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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – I spent a morning last week at a showcase for the finalists in the 2012 Toy of the Year Awards. This annual affair looks at children’s toys, divided into categories, and finalists are evaluated based on fairly rigorous criteria including creativity, new technology and safety. I wanted to see if any of the finalists were food-related toys. Toys that relate to food, cooking and grocery shopping can teach children a great deal about good eating.
I came away from the event wondering – why are all toy kitchen sets pink? As I walked down the street and saw the Lord & Taylor animated holiday windows, there was a setting of a mother cooking Christmas dinner and a young girl on a chair helping. The boy in the family was off in the corner playing with his dog.
Cooking, eating and the foods we introduce to our children are a central part of family life. Yet, in this era of perceived gender-neutrality, cooking is still represented as a female activity, even though most successful chefs are men. You wonder how these chefs became interested in cooking.
The kitchen is a wonderful learning laboratory for children of any age, but young children in particular delight in being kitchen helpers. These experiences can form the foundation of food choices and healthy habits. Asking your child to help cook can explore many topics – cleanliness, food safety, kitchen safety, colors, sorting, fine motor skills, and tasting new foods. Creating a recipe is a math project. Add, divide, multiply – all these play into placing ingredients into a bowl and portioning quantities into a pan. Timing a recipe reinforces telling time. And eating your creation is the final reward.
Finding creative toys that use a food theme can be challenging. Too many involve making cookies, cupcakes, and ice cream-type foods. But there are some good choices out there. Melissa and Doug have long been known for their solid wooden toys and puzzles. They offer a fruit basket with pre-cut fruits velcroed together along with a wooden knife to let toddlers successfully cut up the fruits. Though they make cookie and birthday cake kits, they also offer pizza, stir-fry, sushi, and food group sets. These are inventive toys to introduce toddlers and preschoolers to good food choices as well as colors, shapes and sorting categories. A preschool teacher told me that her students would compete for the opportunity to play with the fruit basket where the child sliced the fruits apart on a cutting board.
Two of the 2012 Toy of the Year finalist related to food – Dora’s Fiesta Favorites Kitchen by Fisher Price, Inc. and Green Toys Pizza Parlor by Green Toys Inc. Dora’s kitchen was the typical plastic kitchen set with a mini refrigerator, stovetop, sink and oven. It comes with 20 foods and cooking utensils. What is unique about this child’s kitchen is that it provides over 60 phrases in English and Spanish. The child inserts a recipe card and hears instructions for preparing food.
This kitchen set is decidedly a girl-centered toy and its category placement was Girl Toy of the Year. A Toy Industry Association representative acknowledged that categorizing toys for boys or girls may seem outdated but in fact when some toys are produced to be more gender-neutral, they do not sell as well. This should give parents something to think about, especially when it comes to food play. We all eat, we all can cook, so why are most food toys directed at girls?
Green Toys Pizza Parlor is a gender-neutral toy and was categorized as a finalist in the Preschool Toy of the Year category. This is a simple toy that will initiate a lot of imaginative play. The plastic pizza (made from recycled milk containers) is divided into 4 slices. Twenty toppings and a pizza cutter round out the set to allow multiple pizza creations. All are boxed in a typical pizza delivery box.
To involve children in cooking activities you really don’t need any toys at all. Wooden spoons, plastic bowls, a plastic apron, and a little patience are all that are needed to engage a young child in kitchen activities.
It has been shown over and over again that kids that are introduced to food preparation at an early age are more likely to try new foods and eat a wider variety. They learn early that cooking is fun and eating the end result of their efforts is even more fun. Cook with your child tonight, the benefits can last a lifetime.
To cast your vote for Toy Of The Year, go to toyawards.org. The winner will be announced in February 2012.
© NRH Nutrition Consultants, Inc.
Jo-Ann Heslin, MA, RD, CDN is a registered dietitian and the author of the nutrition counter series for Pocket Books with sales of more than 8.5 million books.
Look for:
The Diabetes Counter, 4th Ed., 2011
The Protein Counter, 3rd Ed., 2011
The Calorie Counter, 5th Ed., 2010
The Ultimate Carbohydrate Counter, 3rd Ed., 2010
The Complete Food Counter, 3rd ed., 2009
The Fat Counter, 7th ed., 2009
The Healthy Wholefoods Counter, 2008
The Cholesterol Counter, 7th Ed., 2008
Your Complete Food Counter App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/your-complete-food-counter/id444558777?mt=8
For more information on Jo-Ann and her books, go to: TheNutritionExperts
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