I grew up in a multigenerational family and had the fortune to live upstairs from my grandparents for most of my childhood. My grandmother was a stellar cook and indulged my siblings and I without much prodding. Frequently I would go downstairs for a late-night snack, only to be met with meltingly delicious pancakes, or start my weekend in the kitchen with my grandmother getting meatballs or sauce started for the family meal later that day. She would lovingly, yet firmly, coach and guide me on how much salt, or oregano, or rosemary to add. I can still feel her hands over mine as she would guide me with the rolling pin and show me the difference between a compliant dough and a resistant one, and how to manage each one. Many tips and tricks were conveyed standing at her side and were transmuted into my brain from her hands. When I wasn’t in my grandmother’s kitchen, I was with my dad stirring pots, checking the roast chicken, planning tomorrow’s dinner menu. There are several family recipes that I memorized before I was teenager and still rely on today. As part of the transition into adulthood, each of my siblings received a family cookbook, written by me, with these recipes and more. For me, cooking for my family not just feeds their bodies, it feeds my heart and, I hope, theirs.
Cooking remains one of my favorite activities. I still enjoy having the opportunity to research a new recipe, source the ingredients and test the edges of my skill level. I find cooking entertaining (I love an open kitchen at a restaurant), and it’s not just personally enjoyable but also heartwarmingly satisfying. When my girls moved into toddlerhood, it became important to have them join me in the kitchen, I wanted them to have the same warm memories I had standing by the stove – it was also a necessity; I didn’t have much help so keeping these rambunctious girls occupied and safe while I prepared meals required that they participate in that process. As the years have passed, each of them has developed their own appreciation for cooking and participate in making meals for our family. It brings me great joy to see them making mac and cheese for each other, or watch them expertly scramble eggs.
They often ask how I know as much as I do about how to season dishes, or adjust the flavor to get it to their liking. I tell them that I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my grandmother and my dad, which is the simple answer. The more complicated answer is that by sharing all of that time and those experiences I was able to acquire both knowledge and skills without formal training because of a psychological concept known as the Zone of Proximal Development. So much of parenting relies on this idea, and this conceptual framework - posited by early 20th century psychologist, Lee Vygotsky - offers us a window of understanding of how children learn from their surroundings. (Vygotsky could be considered one of the folks that laid the groundwork for the field of neuropsychology because of his theories of cognitive development.)
In its basic form, the Zone of Proximal Development is the space between what the child is currently capable of on their own, and what they can do with support/guidance from an adult. It suggests that children are able to acquire new skills by working with, or even observing, an expert (typically the parent, but it can be a teacher, sibling, friend, anyone really) as long as that expert starts from the child’s current strengths and capabilities. If you start at too advanced a level you are outside the zone and you’ll lose the learning opportunity. The relationship and connection you, the expert, has with the child allows you to know what they can do already, so you know where to start.
Using strategies likes discussion, encouragement, joint participation, and explanation, the expert builds a cognitive scaffold for the child to develop their own understanding of the task. It’s a shared experience with a joint focus of attention and one goal in common. All those times that my grandmother held her hands over mine as we rolled out the pasta dough, or my father asked me to pass him the herbs by name while he explained what they each offered to the dish, when my grandmother would gently scold “too much!” as I was adding salt, or when I ask the girls to taste the sauce and give feedback for how to adjust the seasonings in an iterative process…all of these leverage the Zone of Proximal Development to help enhance their knowledge of cooking. It even includes things like when I sat at the table watching my grandmother measure out ingredients for that special family recipe week after week, or when the girls stand next to me day after day while I prepare macaroni and cheese, such that the steps are repeated and internalized. It’s similar to what Jean Piaget (a Swiss psychologist from that same era) called Assimilation and Accommodation – that you can do anything new so long as it is close enough to what you can already do. Such learning occurs primarily in the context of the interaction between child and expert - according to Vygotsky, it occurs only in this context – and leverages the fact that there is a shared experience between the two, with the emphasis on gradual learning.
An important piece to remember about this concept is that the goal isn’t actually to have the child be able to master the task, rather the process of learning and acquisition of knowledge IS the goal. This means that when my girls try their hand at cooking, they will likely make a mess, or they might overcook the pasta, but they’ve developed new skills and become more inculcated into our family traditions in the process.
This might be my favorite part of the Zone of Proximal Development – the idea that the goal is not to be perfect, but to keep working and learning from those around us. That if we start – together – from where we are strong, we can only grow stronger.
Parenting is hard. Growing up is hard. Learning from each other makes it easier.