Tips for Eating with Chopsticks

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Lisa Krone and I’m here with Best Epicurean on behalf of expertvillage.com. I am here to teach you how to teach your children how to use chopsticks. So one of the things I like to do, this is my son Scott and my daughter Kyle is I like to pick foods like Cheerios or nuts and then we will take them on to the more advanced stuff like rice, which is even smaller. So the first thing you are going to do Scott, you don’t mind if I borrow these for a second, is you are going to pick a pair of chopsticks. The important thing is you want to make sure that the bottom of the chopsticks is not too small and not too thick; otherwise you won’t be able to have good dexterity with the chopstick in order to pick up the food. The next thing you want to do is you want to place three fingers of the chopstick and the thumb on this side of the chopstick when you go to teach your child. You want to place them there and most importantly, you want to lift my center finger so that you can use that as the tool to move the chopstick back and forth. So what you would do is you go for the food that you are interested in and Cheerios are easy because they have a hole, you pick it up and place it in your mouth. I will place it in Scott’s mouth so I can speak. So Scott, you want to give that a try. Kyle has already seemed to have mastered it. She kind of uses her way a little bit. She is using her thumb to kind of separate the chopstick a little and what will happen is once your kid learns how to use chopsticks they are going to kind of develop their own way. She has been using them a lot longer than Scott but as you can see with that method, he’s got his three fingers on the chopstick and he is using his center finger as his mechanism to open the chopstick and close the chopstick. This is not going to be a perfect thing that works on the very first taste, so don’t be discouraged if your young one is not able to eat an entire bowl of white rice using chopsticks and they also sell kids chopsticks in the store so you might want to start with those first but it is really neat when you can take your child to an authentic Asian restaurant and the server comes over and says, can I get the kids forks? You say no, they know how to use chopsticks. Bring them on over and that is how you teach children how to use chopsticks. "