To say 'make your own breakfast' to Husband

You are cooking the toast and eggs for yourself anyway it would take 2 seconds to pop 2 more pieces of toast in the toaster and 2 extra eggs in a pan
Its not like they take hours to cook its literally minutes and you are doing it anyway
Very petty, there must be ALOT more to this

Sometimes Mumsnet just isn't the place to post. This woman is clearly exhausted and utterly fed up. It's not about how much extra time & effort it would have taken. It was the straw that broke her. The lack of basic emotional intelligence and compassion on this platform makes me despair at times.

There is also a missing piece of the puzzle in that South Asian multi-generational living often traditionally features a mother or MIL, who has completed her own child raising relatively young and then has charge of the domestic domain.

It may be traditional for women to do all the work, but that doesn't make it right.

Particularly when this is not a traditional multigenerational household with a mother in law to do yell at her daughter in law to do all the work.

Agreed, now is not the best time for changes, regardless of what happens in other households. But learning to cook would be a nice project for after exams.

Great post!
Also, if I’m not mistaken, the poor boy is actually doing exams at the moment .
Lots of parents go overboard in looking after their child at this time.
Surely better to put off the revolution until the exams are over?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a hot meal at lunch time and something lighter later, as it probably matches when you are most active and so is better for your metabolism. Not entirely compatible with home working, but there are ways it can be managed. Perhaps a slow cooker would help? @OneThingAfterTheOther

I think that many people are significantly underestimating South Asian cultural factors on this thread.

There is a huge emphasis on hot food in South Asian cultures. If you visit someone’s house, it is totally normal to be offered hot savoury snacks such as samosas or pakoras. These would be cooked from scratch, generally by the women of the household.

In the Sikh temple the langar (communal kitchen, generally staffed by unpaid women!) cooks hot meals for most of the day and evening. Think vast vats of rice or dhal, plus hot savoury snacks.

There is also the tiffin or hot lunch system in Mumbai, whereby hot lunches are made from home (again by wives or mothers!) and then delivered to workplaces. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/17/tiffin-the-history-of-indias-lunch-in-a-box-mumbai

There is also a missing piece of the puzzle in that South Asian multi-generational living often traditionally features a mother or MIL, who has completed her own child raising relatively young and then has charge of the domestic domain.

So it would be interesting to know what the domestic patterns were in the DH’s home life, although I can pretty much guess.

But he is in a modern marriage to a working woman, so needs to temper his expectations to what is realistic.

Turning to her son, some of the language used about a sixteen year old boy has been pretty nasty. Yes he needs to gain some skills in this area (perhaps he is good in other areas?) but he is only responding to how he has been raised (as we all do) and I don’t think the OP has anywhere described him as lazy, entitled or badly behaved? I am not sure that he has done much wrong, apart from be a bit behind the curve in one specific area. Some of the curt or dismissive responses are pretty unnecessary.

Nor is he destined for an adulthood of being unable to cook and hated by his peers. I was raised with very little experience of cooking meals (I grew up in a home that was tightly controlled by one of my parents) and just learned to cook when I went into university self-catering accommodation. The first night I got there, I cooked something to eat. It’s not difficult and you don’t need years of training. Yes, there were a few mistakes along the way but I didn’t poison myself or anyone else and it really wasn’t a problem. Lack of money to buy something to cook was more of an issue!

Yes. A sharp knife is much safer to use than a blunt one, it’s less likely to skid, and I was there to ensure she used it safely. Ditto when she started cooking. I don’t think she’s ever actually cut herself or burnt herself (unlike me 😂).

How did you learn to cook and to look after yourself? I was expected to make a pasta sauce once a week from the age of about thirteen, and I always helped in the kitchen (both my parents cooked, my dad was the better cook IMO) so picked up bits and pieces of knowledge an also interest so as I got older I wanted to try different recipes and feed the family. I also had to do housework, ironing, and keep my own room clean and tidy. As a student, it was clear who still thought that fairies came to do the cleaning- they got pretty short shrift from the others- and also who didn’t know how to make tasty (and safe!) food.

Congratulations, you are raising another man child 👏🏻

You still must work much harder on getting dh to cook for himself and for everyone. Otherwise you will both be retired but he will be relaxing and you will be planning and cooking and cleaning every day like you still have young children but you’re 70, and you will resent him every day.

Oh and you're doing him an absolute disservice by not teaching him these things. My parents didn't teach me anything at all, my Mam would shoo us out of the kitchen when she was cooking and she did all of the housework. I left home at 17 and I'd never used a washing machine, never cooked anything other than a microwave meal, I couldn't even boil pasta. It took me years to teach myself how to function properly and even now I'm not great at cooking.

Mine certainly weren't operating the oven at 7, they could make a sandwich though. I taught them how to do simple things like sandwiches, toast, cereal as early as possible. I don't think I've made them breakfast/dinner since they were about 8. I do cook tea but if I'm busy or working one of the older ones will cook tea, that probably happens once a fortnight. They are 18, 15 and 13 and can all cook, put a wash on and do basically any form of housework if I need them to.

Despite some awesome stories here of creative kids knocking up a feast at 8, most aren't. But they are slowly learning the basics.

So for my 8yo, she can bake a cake independently if I give her a simple recipe and I get it out of the oven for her (she's happy putting it in though). She can make a simple sandwich, toast, cereal and has just started to make pancakes. She's very risk adverse (which we are trying to deal.with) so doesn't like knives, hob etc. I'm going to get her more comfortable with the air fryer and microwave over summer so she can be more independent but in a way that doesn't freak her out. She is less independent than a lot of her friends, yet even at half the age of your son, she does more

My parents pretty much babied me, but I could and often did cook for myself at 16, albeit it was very oven based and quite basic. I could knock up a decent roast and make cakes for the family.

When I was 16, a decade ago, I was a chef at a cafe on the weekends… teenagers aren’t babies. They can cook. They can press a button on the washing machine. You’re treating him like he’s 7 and behaving as though you’re a slave.

Could you cook at 16? I bet you could and I bet it was expected that you did.

He doesn’t need cooked food 5 times a day. He will be obese if you do that. He can have fruit or yoghurt for snacks.

However the options for non labour intensive food aren’t just sandwiches. I don’t know where people get this idea that all British folk eat is sandwiches. Easy lunches include omelettes, pastas, quesadillas, chicken rice, fish/prawn rice bowls. They take 10 minutes and a 16 year old can do it.

That still leaves Op with the responsibility of sorting all that out though.

If i was her I'd go on strike.

She said she was happy to cook five dinners a week. So this means she's going from cooking four times a day, seven days a week to cooking four nights a week.

Everyone is sorting themselves out for breakfast and lunch, and she gets to teach her son how to cook and not be the sort of husband her DH is.

It's a gradual change. More successful than a strike.

Why should OP do the lion’s share of any of that?

Well I would not have said it so rudely but YANBU to ask him to make his own breakfast. DH and I will often sort out just our own lunches and breakfasts and if your DC is 16 surely he can sort out his lunch? Certainly I would not be cooking 4 meals during the day. I think I would knock this on the head that you are the default cook and make sure both your DS and DH know you aren’t their slave.

@OneThingAfterTheOther

If I were you I would do the following:

Everyone fixes their own breakfast and lunch - have on hand an agreed selection of healthy options everyone likes. Occasionally on weekends if you have the energy and time you could batch cook some of those mini egg muffin things and have them ready to heat up during the week.

Have a good selection of healthy 'grab and go' snacks for the teen - fruit, power bars, cheese sticks etc so that he knows that it's on him to manage his own snacks - this is a good time to talk budgets and show him that there's a week's supply of snacks in his allowance and he needs to make it last the week.

Dinners:

You cook four nights a week. On one of the nights, you cook WITH your son and teach him how to make the dish - make double portions and show him how to decant and separate half of the dish to put away in the fridge/freezer.

Either the next night (if you don't mind having the same dish twice in a row or the day after that) your son is responsible for reheating the dish, setting the table and preparing dinner for the rest of the family.

This way, he's learning to cook, learning to portion. learning how to be the one responsible for making dinner happen all at the same time.

That takes care of five nights of dinner.

Tell DH he is responsible for the other two nights a week - up to him if he wants to cook, eat out, or provide a takeaway.

She offered him before she started cooking. By your reasoning she should then let her food go cold while she cooks separately for her husband as he declined breakfast when she was cooking hers

Yes, she posted that while I was writing my post, which I commented on in a later post

I would have been utterly ashamed if I had sent any of my dses out into the world this useless and helpless, @ItsaFairWind. I don’t blame your dd or his other flatmates for being totally fed up with this man baby.

Can’t say for other people but when I was 11 my mother went back to school and I took over cooking for the house ( four of us). I tested a new cookbook written by some friends and cooked the entire repertoire of szechuanese dishes including chilled kidneys in sesame paste and stir fried snails. I did the exotic grocery shopping with my father’s help but the rest I did via phone at a local shop thst delivered do I didn’t handle any money. I am 65 now. Both my daughters learned to be self sufficient in the kitchen by age 12.

Please don't send him out into the world like this. My DD is currently having to uni flatshare with one of these boys. He expects to be cleared up after and has an attitude about it, cocks up the washer, can't work the dryer. His Dad expects him to have more than his fair share of freezer space for all the meals his Mum preps for him. He won't share the communal jobs.
His flatmates are utterly sick of him.

And the comments definitely brought back the teenage years with my dses!

Please tell your son thank you, @Balloonhearts! It sounds delicious.