While eating with chopsticks yesterday, I began to wonder about this. Kids’ fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination take awhile to develop. In cultures where chopsticks are the primary or only eating utensil, at what age do kids learn to use them well?
I taught myself to use chopsticks when I was 10 or so, when ads for Chicken McNuggets Shanghai (which were served with chopsticks as a gimmick) showed a bunch of different people attempting to use chopsticks with varying levels of success. It became all the rage among my 5th grade classmates to learn the technique, using a pair of pencils to pick up various small school supplies. These days I can pick up chunks of meat or vegetables and sushi pieces just fine, but I never figured out how to eat rice without resorting to a fork.
I don’t know what age Asian children start to learn. I presume they start with chopsticks first.
Generally, though, the rice meant to eat with chopsticks is stickier than ours, so it’s just scooped up in whole chunks to eat, and the bowl is held very close to the face so there’s less chance of dropping it. I (Indian) do indeed eat Chinese rice with chopsticks, but I could never eat Indian rice with chopsticks, where the beauty of the long-grain basmati is to have every grain distinct from the next.
In Korea chopsticks are mostly used for reaching, wrapping, and for noodles. If you have a rice dish (like fried rice, or bi bim bap–rice with mixed vegetables) it’s generally eaten with a spoon.
I’ve seen little kid chopsticks that are joined together at the top.
My great aunt taught me to eat with chopsticks when I was 4 or 5. However, when I’m in Asia I get laughed at because I use chopsticks like a child. Apparently my grip is very cute.
My kids (my son is Korean but we are a pretty white family) could use chopsticks about the same time they could use a spoon or fork - and long before they could dependably use a knife. Probably around three or four. We did have kids chopsticks - they are connected at the top - and there is the starter chopstick trick that you use a rubber band for. They are eight and nine now and I honestly can’t remember ever taking them out for Chinese or Thai or Sushi and having them use a spoon or fork (other than the spoon for soup).
The rice you eat with chopsticks tends to be sticky rice and is easy to eat with chopsticks.
I’ve had what was supposedly sticky rice, but it wasn’t so sticky that I could make it work very well!
I never thought about using chopsticks with “training wheels” so to speak. It seems like having them connected at the top would teach you to grip things the wrong way, but it might be a decent do-fer until a kid was old enough to control real chopsticks better.
Chopsticks are never used for rice in Thailand except by hardcore ethnic Chinese. Western tourists who think they are being “local” by using chopsticks with rice are quietly snickered at. For rice, a spoon is always used. Chopsticks are for noodle dishes and picking up items from commual dishes in the middle of a table.
The practice of using chopsticks with rice seems to be purely Chinese, although I don’t know about Japanese or Koreans.
As for what age, I’m not sure. Pretty young, I guess, but I’m never around children.
In Thailand, sticky rice is strictly finger food. You roll it into a ball, make a little dent in it with your thumb and scoop up a morsel from a communal dish with it. The lower-quality sticky rice is annoying, because little bits of it stick to your hands and fingers. The good-quality stuff peels right off the skin without sticking, like Teflon.
That’s the other thing, as Siam Sam mentions - be aware tat saying "Asian
when asking such a broad question is not useful. All of the Asian cultural groups are different. They use chopsticks at different ages. And some Asians don’t even use chopsticks - witness Indians. We’re Asian, too!
Those are common here, too, but they’re not for children, at least not here. You’re supposed to break them apart and then use them. They’re cheapie chopsticks handed out in the lower-priced places.
There are two different kinds of joined chopsticks. There are children’s training chopshicks, where the join is flexible, and makes the chopsticks work like a pair of tongs, and there are the disposable chopsticks that you break apart and use like ordinary chopsticks.
I do realize that India is part of Asia, and no offense was intended. I didn’t mean to imply that ALL Asian children necessarily use chopsticks, but I was guessing that the overwhelming majority of very small children who are taught to use chopsticks are in fact from various Asian ethnic backgrounds. I used “Asian” in the thread title as shorthand more than anything; in the OP I wrote, “In cultures where chopsticks are the primary or only eating utensil, at what age do kids learn to use them well?”
I’ve still not seen those very often, but then like I said, I’m not around childen. But they don’t seem very common in the stores here. When I read “joined together at the top,” I immediately thought of the disposable kind.
My own, fairly Americanized half-Chinese kids only learned to use chopstick after the age of 5. I admit, I’m giving my son a hard time about it now and he’s 4-1/2. I’m not a very good teacher as I don’t remember learning how to use them myself, though I do remember not being able to use them very well, so I figure it’s a matter of forcing them to use it and they’ll get better at it with practice. I never had those “rubber ball” versions as a kid either, just ones that were shorter in length.
As for eating rice with chopsticks – it’s not hard to do, because to eat rice Chinese style, you eat it out of a bowl that’s lifted to your mouth, shoveling it in with sweeping motions. I sometimes see people picking up rice off of a plate and lifting it to one’s mouth by using them sideways, but only if for some reason the rice was not served in a bowl (an oddity already) and if there is no spoon on hand.
The rubber band trick seems to be more common than trainers - and the “sink or swim” method more common yet (which is how my kids learned) - at least among Asian immigrants in the U.S. But a generic Asian market (which is, by the way, almost never an Indian market in at least this part of the U.S. - those are different) will generally carry children’s chopsticks.
