue the latter.

In fact, in many parts of the world, children are routinely allowed to interact with “dangerous” tools such as knives, hammers, mortars and pestles, and others from as young as age 2 (and even younger in some places!).

Learning Risk Assessment and Independence

This may seem like blanket heresy in our overprotective society, but hear me out…

Exposing children to situations that teach them at a young age to gauge risk accurately actually helps protect them in the long run. Children learn by trying (and sometimes failing) just how far they can jump, how to fall safely, and how to use tools (like knives) correctly.

Yes, there will be skinned knees and small cuts along the way (what child hasn’t fallen down and gotten hurt when learning to walk?), but we all managed to survive the horrors of a skinned knee and our children can too. More importantly, they need these experiences to teach them independence and resilience and that minor setbacks aren’t the end of the world.

From the article, “American Parents Have Got It All Backwards”:

Ellen Hansen Sandseter, a Norwegian researcher at Queen Maud University in Norway, has found in her research that the relaxed approach to risk-taking and safety actually keeps our children safer by honing their judgment about what they’re capable of. Children are drawn to the things we parents fear: high places, water, wandering far away, dangerous sharp tools. Our instinct is to keep them safe by childproofing their lives. But “the most important safety protection you can give a child,” Sandseter explained when we talked, “is to let them take… risks.”

Countries where children are given freedom to take risks develop a well-honed sense of risk assessment. Rather than keep their children indoors, countries like Sweden and Norway design their cities to enable safe walking and biking. This one of the factors that allows them to have some of the lowest child injury rates in the world.

Raising Helpers Who Aren’t Helpless

There is also a theory in psychology that the declining number of children per family in modern times has led us to think of our children as “precious treasures to be protected” rather than future helpers to be nurtured.

Don’t get me wrong, I consider my children the most precious gift I’ve ever received. I am grateful to have been given these years to spend with them and raise them as responsible members of society. Over time, I’ve also come to realize that doing too much for them denies them the chance to contribute in a meaningful way to our family. This will actually hurt them in the long run as they move into contributing to society.

Now it’s one of my parenting mantras: I don’t do anything for them they can do themselves. I made a list of skills my kids need to know to take care of themselves by the time they leave home, and this dictates age-appropriate responsibilities they can help with. These include basic tasks like cleaning, cooking, sewing on buttons, and changing a car tire.

Using a knife safely and correctly is an incredibly useful skill and one that I use daily, even outside the kitchen.

Helps Reinforce Healthy Eating Habits

When it comes to letting children help prepare food and use knives and other tools, there is another direct benefit that can’t be overstated:

Letting kids help prepare food makes them more likely to eat it.

Processed foods often require little or no preparation, but nutrient-dense whole foods have to be washed, peeled and cut. It has been my universal experience with my children that the more a child is able to help prepare a meal, the more likely he or she is to eat it.

In fact, our 7-year-old and 9-year-old started to prepare meals for the family themselves on occasion (especially weekend meals) and have become adventurous cooks and adventurous eaters in the process.

Involving the kids in all aspects of meal prep has shifted the conversation about new foods from “ewww… what is that” to “how do you cook that and what kind of recipes do you use it in?”

This winter the older kids peeled and grated carrots, kohlrabi, onions, and other vegetables and made a vegetable soup from scratch. And they ate it. And loved it.

In countries like Japan, France, Korea, and others, there are no separate foods for children and no such things as kids menus. Children are expected to eat when adults eat and to eat what the adults eat. In most places, children aren’t even given snack time or food between meals.

Letting children help prepare the food provides a natural sense of anticipation and a more adventurous spirit when it is time to eat. Avoiding snacks or kid-specific foods lets children feel a natural sense of hunger and develop self-control while waiting for meals.

In my experience, there is the least frustration with meals and the least complaining about food when our children are allowed to be involved in every aspect of food, from planning to purchasing to preparation.

How to Teach Kids Knife Skills

Letting our kids use knives has been an interesting growing experience for our family. This is just one representative step in the ladder of independence, but we’ve found it is an important and much anticipated one for our children.

To clarify, we aren’t giving toddlers machetes or giving any child unsupervised access to knives, but rather making it a priority to spend time teaching our kids to safely use knives in the kitchen as part of preparing meals for the family.

I use this great course called Kids Cook Real Food that teaches children how to safely use knives and other kitchen tools and how to make many types of foods. My kids have loved the knife skills class especially. They are offering an incredible deal right now, so check it out!

The result? Our older kids are even now using my Wusthof kitchen knives to safely chop and prepare food and look forward to this time each day.

And since my husband started an outdoor equipment company and makes his own knives, our kids get even more access to sharp objects!

Here are some other tools and recipes that helped along the way:

• Natural Kitchen Essentials List: My Most Used Tools and Appliances (+ suggestions for kid-friendly tools)
• 12 Easy Recipes Kids Can Cook
• Simple Batch Cooking Meal Plan
• 35+ Healthy Lunch & Snack Ideas (Kids Will Eat!)

Are there ever minor cuts and accidents? Of course, but then again, I’ve been known to slice a finger while cooking every once in a while and I’ve survived… so will they!

What do you think? Do you let your kids use knives?