Cooking With Kids Sucks

The myth of motherhood without trade-offs

Targeted ads are trying to sell me a step stool. It’s not just any step stool– it’s aesthetic, with blonde wood and whimsical cut-outs, intended to make it easy for your children to cook dinner alongside you. I am very susceptible to advertising (it’s the sleep deprivation) so I have considered purchasing this step stool, with its promises of idyllic afternoons spent instilling a love of cooking in my children. But I always stop short because I have a secret: I hate cooking with my kids.

I want to like it. I love to cook– so much so, in fact, that I spend hours every year poring over reviews before buying myself a single birthday present: a new cookbook. I beeline for the food section at the library. My first Google every time I am in a new city is “best restaurants.” I am a lover of food, of feeding my family, and of the challenge of executing a new recipe. I want to share this with my kids, and I want to enjoy doing it, and yet every attempt to cook with my children has been The Worst.

Mealtimes are the most manic 90 minutes in our home. Depending on the timing, I am often juggling a hot stove and several sharp objects when my toddlers, ages two and four, hustle inside from daycare, brimming with energy, the pent-up stories they’ve spent all day waiting to tell me, and perhaps most urgently, the desire to Eat Something Immediately. I would describe to you what happens next, but honestly I sort of black out and regain consciousness only as the last dish hits the dishwasher. I don’t honestly know how I execute dinner most nights, only that it requires my full focus, at a time when my energy is at its lowest point of the day, and that my patience for a small hand snaking around my waist to grab a shaker of cumin and dump it into a hot pan, is nonexistent.

Even cooking near my kids has often proved disastrous. I once turned my back for a split second to throw some chicken breasts into the crockpot. I looked up to find, to my absolute horror, that my one-year-old son had removed the vent cover and climbed inside. With a shriek and the bare minimum hand washing actually necessary to prevent salmonella, I went running to fish him out. On the few occasions I’ve had weekend time to devote to, say, making a batch of cookies with the kids, knowing that the result is likely to be more mess than meal, we’ve all left frustrated and covered in flour.

Why, then, knowing that this activity is a bad fit for my temperament, do I persist in thinking I should do it? In fact, I think it is necessary for me to persist, so that I can prove I am the right kind of mom. Admitting that you don’t enjoy any aspect of parenting or, worse, that you have tried it and failed, is one of the worst things you can do. There will always be someone waiting in the wings to tell you how easy it was for them in a way that implies it should be for you, too. Any time I complain about the difficulty of getting five or more healthy and balanced meals on the table every week, someone will pop up with the cheery advice to “get the kids involved!” and I will feel even more insane.

We are in the middle of a vast perspective shift in modern parenting, one where moms are, on one hand, vulnerable and honest about their struggles, but on the other, harder on themselves than ever. We are constantly shown examples of women who, balancing a baby on one hip and a homeschool textbook on the other, placidly lead a multi-level science lesson for their ten children while snipping herbs from the garden, feeding a cow, and baking a pie from scratch. The reality is that this is monetized, produced content, and that these women often consciously omit or recharacterize the considerable help they have (is a tutor for a two year old not simply a nanny? Is it homeschooling if you hire a teacher?). The whole operation is marketing for the idea that if you can’t do this, the problem is with you.

Recently, a “trad” influencer from the platform formerly known as Twitter, a cartoon avatar named “Patriarchy Hannah” (I know, stay with me) was revealed to be a single woman, with no children, catfishing an entire Discord server of acolytes from her parents’ basement. The idea that she could maintain a fit and trim physique, raise and homeschool 14 children, and even build them all homes on her family compound while tweeting all day long, seems laughable when held up to scrutiny, but a lot of people believed it. I’d wager they fell for it not because it isn’t fairly ridiculous on its face but rather because we are continuously told, with a straight face, to achieve the ridiculous. Moms must scale even higher heights of absurdity– more kids, less help, six-figure income hitting our bank accounts without needing to leave the children for a single second. While it’s easy to laugh at the folks who believed “Hannah,” in hindsight, I understand. We are constantly bombarded with similar half-truths and obfuscations every day. This one is hardly even extreme. The insecurity it churns up by design is an insurance policy that prevents us from asking too many questions. If I say this can’t be real, I will be admitting that I can’t do it, and no one can know.

These narratives get traction for the same reason any aspirational content does: they are fictional examples of women doing more and more with less. The goal is for us to feel like the things our mothers and grandmothers didn’t think were important– either because they didn’t have the resources to do them or simply didn’t want to– are basic necessities. The larger goal, the really zoomed-out goal, is for women to accept that any help they engage to balance it all or ball they drop is a personal failing. I am too stubborn to let them win– not just for me, but for everyone who has been stressed to tears about something optional: the homemade treats for the class birthday party, the family photo holiday card, or even the matching sheets and duvet cover.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I am no longer putting my energy into the things I don’t like doing or can’t do without the kind of support that I can neither access nor afford. Instead of asking myself Why can’t you, I’ve started to ask Do you (and the kids) even want to, and also Why do I think this is important? Who told me that? If we are going to survive and even thrive in motherhood in the age of misinformation and bare-bones social services, our only option is to do less of the things that drain us and more of the things that feel fun.

I have very few superpowers as a mom, but one thing I set out to do when I became a parent and have achieved is for my kids to sit down to a balanced family dinner most nights. By cooking solo (or with the help of our good friend Bluey), I am doing something I enjoy in the way that I enjoy it, and giving my kids something good for us all. Rather than deciding this is not enough, I am choosing to be proud of what I can do. That alone is a fairly radical act by any working mom. I am not only enough, I’m more than enough for my family. The people who say otherwise are, most likely, selling something (step stools).