Using Cutlery

I’m Kirsty Brocklehurst and I’m a Children’s Physiotherapist and I’m Sally Hillis-Davis and I’m a Children’s Occupational Therapist and we are the Practical Child. We’re going to be sharing some common issues around child development and our top tips for how you can help.

Hi there, I’m going to be talking about cutlery today and my top tip is when you first use cutlery with your children, don’t sit at the table with them eating and try and expect them to use cutlery.

It’s really good to start early on with play. So please do its brilliant thing to use. To roll it in the sausage and then just cut it with a knife and that’s a really good way to start. These, I think are fantastic. They come apart and they’re really good for cutting with. So you can just cut down it and they’re really a fun way to start cutting as your children get a bit more confident in what they do. Obviously you can bring in a fork and again, you can’t use that with this, but you can call these folks and play again and get them to make patterns. And again, use a knife and fork together.

I really like specialist children’s cutlery. These ones are particularly good because they do have finger holes in them. Amazing thing to remember about cutlery is these two fingers. These two fingers are key to being really good at being able to use cutlery because they can give you stability, but they also give you the force to cut. So again, with plasticine, you’ll get your fingers in the right place and then come down.

What children tend to want to do is this and actually that gives you much less stability If you don’t want specialist cutlery and certainly don’t need to have it. It’s quite good to have quite big thick handles and sometimes what I suggest is that you put a blob of nail varnish on each knife and fork and so children know where to put their fingers.