What we teach our children

[mnistooaddictive]

I have been considering this for a while based on interactions with my friends. They are all pretty much like me, both partners work and share responsibility for household jobs. There is no way they would let their husbands awY without cooking and cleaning.

Recently my car had a puncture and they were all amazed when I changed the tyre myself. Most of them have never changed a tyre and seem quite proud that they don't know how.
I believe that for a truly equal future it is not enough to teach our sons and daughters how to cook and clean, we need to teach them all how to change a tyre and wire a plug.
Am I that far out from the norm?

Changing tyres is what the RAC is for in our family...neither of us want to do it.

Goodness knows what my DD's household will turn out like in due course... at the moment she seems to be in the can't/won't camp on cooking and household chores . Never mind merely wiring a plug though... she's got her own soldering iron and toolbox, plans on going into electronics. Arghh.... Guess she's interpreted gender roles and decided which she prefers.

Since wheelie bins, it's a lot easier

...easier for women, and therefore easier for men to 'cant/wont' on.

Only if said men are with partners who accept that as an attitude.

"I simply can't fit a sink or lay tiles as quickly and as well as he can. it feels fair in terms of time spent, "

Is it? How often do you have a new sink fitted or replace your tiles?

Yes, of course. But it happens... things which save physical labour can have the effect of yet more boring menial regular tasks landing up as things the woman does because she can.

I agree, errol.

Something I find really upsetting to see is my mum, who is increasingly struggling, gets properly exhausted trying to keep a house and garden clean and to cook. None of the jobs she does is 'hard' but when you put them all together, yes, it is tiring. It wouldn't occur to her she's doing 'hard work'. And then, of course, she feels depressing and shit because she gets to the end of the day and feels she's 'done nothing' yet she's tired.

I would absolutely love to make my dad spent two weeks doing what she does.

I think the difficulty is, you cannot appreciate this stuff until you actually have to do it, can you? You can't see a big, obvious effect.

Entertainingly, my (female) DP cant' see dirt, is just about capable of tidying if driven to it with a whip, thinks three days' washing up in the sink is about when you should think about doing it and has a fully-stocked floordrobe. Folks can tell when I've been staying over because her house gets within long-stick-poking distance of clean and tidy.

I think she's decided that since the genderisation of particular forms of work is inherently patriarchal and sexist she's betraying the sisterhood by doing any womens' work whatsoever*.

Me, I honestly don't care how the work is shared, as long as it is shared.

*That or she's just a messy mare taking shameless advantage of the fact that I get twitchy at the sight of mess and can't sit still until I've ENDED it.

'I would absolutely love to make my dad spent two weeks doing what she does. '

G'wan, you know you want to. Why not?

Yes, it's not always gender specific. When we got married I had just stopped being a student and he had owned and run and cleaned and organised his own house for a few years. He was better than I was at those things. I learned and we did as much as each other.

Oh, I wish.

Obviously, this is something that is a serious ongoing problem, and though it's fun to joke about it, it's not really funny for my mum. Which is why I think it's not a trivial thing to worry about in terms of how children learn this stuff.

So growing up in a sexist household, what changed your world view LRD?

That's what I'm trying to think about! I suppose that is why I have a positive sense of how much outside context, as well as your parents, influences you. Because for me, it was definiely that!

Despite growing up in country Oz on a farm, I grew up in a non-sexist household. I remember being utterly puzzled seeing the looks on people's faces when proudly declaring in Brownies that 'dad can sew, but mum can't!'. My sisters and I were just as interested in learning car maintenance as we were cooking (both parents are excellent cooks!). This led to us being labelled as 'not real girls' by some people in the district... We intend to raise out DTDs as 'not real girls' also!

*our

No one 'taught' me to do many tasks, I knew I had a task to do to get to the outcome I wanted and got on with it. That's from changing tyres to working the washing machine. People who say they can't do something simply haven't bothered to work it out for themselves.

I'd never changed a tyre but had a flat on a highway in downtown Miami at night. I still managed as I damn well had to!

How to break the cycle is interesting, DH and I follow gender roles less than our parents did. Funnily enough it's the mothers who find this hardest, or rather are the most likely to comment on it. Both have made comments about how DH 'has' to cook for the family (we share the cooking), or how he is 'so good' with the kids (we share the childcare, I don't get the same praise for doing the basic stuff that he does).

Is it outside influence or education or money that determines how you act? It's more than parenting definitely, I'm far more feminist than my sister (who's of the 'it's all about choice' variety of feminist that thinks lapdancing is empowering). For me being a scientist is definitely a factor, all those tests that are suppose to give different results if you are male or female I always am 'male' but I think that's because I self identify more as a scientist than a woman. Although I'm not on the spectrum I can identify with the idea that if you are used to standing out from society for another reason then the ideas of feminism are easier to understand/adopt. Maybe you just need to be exposed to enough 'feminism' to open the door - my Mum might have followed quite a few gender roles (homemaker etc) but she never wore makeup, wasn't a dieter, and didn't bother much with hair removal (this was a conscious decision), my Dad's celebrity crushes were always people like Kate Adie so I was taught that brains were essential for attracting men, looks not so much.

Maybe it's a case of 'all non-feminists are alike but all feminists are feminist in their own way'.