I’m a good cook, but having other people in the kitchen makes me tense.
My mother’s response to “Can I help?” was “Yes, dear, please set the table”.
I think lots of us never teach our kids chores because it’s a large investment of time, patience, and effort at the start–the payoff is a few years down the road, when you sit back and trust your kid to do a decent job cleaning the bathroom. I’m sure lots of parents just always tell themselves “I’ll teach him to mop when I have time, but right now I just gotta get this done!”
By this method are 10yos who can’t tie their own shoes produced–no one means to, but it’s always quicker to just do the job for the kid and not spend that extra time to teach the skill. If you’re always in a hurry, you’ll sacrifice future payoff for immediate benefit. (Yes, I actually did know a 10yo who couldn’t tie his own shoes. His babysitter took pity and taught him.)
I’m now starting to see the benefits of a 9yo who can do several jobs competently. She’s becoming a real help around the house and does save me time; I hardly ever clean her bathroom. I still have a lot of investing to do, though, since she can only do some things well.
The trouble with the ‘I’ll do it later’ idea is that the older they are, the more resistant they are to starting to learn. It’s easy to teach a 3yo to use a Dustbuster to pick up crumbs, and he loves it. It’s not so easy to teach a recalcitrant 10yo who has never done any chores to do his own laundry–by then he already feels that it’s not his job.
Our bathroom towels all have huge bleach spots on them because my daughter cleans the bathroom - and cleaner goes all over the place…the toilet bowl cleaner in particular seems to be an issue - it ends up outside of the toilet and she wipes up with whatever is handy. So its can be a sacrifice to get them trained.
My mom was a great cook, but she never “taught” us how to cook. My sister spent the better part of her adult life resenting my mom for teaching me and not her. I told her I had to hover and watch and ask a few questions. There was never a “session” where kitchen magic was passed on to me.
That was me. My mom would send me to practice piano, do homework, and stuff like that while she cooked. Same with sewing and other household skills. She’s like Martha Stewart, but I hardly learned a thing about domestic goddesshood. I still have to call her up to get instructions on how to cook pretty simple things. I can follow recipes, sure, but I don’t have a feel for cooking and I can’t make very educated guesses when recipes leave out steps or assume a certain level of knowhow.
Not sure what she was thinking – and I didn’t have enough foresight as a teenager to question the situation. I think she figured it out when I left home with practically no cooking skills, though. She did things differently with my brother, who is six years younger.
get white towels. problem solved 
I actually think there’s at least three major trends here. Firstly, the trend towards both adults being part of the workforce. Home ec skills weren’t just neglected, they were actively avoided by an entire generation of women, and due to the post-WWII economic boom, unnecessary for men as well. Therefore you have people who didn’t just lose the skills, they actively suppressed them. There were no others to step in and pick them up because pretty soon we were going to have robots to do all that and/or getting our meals in pill form anyway. Not only are both adults working, but school schedules take more hours and more days. Compulsory education has become a major factor in family time and has become a substitute for parenting more and more often. Parents assume their children are learning what they need and since they’re not being independent at home(thanks to TV dinners and Wal-Mart) the kids aren’t learning anything. How many people know someone who uses disposable dinnerware and tableware regularly? I knew several kids whose families did when I was growing up.
Secondly, the commercialization/urbanization of America led to everything from “TV dinners” to disposable clothing. Even among the relatively skilled subset which posts on the dope, how many know how to darn a sock? It’s a skillset which is pretty much made obsolete(and good riddance IMHO) by inexpensive textiles due to commercial manufacturing and distribution. Cooking and household self-reliance has suffered from a similar atrophy due to readily available alternatives, which are only now showing their hidden costs in health and quality of life effects. Urban areas may have a Wal-Mart on every corner, but while those places bring conveniences to large numbers of people, they also act like crutches which mean people don’t keep their own gardens, raise their own livestock(chickens were kept in many households until after WWII), mend their clothing, etc.
Lastly, the change in demographics for families. In addition to the kids being overscheduled, there are less of them. The average household size has nearly halved since 1890, and single-family households are significantly smaller in 2007 than they were in 1970. Bigger families mean mom and dad CAN’T do it all and the kids HAVE to pick up life skills. Add in the fact that significant numbers of women simply aren’t having children compared to a few decades ago, and you see that childrearing skills are understandably on the decline. It also means it’s easier to just pick up after your 1.5 children than it was to pick up after 2.5 children and thus the path of least resistance leads to the parents not forcing kids to clean up after themselves or pitch in around the house.
I heard an interesting podcast(Warning, plays sound) a month or so ago with an interview by the editor-in-chief of the dying(November is their last print issue) Gourmet magazine. She said people just don’t seem to be comfortable in the kitchen anymore. People have been conditioned by advertising and television to believe they have to be a skilled chef, and as such they invest too much in a meal, which may or may not go wrong. If it goes well, then they may repeat it, or just look back on it fondly as an itch well scratched, but if it goes badly they’re much less likely to dip their toes into that water again. Whereas in the past people might try a new recipe or ingredient and if it went badly, shrug their shoulders and move on. There wasn’t this mystique about the kitchen where people felt they had to live up to some sort of Iron Chef standard when they cooked. She also mentioned how they constantly review their recipe writing guidelines. A recipe from the 40s which may say 'clean and roast a chicken" assumes WAY too much for a modern audience who has NO idea how to put that into practice. As such a modern recipe seems much more difficult to follow because they’re longer and more detailed, although probably not “harder”. It’s a bitter irony that instructions intended to simplify things for the novice cook end up driving them away, but I don’t see what else the recipe writers could do.
Enjoy,
Steven
I’ve never heard of a soup with a skeleton, so excuse my doubts about them having bones. 
I think maybe I fall into this generation. I’m 31. There’s not much I can’t do, from bleeding a radiator to making a souffle, and I have my mother to thank for this. She is a wonderful woman, and taught all of us (boys and girls) any and every skill she thought was required, with no thought of gender specifics. We needed to be self-sufficient. I have two dear friends who I love deeply, but they have teenage twins (a boy and a girl) who can do nothing for themselves, and I judge them for their children’s lack of skills. How will they survive their lives?
This thing about bread taking a long time… what? The recipe I most regularly use requires my actual attention for maybe fifteen minutes. Put the kettle on, make a cup of tea and start the yeast with a little of the hot water let down with cold. While the yeast gets going, put the flour in a bowl. Mix, knead, cover, set to rise. Drink tea, do whatever for half an hour or so. Knock back and switch on the oven. Make whatever’s going with the bread, putting the bread in the oven at the appropriate time to be ready at the same time as what you’re making (this particular bread only takes 12 minutes to bake). Possibly have time for another cup of tea, scan the Dope. Take the bread out and be happy. Total time, sure, over an hour at least. But time I actually have to spend with it: minimal. Just the other day I managed to get home from work at 6.30, make bread, wash and hang out a load of laundry, clean the kitchen and bathroom, mop the floor and make up the bed, and had hot bread rolls with homemade garlic butter and prawn curry (which began with raw prawns) on the table in the clean house when my partner got home at 8.30. And when I’ve had one of those days when I just want to beat the hell out of some student or colleague, kneading bread is more therapy than chore at the end of it!
These will be white if she cleans the bathroom a few more times…
Boy, am I ever glad I was booted out of the nest at the tender age of 19. Nothing teaches you to be frugal like working a part-time minimum wage job and having less than $150/mth to live on once the rent and bills have been paid.
Mind you, my mother had taken the time to make damned sure I’d be equipped for living on my own while I was still in my early teens. I was doing my own laundry by the age of 12 (tho I wasn’t allowed to iron until a few years later, since that was a little scarier than using a washer/dryer), cooking dinner once a week for a family of five by the age of 14, and helping out with housekeeping and gardening pretty much from the time I could walk.
I don’t have kids, so I can imagine that a lot of good intentions get tossed out the window when faced with the reality of dashing from work to school to hockey practice to piano lessons to home again. Still, I’d like to think I’d still be able to batch-cook dinners every weekend or two like my mother did, rather than resort to frozen prepared meals.
Mom tried to teach me to cook, but I was only interested in cookie baking; she and my sister did a whole lot more cooking. I essentially taught myself in college, drawing on cookbooks, what little might have sunk in from Mom, a semester of Home Ec in middle school, and old memories of watching Julia Child on TV when I was a kid. Considering that I’m a vegetarian and yet make the most awesome Thanksgiving turkey out of anyone in the extended family, I think it worked out OK. There’s no shame in using recipes, either; I have a few dozen cookbooks on the shelves in my kitchen and am getting rid of nearly that many others.
It’s not just that there are so many cooking shows, it’s that the “lifestyle gurus” are everywhere and they do much more than just cook these fabulous gourmet meals. If you believe these people, your house must be tastefully decorated with just the right kind of paint, wallpaper, accessories, appliances, and so forth, and it’s all available for a price. You must also have the perfect wardrobe and makeup, and that’s also available for a price. And so on, ad nauseam. There are an awful lot of people brainwashed to think that these things are necessary for gracious living. It doesn’t occur to them that a white T-shirt from Wal-Mart is just as good as a white T-shirt from the Lifestyle Guru collection at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Or, as my dad used to say when we watched The New Yankee Workshop, “I’d be able to do all that if I had the money for all those fancy tools.”
Yeah, I’m not sure that I appreciate Martha Stewart’s contribution: she made ‘homemaking’ fashionable, sort of, but she also made it perfectionistic and unobtainable. And only the expensive, unnecessary, time-consuming parts of homemaking–everyone needs to scrub the toilet, but no one needs to make specialty marshmallow-roasting sticks with linen twine and fancy ribbon unless they really, really want to.
Making a house into a working home isn’t glamorous or expensive, and it also isn’t difficult or perfectionistic. It’s just life.
It’s funny how that “crafty and impractical” homemaking stuff comes in cycles - a few weeks ago I saw a darning egg at Wal-Mart, because knitting socks has become fashionable. A darning egg! Which I’m sure was a staple of the 19th century big box store equivalent, but has been unheard of for decades.
An absolutely awesome homemaking book - not as much in how to cook, but it does give a lot of advice on stocking a pantry, cleaning a kitchen, and a bunch of other useful information - is Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. It’s a reference book on pretty much anything to do with homemaking, from cleaning spots out of your carpet, to how to set a table for casual to formal occasions, to the pros and cons of different fibers for your home fabrics, to electrical safety issues, to legal and insurance matters. It really covers a wide spectrum of stuff you might want to know about dealing with your home.
I love that book. The first couple of chapters are downright inspiring. 
Speaking of which, you guys inspired me and there is bread rising in the kitchen. I’ve been meaning to make some for a few days but hadn’t gotten around to it.
I know how to darn a sock, but really, I’m not going to bother to mend most commercially produced socks. If I had knitted them myself, then I’d probably darn them, or if I particularly liked a pair, and they were expensive or discontinued, then maybe I’d darn them.
I’ve mended any number of garments, though. I can and have rewoven rips and tears, and with one pair of favorite jeans, I reinforced the area on the inner thighs by reweaving the spots with more thread.
Thirding the recommendation for Home Comforts. I seriously read the laundry chapters just for fun sometimes.
Personally speaking, most of my housekeeping skills are self-taught, or were taught to me by my grandmother when I stayed with her during summer vacations when I was a kid. My mom was a single mom, raising three kids, and she simply did not have time to teach us how to clean or keep house. She preferred to just do it herself, to her standards, because it was quicker and easier for her that way. We did have some chores, such as making our beds, but as far as teaching us how to manage the laundry, or how to do grocery shopping, or even how to properly dust the furniture, we were on our own. And, she didn’t cook. Most of our dinners were frozen entrees or came from a jar or a can. I was in college before I ever even saw a head of garlic. She didn’t own a knife, apart from a couple of steak knives. Oh, and forget sewing. Please.
I have a lot of these skills myself these days, but that’s because I actively learned how to sew, to cook, to shop frugally, etc. I hope to pass these skills down to my own kids. In MrWhatsit’s family, after age 10 or so, each child was in charge of fully preparing the family’s dinner, one night per week, and he feels that this was a really good learning experience for him and his sibs. We may implement something like that ourselves.
We live on a pretty limited budget and have discovered that it’s actually cheaper to eat out (well, get Chinese or Indian) than it is to cook at home sometimes.
I cannot imagine not having meat (which includes fish and chicken) most nights. I’d be furious if I worked full time and came home and dinner was [del]rabbit food[/del] “vegetarian”.
Fortunately, I do almost all the cooking and by buying in bulk can get really good deals because of it (hurrah for chest freezers!). There doesn’t have to be a lot of meat in a stirfry, of course, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a working person who likes meat to expect it a couple of times a week.