Cooking and parenting are two important skillsets and responsibilities for all parents. But we look at cooking and parenting in two different paradigms. But what if I told you that these are so correlated skills and one could help you understand the tenets of other better. Sounds strange, right? So let me sort this out for you and make it simple to understand in this blog.  

To start with, let me set some context here. Well this all comes from my experience as a mother of a five year old, on a mission as a commando(as my son says) to feed him healthy, home cooked food. And being on this mission day in and day out, helped me connect the dots between cooking and parenting.

I was never a cooking enthusiast, but there was a three sixty degrees change in me when my son turned 6 months and I started introducing solid food to him. I don’t know how and when I decided that I will not give him packaged or any readymade food but that surely became an ingrained principle for me. This was the reason that even though Doctor suggested Nestum for him, I never bought it. Nestum is basically made of rice, I thought, hey if that’s the case then why Nestum…?  Why not give him fresh home cooked rice. And that’s how I embarked on my journey to mommy chef’s kitchen with full enthusiasm and this inculcated my interest in cooking healthy food.

Well, enough rant about how I started(I kind of like telling it, so bear with me)..  so as I was saying that there is a strong relationship between cooking and parenting. When you are new to the kitchen, you are confused, you tend to make mistakes, you get irritated. Same happens with parenting. As a new mom, you are confused and irritated too and of course you tend to make mistakes. But well mistakes are what help us improve. And being hard on yourself for making these mistakes will take us no where, and like cooking , parenting is an empirical process, and this philosophy holds true for both.

One striking similarity that I noticed while cooking is that when there are too many spices added to a vegetable, the actual taste of the vegetable is lost. Similarly, in parenting when we engage our kids in too many activities and burden them with so many expectations and desires, their actual self is lost. It then becomes difficult for them to understand what they actually want to do and what they are passionate about. 

As a cook you realize this great power that, it is the cook who can actually either enhance or completely destroy the taste of a food. Similarly, in parenting the mould of the child lies with the parents. Like every vegetable or pulses or grains have their own cooking time, method and process, every kid needs their own time to understand and get comfortable to the situations. Some kids gel really fast  while others are shy or introvert and take their own sweet time. Some kids are good at sports while others in studies or arts. So as parents we need to understand what our kid really want and give them the space to grow in their own pace. There is no one cut fit all process that exists, like following the same recipe, process to cook lentils and cashew gravy is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

You can cook a variety that could serve a buffet, with the same set of ingredients. Similarly, a kid can be brought up in different ways depending upon who is nurturing her/him. So again, there is no one way of parenting, it is the kid and value system of the parents that become the deciding factor on the way parents decide to nurture their kids.

Any dish that is too salty or too sweet just spoils the taste and is harmful for our health too. Similarly, being too strict with the kids or being too sweet and loving all the time does not work either. It is harmful for the kids. There needs to be a perfect balance of salt and sweetness and that is when the life becomes delicious and beautiful. Like every food requires a different balance of salt and sweetness. Similarly, every kid requires a different balance of strictness and love. No two kids are similar and therefore, there cannot be a fixed template that can be followed by all. Like food we need to understand what the kid requires, and decide on the balance based on that. 

As parents, we understood one thing that we should not keep high expectations from our kids and just let them be free and see the magic. Yes of course we need to be there for them in the initial stage of life but not expect that for the love and care we provide them, they should do whatever we ask them to do or play with them emotionally. Just like while cooking, we make a mind blowing dish from just a set of raw ingredient by adding and seasoning them with whatever is required but do not expect that the dish belongs only to us and only we have the rights to eat it. We enjoy the cooking process and then leave it to the taste of whoever is eating it, whether they like it or not. Some may like it and some may not but what is important is that we enjoyed cooking it. Do not try to prove the world that we are the best parents, that my kid is the best or my parenting was right. We should just enjoy the journey of parenting, giving and doing our best but without setting any expectations around the outcome.

Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu..