Planning and cooking food for yourself and packing food to send for your kids. Keeping food ready to help out elderly parents while catering to everyone's food preferences and needs, all while managing your own personal and work routine, can be hectic and tiring. Handling meal preparation while working full-time and maintaining your physical and mental health is something that many people struggle with - especially if you are trying to do it all on your own.One of the best ways to make things easier is by getting support from your close ones. Here are a few ways to involve your family to help you with meal planning and preparation!
Communicate and Discuss
Rather than single-handedly taking over everything in the kitchen, from planning to preparation, having a discussion to decide on meals with your family is one way to start introducing your family members (including kids!) to the cooking work. Not only will this foster a sense of openness and inclusion with everyone, it will also ensure that everyone gets to be a part of meal planning, rather than all responsibility falling only on you!
Keep it Simple
Catering to everyone's tastes and needs can get complicated. Discussing with everyone is an effective way to understand each other's needs to come together and find common ground to build simple food habits, especially on working days. Doing so will make meal prep easier to handle, so you can spend less time in the kitchen and more time doing other productive things. Another bonus is that you get to spend more time with your family!
Get them involved hands-on
A simple way to start is by assigning short, easy, and helpful age-appropriate tasks to your family members. For example, you can ask your kids to do tasks like collecting the ingredients for a dish and ask your spouse to help with tasks like cutting vegetables, etc. Introducing them to such activities will ease your workload and inculcate a sense of responsibility and accomplishment, especially for kids.
About the Author
Meghana Ganesh is a Community Manager at Her Second Innings. She is a Computer Science Graduate with a passion for women’s empowerment and equality, and diversity hiring in organizations.
Her Second Innings supports women professionals on a sabbatical in their journey of getting back to work. The mission of HSI is to guide women to achieve financial independence. Support from HSI comes in the form of job interviews, reskilling programs in Automation and, free Career Guidance Counselling. Sign up with us and complete your profile to get a call from our counselors to know your job fit.
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