Cooking Shows

For some strange, inexplicable reason a lot of people love cooking shows. I guess it’s the voyeuristic nature of people wanting to see others under pressure, being shoved outside their comfort zones, yelled at, fail, recover (or not) and it’s ok, because it’s not you! I’m not here to judge the moral compass of these shows and their viewers, as some people love the spotlight and the pressure and it can indeed fulfil an important desire in their life. However, what happens when you swap out the adults and replace them with children?
 
Cooking is a fantastic activity in which kids can be involved. The sooner you can get children helping out with cooking, making cookies, cakes or meals, the better. It’s a great activity to be doing, giving children the opportunity to measure, follow recipes, experiment and taste a range of different flavours. Added to this, it enables them to be more independent sooner as cooking is a skill to which many children are not exposed until they leave home. Despite the mess, the benefits of spending time with your kids cooking can be wonderful and good bonding time. Ultimately, they can then cook for you and  that makes your life way easier!
 
With all these amazing benefits of cooking for kids, someone had to come along and corrupt it. As I was channel surfing the other day, I came across one of these cooking shows, but for kids. It was the stupid intense part of the show where they have all the children lined up, standing nervously. Some boring douchebag judges are sitting in judgement on how well the children baked a cake, making them feel increasingly anxious, as they provide their expert criticism of each cake and deciding who will stay and who will go.
 
Whilst I’m a huge fan of honest feedback for kids and it’s healthy to let them try things, fail, help them to understand why it didn’t work and then try again. However, this sort of intense public display of judgement and failure is totally unhealthy and in my opinion, emotionally destructive. Why parents let their kids be subjected to this I have no idea. If you’re an adult on one of these shows, you’ve made a conscious decision to be on there and compete. As an adult, you have the ability (generally speaking) to make rational, informed decisions and understand the risks and rewards that come with being on a TV show with endless armchair critics, ready to jump on Twitter or whatever else and ridicule and blast you for everything you do. However, as a child you have no idea and as a parent, well… you’re idiots for exposing your kids to such an experience.
 
With mental health issues on the rise amongst young people, there’s absolutely no reason to unnaturally expose them to high levels of stress and anxiety for a tiny bit of public exposure, which even if they won a TV cooking competition, any benefit will quickly fade into insignificance. You only have to look at the trail of destruction left in the wake of childhood actors such as River Phoenix, Cory Haim and countless others to see how false the notion of fame and fortunate from a childhood experience on TV or the big screen really is.
 
It’s important that we let kids try new things, challenge themselves and do things together with mum and dad such as cooking to help build their experience, relationships and confidence in life. However, it’s also just as important to protect kids from such awful soul-destroying experiences such as reality TV. There’s plenty of time in their lives as they grow and mature to do something stupid like this. However, whilst still a child, it’s important to be protected from an experience that’s merely a shallow marketing exercise created and run by people who are purely interested in the massive amount of money that comes with TV productions such as this, not the welfare of the kids. At the end of the day, why not just turn the TV off and spend some quality time baking cookies with the kids.