Microwave Safety for Children

Sue Snider: I am Sue Snider, University of Delaware, department of Animal and Food Sciences. We are talking about microwaving of foods safely. I would like to talk about kids and microwaves, seems very simple for children to do their own microwaving and in fact, we have a lot of kid friendly meals that are now available on the market. You might ask yourself, When is my child ready to start microwaving on their own? Well, there are some things that you need to consider. One of the first things is the hot eye hand coordination of the child. The child needs to be able to take a hot container of food, take it out of the microwave. They need to be able to open a seal package without burning themselves. So those are things that take good hand eye coordination and if the child is a little bit where they can't do that then there may run the risk of burning themselves and thats the one of the major concerns with children and microwaves is the burn that they can occur when they are cooking foods in the microwave. Another concern with children and actually, with everyone is when you eat a product. You have a product like this, lean pocket sandwich and the exterior may feel just slightly warm, but when you bite into it, the interior can be quite hot so you need to really be careful when you eat foods particularly, foods that have, part of it that has low moisture which is not going to heat very much than another part that has a high moisture content because you can get severe burns in your mouth. Finally, you need to be concerned about preparing foods like cocoa. Hot chocolate is very popular for kids, seems very simple, you put the water in, you heat it in the microwave and then you add the hot chocolate, but this water can become superheated that means that it doesnt look like it is boiling and then when the child adds the cocoa to the water, it all of a sudden, the water erupts and the child can become burnt. Its the adult's responsibility to show the child no matter what age the appropriate way to microwave, the importance of using all the safety features like rotating, stirring, taking the temperature and making sure that the food is safe and that the food does not become a hazard itself by causing burns.

Next we are going to be talking about college and that famous microwave.