Kids of all ages can get involved with meal planning! This is an excellent way to bond more as a family and find a way to save you time with the tasks that most parents have to deal with. Today we’ll show you some of the simple ways your kids can start helping with meal planning so that you can spend time doing other important parental tasks in the home.
Set Favorite Meals
Before you start your monthly or weekly meal plan, ask the kids what their favorite meals are. Try to include some of your kids’ favorite meals so that they’re interested in meal prep and cooking if they’re old enough to cook their favorite meals.
Put the kids’ favorite meals on your meal planning list and add the necessary ingredients to your grocery shopping list.
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Give the Kids Weekly Fliers
Allow your kids to have a simple budget amount that they can “spend” while surfing the weekly fliers from your local grocery store. See what type of grocery lists each of your kids come up with as you work to teach them how to plan a meal plan and the grocery shopping trip for the meal plan.
Don’t forget to have your kids clip coupons from the internet, the grocery store fliers, or other areas that you use for coupons!
Let the Kids have the List
Take your kids grocery shopping with you and allow them to be in charge of shopping. Do this with them so they can start to understand the layout of the store and the costs involved with feeding a family. You can have one kid use a calculator and others handle the list. If you have multiple kids, just split the list up among the siblings with one sibling in charge of the calculations.
This is an excellent way to get your kids involved with all aspects of meal planning from shopping to planning the meals.
Allow The Kids to Cook
Lastly, don’t forget to have your kids help you with the prep of the cooking part of this meal planning. Some of your meal planning meals may need prep to be ready to just bake or cook and serve. Allow your kids to take part in this step so that they can learn the life skill of cooking, budgeting, and meal planning from start to finish.
Following these steps will help your kids be so involved with the groceries and meal planning in your home that soon they can start to do most of this on their own, especially once they reach the teen years.