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Life Skills: Learning to Cook Around Sensory Challenges 🥞 When Ben was younger, using the stove was a real challenge. One of the biggest barriers wasn’t the cooking itself — it was the sound . Ben was extremely sensitive to the sound of food sizzling in a pan. He called it “the sizzle,” and when he heard it, he would often run out of the room. So learning to cook on the stove has been something we’ve worked on very gradually over the years. We didn’t start with foods that required a very hot pan or created a loud sizzle. We started with quieter, more manageable cooking experiences and slowly built from there. Today, Ben can do things like flip a pancake, stir food cooking on the stove, and participate much more comfortably in meal preparation. He’s still not independent with stove cooking. He needs supervision, prompting, and help along the way — and that’s okay. The goal has never been to rush independence. It has been to help him participate, build confidence, and continue learning at a pace that works for him. Sometimes a life skill isn’t difficult because someone doesn’t understand how to do it. There may be a sensory piece making the skill much harder than it appears from the outside. For Ben, before we could work on cooking, we first had to work with the sizzle. ❤️ Are there any everyday life skills that have been harder for your child because of a sensory challenge? What helped them take that next little step?