3 tips to help your children make their own lunch

You may want to teach your children how to cook meals or at least prepare their lunch for school by themselves. The key to getting kids to do this is to make the process of preparing lunch simple so that they can learn to do it quickly and then remember how to do it again and again.

Create a menu

One way to provide motivation is to involve the children in planning their menu for their lunch. Perhaps for the first week, you could give each child an extra “treat” to put in their lunch each day or get the ingredients for their favorite sandwich.

The menu will not only involve the children in the lunch-making process from the start, but it will also give them guidelines to follow. They will already be thinking about all the things that they will include in their lunch before they even start to make it.

Step by step

When teaching children anything new, it’s best to take a slow and steady approach. Plan to move forward a little bit each day. On the first day, for example, you can make the lunches in front of the children and have them make certain that you include everything that is on the planned menu.

On the second day, you can repeat the same process, but have them get a couple of items themselves. Then, day by day, you will do less and less while they are more and more involved in the process. The goal should be to have them look at the planned menu and then assemble their entire lunch by themselves.

Teaching responsibility

An important part of this process is giving the kids the confidence to make their own lunches without your help. Certainly, when they start the phase where they are making their lunches without any direct help from you, you will want to check to make certain that everything that they need is inside their lunch. However, the ultimate goal is to have them do it all on their own without any input from you.

If you are concerned that your kids are missing something, you can check later when they are not around. Or you could stay with them once in awhile while they are making their lunches to make certain that they are still following the process and menu as you taught them.

If this step by step approach works for teaching your kids to make their lunches, then you could also apply the same idea to teach them to clean their rooms or perform other household tasks. Or, you could apply it to other meals, such as breakfast.