What helps families cook more often at home?
What helps families cook more often at home?
This study explored the challenges parents face when preparing meals at home and the strategies they use to overcome barriers and support healthier family eating habits.
What We Did and Why We Did It
We conducted a qualitative study with 40 parents of children aged 2–12 years from Southwestern Ontario. Researchers collected data through eight focus groups conducted between October 2019 and January 2020. Parents discussed their experiences with the 2019 Canada’s Food Guide recommendation to “Cook more often,” including barriers they face and strategies that help make home cooking easier. Researchers analyzed the discussions to identify common themes related to food literacy, including planning, food selection, preparation, and eating behaviours.
Cooking meals at home more often is associated with improved diet quality and healthier eating habits. However, many families face challenges that make home meal preparation difficult, such as limited time, food costs, and competing responsibilities. Understanding the barriers and strategies families experience can help inform programs and resources that support parents in preparing healthy meals at home.
What We Found
What We Can Learn From This
Parents identified several challenges that made cooking more often difficult, including lack of time, the cost of healthy ingredients, picky eating, limited cooking skills, difficulty involving children in meal preparation, and outside influences on children’s food choices. Parents shared several strategies that helped them overcome these challenges, such as planning and preparing meals ahead of time, using meal kits or grocery planning tools, using kitchen appliances like slow cookers or pressure cookers, and getting help from family members. Many parents also recognized that including some processed foods in moderation could make meal preparation more realistic and manageable.
Supporting families to cook more often requires more than simply providing nutrition information. Programs should consider practical barriers families face and provide tools that make meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking easier. Building food skills, involving all family members in food preparation, and creating resources that fit into busy family routines may help make healthy home cooking more achievable.
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