All about cars

Current Mood: Surprised

I had a conversation with a friend of mine this morning. He lives in Europe. I told him that I was knitting, and he said that knitting was a very large part of their country’s lifestyle. So important, in fact, that it is taught in school. So we talked back and forth about homemaking classes and such in school, and he said that they have whole schools dedicated to teaching homemaking. That got me to thinking… Why don’t we have schools like this? Required classes in school or some kind of prep school to teach teens and young adults basic life skills? While you may scoff at this, there are many, many people that enter the adult world without these living skills. My poor husband, bless him, is one of these people. So, using him as a model, I will relate how people are unleashed into the world without knowledge.

My husband moved directly from his parents’ house to mine, so he has never truly lived on his own. The man that I married was severely lacking in life skills. He couldn’t cook because his mother always cooked. He didn’t know how to sort laundry, another thing she always did. He did know how to mend, because his mother was a seamstress. So my husband, at 21 years old, was really not ready to enter the world of independent living. It’s not because he didn’t want to know, but because he was never taught by enforcing it. Read: chores.

I see this repeatedly today, where families will rely on one person to do a particular chore (or they just don’t do it at all by going out to eat, having a housekeeper, drop-off laundry, etc). This leaves children sorely ill-equipped to live on their own. Granted, the way that many of our baby boomer (and older) generations were raised, the man has certain household things he does, the woman has certain household things she does. The man passes on his knowledge to his sons, the woman passes on her knowledge to her daughters. The man changes the tires and mows the lawn. The woman sews on buttons and dusts. Yes, it’s 2010, and many people are making sure that their children are more well-rounded than these traditional roles (and many have not grown up in traditional households), but there are still a lot of people that are lacking this basic knowledge of living.

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