At 11D, Laura’s kindergarten-age son is having trouble with worksheets that assume he’s encountered traditional housekeeping, such as a mother who sews torn jeans instead of buying new ones, cooks while wearing an apron, irons shirts instead of sending them to the dry cleaner and sweeps and mops the floors.
. . . he’s coming across completely alien objects. Needles, thread, thimbles, mops, irons, aprons, dusters . . .
Objects that Ian is familiar with: takeout menus, wine bottles, cell phones, Blackberries, computers, scanners, color-coded calendars, remotes, drive through windows, and game systems.
When my daughter was about kindergarten age, she told me the story of Hansel and Gretel: “Gretel pushed the witch into the oven. MmmmBEEP!”
“She pushed the witch into a microwave oven?” I asked.
Allison was puzzled. What other sort of oven could there be?
I had a roommate once who would stand in the kitchen and watch me chopping carrots because she’d never seen her mom do that. It was one of my watershed moments in understanding America.
Sounds like we should mandate women back into Stay-At-Homeâ„¢ roles. For the sake of the children.
Oh please.
What happens when Ian spills juice on the floor? Don’t tell me that they leave it and wait for the next time the cleaning lady comes.
Maybe I’m excessively old-fashioned, but I think kids (boys AS WELL AS girls) should learn the basics of housekeeping. When I was even quite small, my mom would hand me a cloth and ask me to help dust.
Do we really want a generation who expects they will be able to hire someone to do everything for them?
It’s called education – I’ve never been to a slaughterhouse but I know hamburg comes from a cow – I’ve never been to the South Pole but I know in our summer the sun doesn’t shine there – I love that excuse that since you haven’t personally experienced something it’s unlearnable – the world so revolves around you
Hell, I’m a bachelor, and I have an iron … and a real oven, as does everyone else I know.
Perhaps it’s an urban-apartment-dweller thing, to have none of that?
(I can see the point with aprons, and even thimbles – hell, I hand-sew things for historical re-creation purposes, and I don’t use a thimble! But mops and irons aren’t exactly anachronistic yet.)
I’m with Ricki, further – everybody ought to be able to do basic housekeeping (cleaning, cooking, repairs to both clothing and objects), just as part of basic living competence.
I have an oven and an apron. I even own several sewing machines (one of them antique and non-functional; I sewed the upholstery for a sofa on another one).