Child responsibilities.. Should dinner be made or even started when the first parent gets home from work?

[Playinwithfire]

Last night I get home, it was around 7.30 and my youngest said mummy I'm hungry. I was confused DH had been home since 2pm and sorted HIS stuff and then he headed off to his hobby. I checked to see if they had enough dinner, then the child says we didn't get any dinner! I'm furious...

There has been a few changes and I have been very understanding that DH is trying to adjust. However, for f"*k sake... I feel like I need to still manage everything and ensure things get done. I'm asked a 100 questions daily. An I snapped last night...

I just don't get how you can go off to a hobby knowing that your children still haven't eaten however, you've made sure all the stuff he had to do was priority and very much completed.

I disagree that it is reasonable to order a 15 year old to cook tea for younger siblings. It is not their job. Fine to ask as a favour especially if they are not doing anything else. Not fine to demand especially as the DH was there and could do it himself.

Of course it's bloody reasonable to ask a 15 year old to cook a simple dinner for themselves and their siblings. And it's disobedient, bad behaviour for the 15 year old not to do it. That is all.

Your DH is a dick for passing this responsibility onto your teen

What was his excuse and how did he react to your snapping?

Hope he’s got his tail between his legs today

Man who has it all is a satire page.
It often uses MN posts flipped the other way to make the point that women don't do this.

Oh interesting! Ok :) I’ve never come across it before.

Wow that is so so odd. wonder what's going on?!

Thank you!

If you call them disobedient for not doing something you are not asking you are ordering. It's not disobedient, bad behaviour for a 15 year old to refuse to cook food for their siblings especially if it is just because the parent is too lazy or disorganized to do it themselves.

DH is a spoilt brat, just like a lot of men. When looking a H material look to see how the parents react with each other, not just the romantic bit. My DH did decorating, cleaning, cooking and washing in his childhood home when living there. BIL did the same. His Dad did lots of cleaning and all the after dinner washing up every day. I rarely wash up, and never stack dishwasher when DH is around.

Yes, he's a selfish lazy arsed dick. We all know that.
Question is, what are you going to do about it?

Fuck me. A parent asked the 15 year old to do a reasonable, age appropriate task. The 15 year old disobeyed and ignored the request. That's not OK and is bad behaviour they should be pulled up on.

Dad isn't free of blame here, but it's not OK for 15 year olds to refuse reasonable requests, which this was.

I dread to think how little parenting goes on in some houses if they think it's not OK for a 15 yo to do a simple task like making dinner for themselves and their siblings, and its OK for them to just ignore what their parent asks them to do with no consequences.

‘Order’ ‘demand’ . Very emotive language to describe a parent requesting their child do a completely age appropriate chore.

I dread to think how little parenting goes on in some houses if they think it's not OK for a 15 yo to do a simple task like making dinner for themselves and their siblings, and its OK for them to just ignore what their parent asks them to do with no consequences.

I dread to think how little actual parenting goes on the part of some men who prioritise themselves over their 8 year olds and don't bother to feed them. And then put that responsibility onto their 15 year olds.

Your internalised misogyny is showing in every post.

This is nonsense. There can be no parenting going on in a house whereby the child is permitted to completely ignore a parents contribution request of them. We’ve all heard the tales of uni students not knowing how to boil an egg, they are the children of parents who consider it utterly unreasonable to expect their nearly adult son to put a pizza in an oven for themselves and their sibling.

Oh for goodness sake. The dh is a bellend. That was known and accepted on page 1. The next topic is ‘should a teenager put a pizza in the oven for their sibling when asked by their parent or wait for their mum to do it after her days work when they’ve already been home 3 hours.’ That, imo, is a yes.

Hi folks, as pp have pointed out, this post has been copied and altered elsewhere, and we have contacted the account concerned.

We appreciate that this may have caused confusion, but we do not believe that OP has anything to do with the Facebook post.

Tell me you are an authoritarian parent without telling me you are an authoritarian parent. Every one of your posts absolutely reeks of expecting 100% compliance with everything a parent demands, regardless of whether it is reasonable or not.

Ordering a teen to cook for a younger sibling because you are off out to have fun, forgot to do it and now can't be bothered is not a reasonable request, no matter how much you want it to be.

Strikes me the teenager has already seen through his useless dad and isn't prepared to keep covering for him.

No. I am clearly saying Dad is not free of blame. But a 15 year old asked to make a simple dinner for himself and his siblings just disobeying and ignoring this request is behaving very badly. It is appalling parenting to not pull them up on this. Even worse parenting to side with them against the other parent.

Ha ha ha, no, not remotely authoritarian. Just brought my children up to be functioning, capable adults!

I've got a 15 year old who is more than capable of cooking for himself and his sibling, and does so when asked.

But crucially neither his father nor I would dump it on him at the very last minute because we'd forgotten or couldn't be arsed to cook for the family.

OP's husband dropped this little gem on a teenager as he was in the way out the door and, given bedtimes, the youngest at least should be eating or have eaten dinner already.

The primary fuckup is the father's. The secondary fuckup, by a long distance, is the teenager who didn't drop everything on demand and rustle up dinner for his siblings immediately and so it wasn't done when OP got home half an hour later.

There is one party I would cut slack to here, and it's not the poor adult man being expected to provide basic care to his own kids.

Do you seriously think that 15 year olds who obey very unreasonable orders without question are more likely to become fully functioning adults? Quite the opposite I would say.

You can be raising a functioning, capable adult without expecting them to be responsible for papering over the cracks of their parents' shortcomings.

It's reasonable to ask a 15yo to prepare a simple dinner for their siblings. It's not reasonable to ask them to drop everything to do it immediately because their parent forgot or couldn't be bothered, and considers their plans more important than the teenager's.

He should have sorted his children’s food before 7! But why blame a man when everyone would rather blame a child.

Leaving aside the useless man, I have thought about what my own eldest would have done at 15 in this situation. She would have made dinner for her 8 years sibling. She would have done it out of kindness. Kindness to me so that after my days work I wasn’t rushing around getting dinner at bedtime for my youngest. Of course her father should have done it, although I wouldn’t actually be with a man this useless so it’s kinda moot.

It's reasonable to ask the child to do it. It would be reasonable for the child to explain if he couldn't do it for a valid reason. Not reasonable for the child to just ignore the request and disobey without discussion.