Not to know how to get teens cooking dinner?

@0ohLarLar I think for me it is the expectation that a 12yo will cook a meal every week. Not that they don’t know how to cook a meal at 12yo.

DS had a long commute for Secondary school, so rarely got home before 6. Then factoring in clubs and homework, it would have been a big ask to then expect him to cook a meal on top of that.

I shopped for and cooked all my own meals from 14 by choice. Well, partly because my mum wasn't really up for it anymore which is fair enough.
I really loved the freedom of shopping for my own food with a budget. I was pretty dire when I first started and plenty of pesto pasta was consumed! But I always loved cooking.

If you give them a budget, tell them it's for dinner tomorrow night. You can choose which nights a week and stick with them. Hopefully!
They might prefer searching recipes online than in a book?
If they fail to spend the money wisely and make something awful then at least they're getting practice. Obviously get a receipt for the shopping. They may try and be cheeky and buy a bunch of sweets as well!

If they don't cook the meal, then they must return the money and there's no dinner (for them). Make a point of not having anything they can easily heat up so they are stuck with toast or a sandwich. If you were to rub their noses in it you and DP could get a takeaway for yourselves. Though that might be a bit cruel?

I reckon after a while they'll start to enjoy it. If not at least learn a bit about how to budget and cook.

Personally I feel they are a bit young to be expected a cook a family meal, especially the 12 year old.

I'm stunned by this. My 8 year old knows how to make a simple pasta or curry sauce with supervision, its really not a big ask of a 12 year old.

One night per dc. Just say "You're
cooking on Wednesday and you on Friday" making sure they are days when they're home early enough. Get them to decide at the weekend what they are going to cook and add the ingredients to the shopping list.

I don’t disagree if it is complicated around timings of complex side dishes like Sunday dinner …but cooking a pasta sauce with mum/dad helping to get pasta on at right time, lay table etc is easily manageable
Mine were doing that at 10/11, they weren’t remarkable other than being permanently hungry hollowed legged boys, who like food. So high motivation, granted.

I reckon if kids can do high speed thinking and decison making, and eye hand coordination that computer games need from a very young age , they can cope with cooking, sorting and putting washing machine on, doing an on line food order frankly (though wouldn’t trust them to load up basket with crap!). Or pretty much any domestic chore. Obviously they need some training- especially where heat and sharp knives are concerned, but mine had good knife skills at a pretty young age - they’re 30 plus now and chop like chefs at very high speed. But then they also type much better than me having used keyboards form young age. 🤷‍♀️

Are you expecting them to do it together or separately?

How much time do they have at home, taking into account clubs, homework etc?

We had family meeting and agreed that we all worked/studied full time, we all contributed to mess so we all needed to contribute to cleaning/ cooking. We then came up with a roster that lived on the kitchen door as to who was responsible for what on each night, including cooking, kitchen clean, general clean and tidy, animals etc.
I had a folder on the kitchen counter that had menu plan on the front and recipes inside for the week.
Bulk shop for ingredients on weekend. If they didn’t tell me what they wanted to cook by shopping day, it was decided for them.
Roster changed according to sports and work commitments.
Nights could be swapped but no abdication expecting Mum/Dad to pick up the slack.
It also meant if DH or I were caught late at work, someone else could start cooking.
This continued until they left home.
Good luck

I made a family cookbook for ours…still have it ….wrote out all the recipes we had as family staples.

I did the same, they each have a binder with the essentials!!

Have you been getting them helping with cooking & learning how since they were younger? 15 is awfully late to start.

Appreciate this is no good to you op but in case parents of younger kids are reading....

In an ideal world they are helping cook from way younger. Eg from 6 or 7 helping chop and prep veg, weigh out ingredients, mix pancake or cake batter.

By 8-10 they should be able to (with a little supervision/support) make simple things like macaroni cheese or a tomato pasta sauce.

Ooo, I’d forgotten that..

I made a family cookbook for ours…still have it ….wrote out all the recipes we had as family staples.

did in in word, then printed out on A4 and stuck in file- but these days you could go all fancy and have it printed and bound professionally on line .

I did it for when eldest went to uni, but it helped youngest one too whilst still at home.

I did an index based on 2 ways - by main ingredient and then by type of food (eg. Sundays, Italian, spicy , long cooks, etc) so they could easily search for things.

Gousto taught my husband to cook. And I learned a lot too!

Personally I feel they are a bit young to be expected a cook a family meal, especially the 12 year old. Mine were older teens when they got into cooking and started by making meals for themselves (and girlfriend/boyfriend). Then they progressed to main meals for the whole family. Both were competent cooks by about 17/18.

HF is good idea, folks, didn’t have that in my day when teaching kids to cook

what I did was getting them to “help” me. Even at very young age (5/6 years) i would get them to smell herbs and spices, and the cooking pot during prep, and ask them if they thought this or that would be nice in it? I’d also get them to look in fridge/freezer with me to select ingredients and decide what to put with meal (like shall we have brocali or beans, what about carrots with this?). Ask them to choose, Build their confidence into knowing they can play around and experiment. By time my DS were in teens they’d be would invent recipes like pasta sauces, and certainly wack up heat on chili and curry’s (no regard for mums more cautious approach to having her taste buds nuked 🤣),

a cheaper option than full HF is getting them to choose a recipe form a recipe book or on line. Show them how to chose main ingredient they’d like (ok, not lobster or steak maybe😉) but let them decide. And then how to search for recipes . Let them decide . Give advice about costs. Then get them to add to shopping list. Then help them, at first, to use the recipe . Maybe if you’re up to it, get them to start choosing more recipes, even if they’re not main ones cooking…let them take charge of deciding.

Be prepared for disasters. We had some bad experiments, but we also had great successes! Don’t be negative, in your “reviews”, just laugh and say it’s part of learning a new skill, and unfortunately we all make mistakes. Just with other things we don’t all have to eat them 😱

Another thing helped us was, that as main breadwinner and long hour job, I was a pre planned menu junkie. We had an 8week rolling menu. On excel. Printed out in kitchen. Food shopping on line for all ingredients once per week. Kids knew what was for tea each night, and if they fancied making it, rather than dad or me, they’d just get on with it. We never did that “what’s for tea” bit. But they also knew they could, with pre planing, swap out a menu dish for something they’d like to make, or a new recipe…they just had to ensure we had right ingredients.

We have loads of Gousto recipe cards, so when I'm doing the food shop, DS1 (14) has to pick out a meal he is going to cook, and I buy the ingredients. He cooks once a fortnight and then helps on one other night.

Sam sterns cooking up a storm is good as a resource, or student cook books

The elder should be cooking for the whole family at least periodically, make sure they either have a selection of family recipes you have typed up for them or a teen oriented cookbook. The younger should be prepping breakfast, lunch and snacks for themselves most of the time, but of baking perhaps and shadowing you cooking helping with prep. These are life skills all parents should be passing on (along with managing money, looking after a house/flat and self care

They will have done cooking at school though, even if not at home. They may be surprisingly competent! My teen wants to do the shopping if he's going to cook, from the point of view of adding things to the online shopping basket. So maybe that's a way in. He has no sense of cost though, and will happily chuck dearer steaks in than we have the budget for! Going in person would be better probably.

This the answer

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Another vote for Hello Fresh - they aren’t the meals I’d ideally choose but it was so good for getting them started. All the ingredients are there in the right quantity and the recipes are all pretty easy. I think my DC was about 13 and I let him choose the recipe and we used them on and off for about 6 months.

My 16 year old can now competently plan, shop and cook a family meal and he really loves it. He now does one weeknight and one weekend night, still some work to do on the clearing up though…….

My younger DC is 14 and a bit more resistant to start cooking (he can do some basics like scrambled egg and pasta etc) so I’ll probably sign back up to Hello Fresh soon for him to start.

Ours are a similar age. I guess they've always had access to kids cookbooks, done chefs badges in scouts etc.

I think we probably started with an 8yo who wanted a cooked breakfast and no adult wanted to cook it so we supervised them to do it themselves. These days we're at " I'm going to be late home, so you can wait for me or crack on and cook your own".

We'd ask what they fancied cooking, ensure we had all the ingredients and then offer appropriate levels of support.

Dc1 learned the hard way that they'd start making cakes then discover we'd not have enough ingredients so would have to stop part way through and go to the shop.
Dc2 is very slowly learning what cleaning up afterwards means and needs recalling to the kitchen 2 or 3 times to do it adequately.

We made it a condition of our son's pocket money from age 11. We didn't include shopping and budgeting (not saying you shouldn't) and when he started out, one of us was always on hand to supervise. We let him choose the meal and we did eat a lot of pasta, tuna and tomato sauce at first but he's now an enthusiastic cook if a messy one, (With hindsight, we should have included clearing and washing up!)

Yes, dc just choose themselves - with the proviso (in our case) that it has to be suitable for dc3. Um no, you cannot cook him a Madras 😂

Always seem to be plenty of veggie options. And a difficulty scale so at first I limited them to the quickest/easiest selection to choose from.