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| Phylis Whitin and her granddaughter |
Teachers in the Classroom & Kitchen
by Molly O'Neill
A child's role in cooking
By day, Phyllis and David Whitin are professors of education at Wayne State University in Detroit. The couple, who met in fifth grade, are teachers of a different sort at home. They are parents who raised three independent, self-sufficient children and are now committed to helping raise equally self-sufficient grandchildren, Sarah, 2 years old, and Sophie, who is almost 1. Their teaching method is simple: They share their love of food and their proficiency in the kitchen and they give the youngsters tasks for which they can be fully responsible.
The Whitins always knew that they would teach like the teachers they had admired as students. When their sons, Brett and David, and their daughter, Becca, were small, the family moved frequently to pursue education and jobs. Through all the changes cooking together remained constant. The activity provided stability, in a way, and helped the children learn to accomplish tasks and exercise their creativity.
“We used to pick blueberries when the kids were little — when the boys were 5 and 7,” said says Phyllis Whitin. She had to hold her hands behind her back to resist helping the children; years later she remains as proud of herself as she is of her sons when she says, “They did it themselves.”
She adds: “It takes patience but you learn that kids really are quite capable of doing quite a lot all by themselves.” Fascinated by the way children assimilate knowledge, she couldn’t help turning her kitchen into a classroom. Baking bread, she found, was not only something she loved, it was also a powerful teacher.
“It is part science, part creativity, and part just amazing," she says, “and then you can eat it.” She loves demonstrating what she always found so fascinating about the bread process: “How the stuff grew up, got puffy, ended up something you could eat and that yeast was really a plant.”
She started her sons and daughter kneading bread — it’s not so different from working Play-Doh, after all. Her husband assigned equally simple tasks: sprinkling cheese on his famous macaroni and cheese, for instance, or cracking eggs on the side of a bowl.
Their children’s culinary skills gradually improved. One of Phyllis's primary goals as a parent was to fully involve the children in the cooking process. “It’s paid off,” she says. “My kids are excellent cooks and take a huge role in cooking at their homes.”
She and her husband are already taking the same approach with their oldest granddaughter, Sarah. At age 2, she is so taken with cracking eggs on the edge of a bowl that, at bath time, she mimics the cracking action on the edge of the tub, using her toys for eggs.
This sort of result, Phyllis says, is from assigning young children real jobs that they can be in charge of... and as grandparent, resisting the impulse to help.
“Bread is great because you can’t really hurt bread. I like kids to be able to do things and feel independent and be part of the real process,” she says. She and her husband are already making Cloverfield dinner rolls with young Sarah. Each of them kneads a small ball of dough, and then they place the three pieces together and bake them in a muffin tin where each roll rises like a golden three-leaf clover.
Another constantly requested dish is her sweet-potato casserole with cranberries. It's not hard to make and it won’t be long until Sarah will be able to assist. When Phyllis's children ask for sweet-potato casserole, it shows that it's a family favorite. When her granddaughter asks to learn how to make it, it will show that the dish is becoming a family legacy. And, in the world according to Phyllis Whitin, the dependent child makes one more step toward independence.
Continue to the recipes: David's Easy Macaroni & Cheese, Phyllis's Dinner Rolls, and Sweet Potato (or Yam) Casserole
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