# Transcript ## Welcome & Introduction to Life Skills **Ela:** Welcome back to the OpenEd podcast. I'm Ela, your sometimes host, and today I'm joined by Katie Kimball, who's here to talk to us about life skills. Life skills are one of those things that sometimes you just don't think about—you don't think about all those little things you just know how to do, and teaching your kids those things are so important. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. And how long have you been doing this? **Katie:** I've actually been online since 2009, so I'm a little bit of an OG when it comes to the internet world. It's funny because I feel like I'm still a rookie because everything changes so fast. I've been teaching kids to cook for 10 years. I started out online helping families stay healthy without going crazy. When I had my first baby, I sort of had my real food awakening and I burnt everything and I took forever to make real food and to cut up vegetables. I'm actually a teacher by training and a teacher by heart, and I just kept thinking, "How could I make this easier for other mamas? Can they learn from my mistakes maybe?" ## Katie's Journey: From Bad Cook to Life Skills Pioneer **Katie:** That's where I started. And then I kept hearing the same story from moms. They would say, "Katie, I really wanna get healthy and cook healthy, but I was never even taught to cook at all." And that's kind of like our generation was a little bit skipped. I think our mothers, very well intentioned, wanted our childhoods to be easier than their childhoods. In so doing, they skipped sort of teaching us basics of cooking and household chores, and they made our adulthoods harder—on accident, no blame. But a lot of us went into adulthood completely bumbling around. I realized that if we're not comfortable in the kitchen, we're certainly not teaching our kids. Somebody had to step into the gap so that 20 years from now, the grownup children aren't saying, "Oh gosh, I wish I could get healthier, but I was never taught to cook." So that's kind of where Kids Cook Real Food started. **Ela:** Wow. So it started with a need that you and your family had. What did that look like? How did you even begin to build out this whole experience of teaching kids to cook? Did you just sit down and say, "I'm gonna build this out, I'm gonna pick one project per few weeks, few months, and then just invite everybody to it"? **Katie:** Because I'm a teacher, my college degree is actually in teaching. I've always known since five years old, "I'm gonna be a teacher." So when I first had kids, I was in it to win it. I did all the things. I loved the Montessori system, which talks about practical life skills. My first child was using a little knife at age 18 months. But once I had two, I realized that was a little trickier. Little sister when she was 18 months wanted to climb up on the chair and do what Big Brother was doing, and I gave her a dull cheese knife. Well, I handed her another cheese knife. It was not dull. She cut herself within 30 seconds and I just thought, "I'm a failure. I can't do this." ## The "Skipped Generation" Problem **Katie:** So I pulled back a little bit from how much I involved my kids. I still was involved with them, but then I had baby three, I had baby four, and I just forgot. I just forgot to keep teaching them once life got moving so fast. There was actually a moment when my oldest Paul was in fourth grade. They had to do end-of-the-year "how to" speeches for their class. I got to go into school because you cannot put a chef's knife in a 10-year-old's backpack. I got to see him teach his class guacamole. And I was super proud of him. He took the chef's knife, opened the avocados, waxed the pit out of the avocado. And I love that and I wanna raise the bar for your kids. But then I sort of had my own moment where I went, "Oh my goodness, guacamole is the only thing he knows how to make. And it's the thing he has been making since first grade to impress everyone." I thought, "Okay, I've got eight years left with him before he's 18. I probably should sort of get back to this whole teaching them to cook." ## Teaching Kids to Cook: The Summer That Changed Everything **Katie:** That was actually right before we took that summer and I taught my kids to cook really intentionally. Got my teacher hat back on. We actually invited neighbor friends over so that they would be more motivated and so that I wouldn't skip it—that's my own life hack. I know that if it's just in my own calendar, I'd be like, "Eh, I don't really wanna do that today. Maybe we won't do our cooking class." So I had other families depending on me, so then I had to do it. That's where this all started. And those kids—my kids and our neighbors—are the kids in the Kids Cook Real Food e-course learning along. **Ela:** Were your kids already bought in or did you have to convince them to care about cooking at all? **Katie:** They were still young enough at that age. Research kind of tells us that when kids are little, they have this wonderful intrinsic motivation, and if we can capture it when they're little, it's almost like we keep this unbroken line. Then when they're eight or 10 or 12, they're still at least somewhat motivated to help. The flip side is if you say to the kids, "No, no, no, you don't belong in the kitchen. You go play," that kind of trains their brains that that's not what they're there for. Then at age 10, if you're like, "Hey, you wanna help?" they're like, "No, I don't." My kids were involved enough that I think, and again, I invited the friends for that little boost of motivation. So it wasn't really too bad. Most of them, right now—so now we're 10 years later, my kids are 10, 13, 16 and 20—I think they're all very proud of what they can do in the kitchen. ## Building Confidence Through Competence **Katie:** John is kid number three, and he'll say things sometimes like, "I don't think most of my classmates know how to do this." And I'm like, "That's cool. I love that he sees that." He just feels like this is something that he has, a competency that he has, and it really raises his feeling of self-worth. **Ela:** I was doing some digging on your websites and something that was really apparent was how much confidence you continued to bring up—confidence in cooking skills, but confidence in life skills. What is the value of having confidence in life skills for kids? **Katie:** That was such a pleasant surprise to be honest, because I thought I was just teaching kids to cook for the practical reasons. They'll know how to feed themselves, they'll eat healthier, they can help a little around the house, and that's nice for moms and dads. Then we start working with all these families, right? People are teaching their kids to cook at age three, at age 10. And we'd start hearing stories like, "Oh, my kid's so proud of themselves. They just feel so confident now." And I started to realize, I was watching it happen and then later it's been confirmed by a sociologist or a psychologist that I interviewed that we have this one bucket of confidence. When your kids are building skills and competency in the kitchen and that raises their confidence, it actually applies to their academics and their social lives and the way they interact with adults. It's amazing. Pretty quickly within a year I realized, "Whoa, cooking is more than just food. This is a huge sandbox for teaching kids how to fail, how to really raise those competencies and raise that confidence." ## The Anxiety Epidemic in American Youth **Katie:** I feel like today we look at our stats on anxiety, Ella, and it just breaks my heart. I just saw that America has fallen off the list of top 20 happiest countries in the world, and it's because of the kids in their teens and twenties—their anxiety is so high that they're not reporting a general sense of happiness and wellbeing. And that's so sad. There's a bunch of reasons, right? People will pin it on screens, social media, et cetera. However, we also know that we've kind of gone through this phase of participation medals and trophies for everything. Unfortunately, when we praise everything, the kids feel that now nothing really matters. ## How Helicopter Parenting Backfires **Katie:** When we bubble wrap our kids, when a lot of parents are very safe and very protective, and we call it helicopter parenting—again, super well intentioned. Parents aren't going out to be like, "Oh, I'm gonna mess up my kid and helicopter parent." They're just like, "I want to keep my kids safe. It's my job to keep them alive." But it actually makes kids really anxious when people are doing everything for them and when they feel like the world is a very scary place because we have to be kept safe. Both of those things are kind of attacking them in the same way. If you feel like the world is scarier than it actually is, and you feel like you don't really have agency, you don't really have skills to take care of yourself because someone else has always done it for you, you're kind of wandering about the world feeling really anxious because you have no control. ## Let Them Fail When Stakes Are Low **Katie:** We've gotta give the kids these skills and this feeling of, "I can fail. I can burn the biscuits and it's not a huge deal. I could still make better biscuits the next time." We want our kids to fail when the stakes are really low, before we hand them the car keys and the fully unlocked iPhone. 'Cause then the stakes are really high and they need to know how to take risks appropriately with things like a chef's knife or a pairing knife or a hot stove before they're taking risks behind the wheel of a car. **Ela:** Were you teaching yourself during this period where you were coming over here and you were saying, "Now I'm gonna start teaching the neighbor's kids, and I'm gonna start teaching my kids"? Were you learning alongside them? Were you learning ahead of them? **Katie:** I will say that when my kids were babies, I was not a very good cook. I can picture turning the blender on without the lid on and stuff hitting the ceiling. That's how bad I was. But I'm a lifelong learner. So by the time I was really working on teaching the kids that particular summer, I'd been writing online about cooking and food and nutrition for seven years. So I was pretty competent at cooking. What was interesting though, because even though I'm a teacher and one of my superpowers is the ability to break down big ideas into tiny chunks and to understand what my learners are thinking, that's where the collaboration really happened. The kids helped me learn how kids learn to cook, right? Instead of how parents learn. ## Creating Family Culture with High Standards **Katie:** I think parents need to figure out what they want their kids to look like as adults. That's gotta be our motivation. As a mom, my job is to raise kids who are sure of themselves, who can be independent, who contribute to society, who are not a drain on society. We've got to think about that. And if you have two people parenting, great. You gotta get on the same page. I think that should be a massive conversation for parents: what is our family culture? If you can set that family culture and the kids understand like, "Here are my boundaries." I'll say things like, "Kimball's do this and Kimball's do that. And Kimball's don't do this." Having that family culture and using phrases like that with your last name gives kids roots. They're gonna leave those roots, they might rebel as teens—that's completely normal. But in order to have something to come back to, there has to be a thing. We have to create a family culture so that they know this is what our family looks like. ## The Entitlement Crisis and American Innovation **Katie:** I see a lot of entitlement, sadly now, especially in the young generation where it's just like people can do things for me. I'll take government handouts, I'll take things from other people, and I don't think that that is the attitude of a country that's going to be sustainable. If we look back to the origins of America and our history, people really had to say, "I don't like what's going on with England, and we have a million opportunities here in this new land, but what are we gonna do with it?" They had to take so much agency and so many risks. I do worry that if we have kids who grow into young adults who are afraid to take steps, who are afraid to talk to other people, who are afraid to call for pizza, then we're just gonna kind of become a nation of sheep. That's scary to me. That's not a nation of free people. We've gotta have problem solvers. We've gotta keep innovating. When you talk with people from other countries, they'll say, "Yeah, in America there are innovators and there are entrepreneurs and there's this whole spirit of can-do attitude." They don't necessarily have that in other places, which I think is why many inventions do come out of America. But we gotta keep that going. I don't wanna lose that. That's special. ## Practical Strategies for Teaching Life Skills **Ela:** What other skills were key for you? What were some of those key things that your parents didn't teach you and the things that you wish that they did? **Katie:** Taking care of a house has like 11 dozen steps. There's so much. First of all, there's like high level life skills on how to think, so we've gotta help our kids build a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. I put "yet" at the end of just about everything. "Oh, this is really hard, mom." "I know that's hard honey, 'cause you don't understand it yet, right?" I try to just pour words like that out of my mouth to my kids because they get stuck in a fixed mindset. "I'm so bad at this, I can't do this." And I'm like, "Oh man." The sense in yourself that you can solve problems and that you can try things—that's huge too because I do see a lot of kids who are very hesitant, very tentative. They're not gonna problem solve. ## Starting Where Your Kids Are Curious **Katie:** I don't think we really know for sure what exact practical skills our kids will need 20 years from now. Technology's changing so fast, maybe they won't need to know how to sweep because everyone will have a robot. I don't know, but I think they need to learn how to sweep now and how to dust and how to clean a gross toilet just so that they can learn how to learn. Also that skill of noticing, "Oh, this is gross. I have the skill to fix the grossness. I shall now fix the grossness." That's huge for kids. Observation. I have three boys. Observation does not seem to come naturally to the male gender. I don't know if that's true for everyone, but those skills of observation of like, "I'll tell my kids like scan the room. What do you see that's out of place? What do you see that belongs to you that you could put away?" There are a lot of really high level thinking, executive functioning skills, but we learn those skills through doing the basic practical things of washing dishes, of cleaning up. ## The Gift of Competency vs. Entitlement **Katie:** I don't teach my kids to cook or clean the house or mow the lawn just so that my to-do list is shorter. I never want my kids to feel that way. I want them to feel like I'm giving them a gift of competency that they can carry into adulthood. I want them to feel like I'm giving them the gift of community and family culture and that teamwork effort. We're all living here, we're all gonna contribute, and the littler kids might contribute less, and that's okay. We grow into that family culture. I want them to know that I'm giving them confidence. As much as I talk about high standards and high expectations, it's gotta be like a give and take. I talked about co-collaborating with the kids when we were creating the course, and I think we need to co-collaborate to an extent with the kids. Not like let them tell us what our rules should be, but if a child's having a really bad day and they're just melting, that's not the time to say, "You didn't wash your dishes last night." That's the time to just hold them and hug them and say, "You know what? You're having a really hard moment. And I know there's those dishes over there and I'm actually gonna go do those for you right now." ## Rapid Fire: Helping Older Kids and Anxious Children **Ela:** When you have a kid that is maybe they're older and maybe they have shied away from certain things, maybe they don't have a ton of life skills, maybe they're more anxious, or maybe they have ADHD or maybe they're dealing with something. How do you use this as a tool? **Katie:** I love that you said heart first, habits second, and I think that's how we can teach skills too. If it's something that you're doing together and you're connecting heart to heart and mind to mind with your child or your teen, then you can give them sort of a safe space. It's like having your seatbelt on or having a parachute where you're doing it with them. Then you can encourage them to take over just part of it, not all of it, so that it's very much like training wheels on a bike. I think too, to motivate older kids, getting accolades from people who aren't their parents is great. So any skill you're teaching, once you've done the training wheel thing, if they can do that for others. I always say have them cook when grandparents are coming over or for a party or a potluck or something, because then you can say, "Oh, John made this," and they're like, "This is amazing. That's awesome, John. I can't believe you know how to do this." Super motivating for kids and teens. ## Why Families Should Prioritize Life Skills **Ela:** Why should families and parents prioritize this, especially whenever it might take longer, it might be a little bit more difficult, you might have to go through a couple of struggle moments or frustrating moments? **Katie:** Two reasons. The practical and the philosophical. The practical is that yes, it will take five to 10 more minutes here and there to slow down and teach your kids. You get that time back in spades because when the whole family is helping, then you actually get more time together. I heard a podcast once and the guy was like, "You gotta go outside and climb the tree. Don't be doing the dishes all the time after dinner." And I'm like, "That only works for one day because then you have all the dishes all the time." So for me, I'm like, "If y'all clean up together, then the whole family has more time to go climb the tree together or go for a bike ride together." The goal is family unity. You get there by having family unity in the practical. And then the philosophical reason is just that I really do want my kids and your kids to grow up to be independent, competent human beings who contribute. The only way to do that is to give them skills. Even if it's your three-year-old knows how to fold a washcloth. Great, right? That's like a 32-second task to slow down and teach that three-year-old. But when that three-year-old takes ownership of folding every washcloth in every laundry load, they feel like hot stuff. And that's the foundation. It's just these little tiny bits of how do we give them competency and confidence so that they wanna then do more. ## Final Thoughts: Following Your Kids' Interests **Ela:** What is a good starting place? **Katie:** Try to follow your kids' interests. If they are still at the age that they're showing interest, like our younger kids will say, "Mama, can I help? Daddy, can I be next to you?" Just a couple weeks ago, my husband was working on the bathroom project and my 10-year-old was finishing up some screen time and he can have trouble transitioning. I decided to just walk out of the room with him and dad had a tripod set up with a level on it. I said, "Gabe, do you know what that tool is that dad's using?" And he was like, "No, what's this for?" Boom. So he was in, and then he was helping dad hang some things and level some stuff and it was awesome. So if you can figure out what your child's already curious about or how to make them curious about something. Curiosity is awesome. Beyond that, there's no prescription. It's not like all three-year-olds should do this. It's just what might they be able to accomplish? Something simple, little steps. It doesn't have to be big. **Ela:** This has been so great and so practical. Honestly, what you're doing here is not rocket science, which actually makes it almost more daunting sometimes because it's like, "Oh, it's just folding my laundry. It's just all these things." But seriously, all these things are so important and underrated for how much they contribute to a person's overall life fulfillment and satisfaction. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. **Katie:** This was fun to share stories. Thanks, Ela.