On Wednesdays, my preschooler is home with me all day. Every week, I give her the option of spending our day together at the park, a library storytime, or a kids’ music class. But, every week, she knows exactly where she wants to go: Trader Joe’s. The first time I took her to the store with me on “our day,” I felt guilty dragging her around on errands instead of filling our day with enriching or supposedly educational activities. But the truth is, she much prefers running through the aisles and riding in the shopping cart to what an adult might consider a more constructive activity. Luckily, it turns out that helping me shop for groceries just might be as beneficial to her as it is convenient for me. 

Considering making a weekly grocery store trip with the kids part of your routine? Here’s all the ways this everyday activity can have big benefits for kids' minds and emotions.

Put aside your worries that it might be too disruptive or take up too much time if you let your kids accompany you on these errands. Because kids don’t always need an expensive class or activity in order  to learn valuable life skills. 

Rebecca Hansen, Senior Director of Communications at  the Center On The Developing Child at Harvard University, says that the grocery store, like many other everyday settings from your living room to the laundromat, can actually be a rich setting for the kinds of interactions that are known to shape a child's brain architecture.

A visit to the grocery store, and other outings that invite us to help our children engage with the world around them, can support their development in many key ways, Hansen says. Involving our kids in these kinds of simple, daily chores serves as a foundation for more complex high level cognitive abilities that form later in life. Here, she outlines the benefits of grocery shopping as a family, for kids of nearly any age.

The grocery store is a perfect place to participate in what Hansen calls “serve and return” interactions, in particular with young babies. Serve and return interactions are interactions that involve responsive back and forth exchanges between a baby or young child and a caring adult. 

Think about these interactions like a lively game of tennis,” Hansens suggests. 

The child might react vocally or point to a food they love. Then, their caregiver responds by handing the package to the child to feel, saying the name of the food outloud, or another response that serves as a kind of primitive conversation. Whatever it looks like, the child and caregiver go back and forth. 

Serve and return interactions have been shown to play a key role in shaping a child's brain development over time, and they’re a critical part of a child's social environment. They’re also really simple, Hansen says, and most caregivers are probably already having these kinds of interactions with their kids, but the more the better. The grocery store is a perfect opportunity to engage with your child intentionally in this particular way. 

Serve-and-return interactions aren’t just helpful for social skills, they’re essential for language development in kids, too. 

Depending on your child’s age, Hansen says, your “conversation” may look a bit different. With an infant, she suggests you could maintain a regular back and forth as you shop, where you simply respond to their coos or their babbling, which you’re probably already doing anyway. 

However, if they point out a food or person in the store, simply follow their curiosity about the world around them. If you’re shopping with a toddler and they point to an apple, Hansen says a great “return” to that “serve” would be to echo their gesture. Point to the apple, too, and name it. You could even pick it up, show it to them, hand it to them, and talk with them about it. 

Trying asking questions like, What color is it? Do they prefer the red apple or the green apple? Do they think that apples are sweet or not sweet? To engage older children, you can get into a more in-depth conversation about different types, colors, and shapes of other produce they see in the store, or the types of fruits and vegetables they enjoy eating for breakfast and lunch. 

If you’re inclined to take a leisurely stroll around the grocery store, you could even involve them in meal planning, by asking them to pick out ingredients they want to try at home. 

The bottom line? The grocery store provides a rich setting for conversation with kids of all ages, and when you’ve got time in your schedule embrace it, Hansen says it’s a productive way to spend time with your kids. 

“The great thing about going to the store is that it doesn't require any kind of special equipment,” she adds. “There's nothing you have to buy to do this with your kid.”

Particularly for older elementary school-aged kids, a trip to the store can be a great lesson in the practical applications of the basic math skills they’re working on at school—looking at prices of each item in your cart is a simple and effective way to apply addition skills to a real word, scenario for instance. Encourage your child to add up the total for all the items, and then watch the check out together to see if their answer is right.

If you really want to take it to the next level, you could try using a cash budget for your shopping trip. Let your child fill the cart, and see if the numbers work out when it’s time to pay for the groceries. 

Including your child in some of your grown-up activities in this way doesn’t just prepare them for the kind of money management and budgeting that adulthood will require, it also situates the lessons they learn in school as valuable real life skills, and might even get them excited to sit down for dinner if they feel included in the process. 

As kids get older, you can also experiment with letting them take on more of the work of grocery shopping themselves. 

Speaking this time as a mom of three more than as a child development expert, Hansen shares that she involves her kids in her grocery outings all the time. 

“We call them grocery store missions, and the kids love it,” she explains. 

Everyone gets their “missions” (part of the grocery list) and then comes back with their goods. Kids gain confidence and experience a little bit of independence in exchange for taking on some responsibility, and parents get the shopping done more efficiently; it’s a win-win.