First and foremost, this is a real kitchen knife. The only real difference between this and our high quality kitchen knives is the rounded tip, shorter blade, and small grip with protection to keep the fingers from slipping onto the sharp blade. This absolutely requires supervision, but it also leads to more success cutting and less slippage. You just need to feel confident you are ready to give your child a knife. That said, we had already let our 6yo sometimes take a small knife to cut soft items like strawberries, mushrooms, etc with close supervision and he did well, but we noticed the most likely injury was from "choking up" on the handle to close to the blade so the handle design here helps prevent that nicely. I also like the blunt tip since he can't accidentally stab the tip somewhere. The design leaves ONLY the blade itself to worry about. So far he has successfully cut strawberries, mushrooms, peppers, and cucumbers, and the pride he feels in helping prepare food has encouraged him to take (and eat) more vegetables in his lunches!