When it comes to farming, you’ve gotta start ’em young! Teaching your kids how to garden and grow their own food is a fulfilling educational exercise and wonderful bonding activity for your family. It’s a gift for you, as a parent, to see your little one transported by the magic of mother nature and all of her gifts.
Growing food, especially in an urban setting, is an activity that cultivates deep life lessons transferrable to all aspects of life. Today, I’m going to outline a dozen of benefits for your children as they learn to grow their own vegetables, herbs, and even fruit — and these are just the beginning. If you’re already gardening with your kids, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please comment below about your experience!
1. Understanding the cycle of life
From sprouting a seed to watching it grow, children get a first-hand experience of the natural cycle of life and growth. Talking to children about this process is not always easy to do, which makes growing food a great opportunity to demonstrate, discuss, and most importantly, practice it.
Through this experiential learning process, children also get to play the role of caregiver and assume the responsibilities that come with it. If and when a plant dies, another fantastic learning opportunity arises. With added elements like compost, the child learns how interconnected the processes of life are, and that nothing is separate. Kids will witness how the sun, air, water, and earth work together to grow just one plant.
2. Fostering patience
With all the technological excess of today, children struggle to stay focused and practice patience more than ever before. Spending time outdoors to watch nature come to life is enough of a reason to start gardening with the kids. Day by day, they’ll get to see the efforts of their work blossom right before their eyes. Waiting for harvest time can be a fantastic teacher, too, illustrating the benefits of delayed gratification and hard, persistent work.
3. Communing with nature
The amount of time that kids spend outdoors, let alone exercising outdoors, continues to decrease — especially in the last year, with mandatory lockdowns around the world. Spending time in nature has been proven on multiple occasions to be therapeutic, and there is an extra benefit to being active outside, like with the labour of harvesting or turning over a compost pile.
The experience a child has when they get to feel life growing between their palms or under the soles of their feet is inimitable. There is a deeper appreciation for food that is created when they get to use the sense of touch, taste, smell, and sight to engage with their plants — and then eventually have the fruits of their labour make their way into their lunch.
4. Learning about the origin of foods
Far too many kids are disconnected from the process of where their food comes from, and are led to believe that it comes from a store packaged in plastic. The more active a child is in understanding where the food they eat comes from, the deeper their appreciation and gratitude for their sustenance becomes. It’ll be less likely that they’d waste their food, too.
5. Growing curiosity
Planting, gardening, and harvesting are all perfect opportunities for a child to grow their curiosity about food, life, and nature. Whether they find answers to their questions or not, the true power comes from the simple act of their questioning. It encourages children to use thinking skills and consider the scientific and natural process of gardening and cultivating their own food.
6. Teaching kids responsibility
Creating a healthy and thriving garden requires a lot of love and care. By introducing your child to gardening and growing food, they learn how closely they need to pay attention to details, such as identifying the signs that the plants require more care and attention.
Watering, planting, compost turnover, and harvesting are all different aspects of the gardening process that can serve as great lessons for the little ones. They also get to experience how it feels to have a living thing rely on them. Eventually, this can turn into a conversation around self-parenting and self-care.
7. Quality family time
Arguably, any time spent together is good, but some activities that have a holistic element can provide even more beneficial bonding time. Together, you’ll share a common goal and purpose of raising a thriving garden, sharing responsibilities, and depending on one another’s support and teamwork for the end goal.
8. Healthier diet and lifestyle
As soon as a plant is harvested, it begins to lose its nutrients. Reducing the amount of time from the point the plant is harvested to the time it’s eaten is important — and made possible if you have a garden close by.
When you choose to grow your own food, you eliminate the risk of consuming harmful chemicals and pesticides that are used by farmers to increase shelf life and improve the appearance of fruits and vegetables. Homegrown food is known to taste richer and better than food that has sat in a grocery store and endured hours of travel as well.
9. Reducing carbon footprint
The environmental cost of transporting goods from farms to stores and then from the store to your dinner table is enormous. Just the environmental factors alone can be convincing enough to take up gardening and grow your own food.
10. Developing life skills
Not all kids have the opportunity to learn about cultivating food, nor what is safe for consumption versus what might cause harm. Through gardening, kids directly learn what plants should be avoided and never touched, and which ones they should feel free to put into their mouths and enjoy. They can take these skills out of their own garden and into life while on nature walks and camping for the rest of their lives.
Kids also get experiential and pragmatic knowledge of math skills when it comes to measuring crops, counting crops, measuring water, measuring height and size of plants and produce, as well as data collection if you choose to keep track of your crops.
11. Affordable activity
Finding fun and engaging activities to do with your kids can sometimes be hard. Gardening serves as a cost-friendly option for spending quality time with the kids. There is, of course, the added benefit of slashing produce costs.
12. Opportunities for play
In the garden, both you and your kids can fully embrace your inner children! You can walk barefoot and feel nature beneath you. Kids can use all of their senses to take in and enjoy the bounty of their surroundings. Here, they have a safe space to roam free, one where you don’t have to worry about them.
Updated August 31, 2021. Originally published June 30, 2019.
