Why So Many Celebrity Parents Are Teaching Their Kids to Cook Before Age 10

A stool pulled up to the counter used to mean a kid was underfoot. In a growing number of famous households, it means something closer to a job assignment, and the kids involved are younger than most people would expect.

The specific milestones vary from family to family, but the instinct behind them keeps showing up in interview after interview: hand over real tasks early, and skip the pretend versions entirely.

Padma Lakshmi Got a Supervised FaceTime Call Mid-Recipe

Padma Lakshmi’s daughter didn’t ask permission to attempt frying chicken. She’d already laid out the egg wash, the breadcrumbs, and the flour, along with paper towels and tongs, before calling her mother with one specific question.

“Mom, how hot does oil have to be to fry chicken?” was the actual question that came through.

When Padma asked how she even knew where to start, the answer was simple: “Mom, I’ve been watching you for years!” That single moment captured something bigger than one recipe, a kid who had absorbed an entire process just from being nearby in the kitchen long before anyone sat her down for a lesson.

Chrissy Teigen Narrates Technique Like a Real Sous Chef

Chrissy Teigen’s cooking videos with her daughter Luna don’t read like a staged lesson. They read like two actual cooks working through a dish together, with Teigen offering real-time direction rather than simplified instructions.

“Rub, rub, rub,” she coaches at one point, treating Luna’s technique like it matters.

She’s also been candid about her daughter’s strong opinions in the kitchen, joking that “she’s tough but she’s fair” when it comes to approving a dish. That dynamic, treating a young kid’s palate and effort as genuinely worth taking seriously, shows up again and again in how Teigen talks about cooking together.

Giada De Laurentiis Learned That Pushing Backfires

Not every approach in this space is about getting ahead of the clock. Giada De Laurentiis has been unusually candid that forcing the issue with her own daughter Jade never worked the way she expected.

“The more I push her, the more she runs the other direction,” she’s admitted.

Instead, she’s leaned on low-pressure entry points, letting Jade add ingredients to a cupcake pan during an easy pasta-cupcake project rather than handing her a full recipe to execute. The lesson wasn’t about starting especially early so much as making the invitation feel optional rather than assigned.

Jamie Oliver Says the Earliest Jobs Barely Look Like Cooking

Jamie Oliver’s case for starting young doesn’t involve knives or stovetops at all in the beginning. He’s pointed to tasks as small as picking herb leaves or stirring batter as genuinely valuable starting points.

“I can’t recommend enough getting your kids involved in the kitchen nice and early,” he’s said.

His reasoning isn’t really about producing a skilled young cook quickly. It’s that those small, low-stakes jobs build familiarity with food and process long before a kid is capable of handling anything more complicated, so the real cooking skills have somewhere to attach later on.

Across all four approaches, the common thread isn’t really the cooking itself. It’s a willingness to hand over something real, a question, a task, a whole dish, well before most people would think a kid is ready for it.