Some modern women have a problem: their mothers didn’t teach them Homemaking. Many are the varied testimonies – girls whose mothers did everything for them, urging them to concentrate on school and career, helicopter parents who do everything for their kids, etc. I can touch this topic without insult to my own mother, however, since she’s off the hook – nobody’s ever managed to teach household chores from Heaven, that I know of at least!
Many Millennials are having to put things together on their own, with “secondhand” help like internet tips, rather than learning organically as part of a passing-on of family tradition. I’m very glad that the internet exists, because I can just imagine the kinds of mistakes I would make and suboptimal solutions I’d lock onto if I had to try to figure out everything on my own, and it’s not pretty! Compounding the issue is the isolation of modern families from one another, because really, who else can you call on when it comes to grungy household chores? Family is basically it. But when they don’t live with you, they can end up more like guests!
Thankfully, I’m blessed to have family close enough that when I need help, I have people to call – and when they need help, they can call on me. This was especially useful to my sister and I today – she had borrowed a carpet-cleaner from her in-laws, and wanted my advice on cleaning her oven. So I came over and played assistant while she shampooed the carpet, and she assisted me in scrubbing the oven with a baking soda paste and a bit of diluted vinegar! Thus did we learn together how to operate the carpet cleaner without drenching the floor, and I passed on some oven-cleaning tips from my experience. (Though the baking-soda paste idea was yanked right off the internet when I arrived, since my current oven self-cleans, and for the oven before that, I used a commercial oven-cleaning spray, which I was not about to use again.) Now I’m confident that I could easily shampoo my own carpets, and my sister is confident about cleaning her oven!
We might both be weird, but somehow I suspect our feelings aren’t all that uncommon – the desire for moral support when tackling a “big” new household chore. There’s something daunting about trying something for the first time when you’re home alone, with no one to assist if some dreadful unforeseen calamity strikes due to one’s embarrassing n00b lack of skilz. (This emotion is probably related to The Voice of Misplaced Priorities, since it doesn’t necessarily bear much relation to reality.)
I’m fairly sure guys don’t operate like that. At all. Try calling on a male for moral support and he’s likely to perceive it as A Problem I Can Fix! and then do it all himself. Which will work – as long as the woman in question is honestly trying to learn new skills for herself and observes carefully so as to do it herself next time, rather than batting her eyelashes and foisting the work off onto her latest hapless victim!
(So yeah: lack of posting lately is due to Spring Cleaning being in full effect.)
Something Fishy 
Part of why kids might not be taught how to do stuff– their parents try to make sure that any household stuff is done while the kids are at school, so they can have some kind of time with them. Especially if the kids have any kind of out-of-school activities.
Add in moms working outside of the home, and you cut down on the time that exists to do what must be done, and sweet mother above does it take at least twice as long with “help” to do most anything around the house! (And that’s if nothing goes wrong. I’m teaching my kids, and it’s a great exercise in patience…..)
Yup, that’s true too!