@40andginger! Wow! Your posts on this are absolutely FULL of the self righteous, smug, narrow minded arrogance of a new parent. Your child is only 3? Are you working full time? Are your finances and health & fitness ok?
There ARE many reasons why a parent either long term or temporarily might struggle with this which HAVE been pointed out on thread and yet you REFUSE to acknowledge that it’s NOT simple for everyone because it is for you!
That’s an unfortunate commonality on mn too - posters who think because something is easy for them it’s easy for everyone.
I’m willing to bet there are basic life skills you cannot currently manage - nobody’s perfect!
I’ve said I am/was lucky enough to be fairly knowledgable and usually confident in this area.
However, I have ocd and at times have been too ill to cope with even shopping! Let along cooking a meal! I felt so guilty (and people like you make this worse for people like I was at those points!) at feeding dd a combination of takeaways, meals eaten out, ready meals and “picnic” style food. We had a social worker at these points and the 1st one had me keep a food diary, whereupon it became clear to her and me that actually even with my “workarounds” dd was still getting enough calories, her 5 a day and other nutrients. She was perfectly healthy nutritionally speaking and indeed appeared so, didn’t balloon in weight or anything.
Plus as several op have pointed out to you it can feel too risky if you’re on a very tight budget to “experiment” by making something your child may not like. That’s certainly a position I’ve been in too! And I’ve stuck to the (thankfully fairly wide range) of foods I knew dd liked and would eat. Not to mention that some ingredients while cost per use is low the initial outlay is beyond that of families barely managing.
How about you try to find even a LITTLE compassion and empathy? and park that smug self righteousness until you’ve fully raised a child
Your post at 0932 yesterday is frankly disgusting and disablist and I’m disturbed it’s either gone unreported (I’ve now reported!) or undeleted (mnhq have a somewhat muddled approach to disablist posts against the mentally ill!)
Re children in care - there are approximately 100,000 AT ANY ONE TIME. When you take into consideration those that have recently “aged out” that’s a hell of a lot of children barely being cared for, you’re right it’s a whole other thread!
Also that doesn’t take into account the children left living in “chaotic” families, mainly because taking a child into care is expensive and as a result the threshold for doing so is pretty damn high!
That statistic also doesn’t take into account the families in extreme poverty, relying on foodbanks etc. Again a whole other thread!
While historically the working classes were more likely to cook (my mum still remembers being sneered at in the 70’s by mc English army wives for making her own soup rather than using tinned) I think the cheapness of not only the food (which is VERY cheap! Many families would be hard pressed to manage to make eg a meat lasagne inc the gas/electric for less than 90p a portion!) but also the cooking method (microwaves use very little electricity) is why often poorer families now err towards convenience foods.
I just think we should prioritise skills for living first. The other area that I feel should be covered in schools, far ahead of most of the curriculum is personal finance. totally agree! Schools now especially in England are far too focussed on preparing pupils for academia rather than for the wider world, very few children need the former while they all need the latter!
@snuggybuggy I agree this nonsense of “adult food” and “children’s food” needs to stop! I never differentiated with dd even at weaning stage she almost always ate the same as us minus salt and strong spices, the only times she’d have a different meal on the same day as we were having were on the rare occasions we had a takeaway or we’re going out for dinner without her.
It’s a personal bugbear as it also made it harder for her and I to eat out as she got older as SO MANY places the “children’s menu” was bloody ‘chips with everything’ and most refused to replace the chips! And as I’ve said dd hates chips, they hurt her she can’t eat them. Plus the other items were usually things she couldn’t eat too. So many restaurants are ridiculously intractable when it comes to customers wanting even a SLIGHT change! They really should just offer half portions of the adult menu.
“But onion and garlic and these absolute basics? Nope. Just no. Not knowing how to cook it? Ok.” I know quite a few people who’ve made the error of cooking a whole BULB of garlic not knowing that a CLOVE is one of the segments, I know lots of people that throw away many perfectly edible parts of fruits and veg, I was very much enjoying being part of the “frugal foodies” threads on here early in lockdown and learned some new stuff myself. I bet you don’t know EVERYTHING about every possible ingredient!
My own mother, who is a fairly competent and confident if basic cook, would not attempt a stir fry and there are certain vegetables she has never cooked with as they are “exotic” to her - I’m talking things that to those of us in younger generations (she’s in her 70’s) are now perfectly normal fare - baby sweet corn, tenderstem broccoli, fresh chilli peppers...
Confidence is a HUGE part of it.