When my teenage boys were little, I used to have the fantasy that, since I would teach them to cook before they were fully grown, there would come a joyous time when they surprised me on Sunday mornings with breakfast. Nothing too elaborate: eggs benedict, say, or even a simple but perfectly made stack of pancakes.
To be fair to them, I recently texted them from my bed to tell them that I was starving and knackered from a late night, and they did, incredibly, appear with a tray of eggs on toast and a pot of tea.
I was delighted, obviously, and suggested that this breakfast thing might become a family tradition on Sunday mornings — although I was prepared to be flexible: lunch would work, too, or even supper. Or they could make tea: there was surely time for a little light midweek baking between coming home and settling down to ignore their homework for hours on end.
None of these suggestions was met with enthusiasm, despite me pointing out that I have been feeding children for 17 years, which amounts to more than 18,000 meals, plus thousands of snacks (much eye-rolling). Still, they do occasionally rustle me up a cup of tea, for which I must be grateful.
Advertisement
On special days when I am deemed worthy of reward — for upping their allowances, say, or spending an arm and a leg on tickets to music festivals — I might even get a biscuit. And they babysit their sister, which is something.
In other domestic respects, alas, they are more homo erectus than homo sapiens: there is some way to go. Here are the things I did regularly from the age of 12 onwards — earlier, in some cases: a) wash my own clothes; b) tidy my own room — not often, but regularly; c) make myself something to eat; d) make other people something to eat (both of these via the Good Housekeeping Children’s Cookbook, a cherished bible); e) empty the dishwasher; f) load the dishwasher; g) run to the shops for my mother; h) rinse the bath after using it; i) eventually pick up the stuff I left lying on the floor; j) make my bed every morning. And so on.
Of these, my children are familiar only with the concept of g), and I expect the proximity of the shops has something to do with it. I recently asked them why they were incapable of putting their clothes in the washing machine, adding detergent and pressing the “on” button. I was met by four blank blue eyes and much shrugging.
What would happen, I continued, if nobody loaded the machine? “We’d smell really bad,” the younger one said matter-of-factly. This is the crux of the problem: it’s not like, if you leave it long enough, they leap into action. No: the bedrooms get more and more disgusting, the pile of laundry gets taller, the floor disappears beneath the socks and bags of crisps.
With all this in mind, I was interested last week to read the findings of a survey conducted by the Children’s Society about the amount of housework the average teenager does. The study was commissioned to highlight the monstrous — I don’t think that’s too strong a word — differences between young carers, who often, heart-breakingly, start doing the housework at the age of five, and the average slobby teenager or young adult, who more often than not does precisely none.
Advertisement
The only vaguely appealing thing about the survey is that I sometimes worry that my children are uniquely rubbish at this stuff More than three-quarters of 11 to 16-year-olds have yet to load a washing machine, the survey found. About two-thirds do not iron and 75% are strangers to bathroom-cleaning. More than a third have never cooked a meal, and 92% have never done the household shopping.
This is in stark and depressing contrast to the approximately 175,000 children who look after an ill or disabled parent and whose daily tasks might include administering medicines, washing and dressing an adult, cooking, cleaning and even managing the household finances, according to the society. All of this, unsurprisingly, causes many young carers to have “excessive” responsibilities, which can lead to problems at school, social isolation, emotional difficulties and no spare time.
Unfortunately, pointing this out to the children works about as well as telling younger ones about the starving children in Africa: you get the equivalent, “Yeah, but I still really hate broccoli.”
The only vaguely appealing thing about the survey is that I sometimes worry that my children are uniquely rubbish at this stuff, and that everyone else’s are running about hoovering and beating rugs: not so. It’s a tiny comfort, unlike the idea that my children are so bad at this stuff because of their gender. I hate pandering to stereotypes but I suspect this might be true, horribly enough, and that if they were girls they’d be tidier. Some gender differences are hard-wired: when my elder son was a toddler, I optimistically bought him a doll. He ignored it for a couple of days and then took off its leg and used it as a gun.
It’s a real failing, this lack of domesticity in teenagers. I thought mine — especially given my periods of single-motherhood — would absorb, by osmosis, the concept of daily domestic maintenance. But they don’t: if a lightbulb needs changing or used mugs need taking to the kitchen, they just zone out, like I do if people start talking about the more perplexing sports.
Advertisement
I’m now working on a cunning new tack, which is the extreme appeal of male domestic ability — by which I mean a nodding acquaintance with the concept of Fairy liquid — to the opposite sex; I’m also kindly offering my kitchen to my elder son, in case he wants to cook his girlfriend dinner. “Like Gordon Ramsay,” I said, with some desperation, last week. “He played football! He has testosterone! Most chefs are men! Cooking is manly! And I can show you how to make stuff, if you like.”
He gave me that look — “Poor Mum, she’s like a person from the olden days” — and started laughing. This son is going to be one of those boys who goes to university and lives off Pot Noodles for three years. It’s a worry, because I hate the idea of whole armies of boys festering in their pit-like rooms eating rehydrated foodstuffs until some nice girl comes along and makes them pasta.
In the domestic sphere, chronic sexism is still the order of the day, even where it is met with the most vigorous ideological opposition.
Behold, the erotic yawn
Apparently if people yawn at you, it means they fancy you. According to a participant who attended the first international conference on yawning in Paris last week, a yawn can indicate a whole range of states and emotions: interest, stress, the desire for sex.
Wolter Seuntjens, a Dutch academic, was the first to postulate the theory of the “erotic yawn” after noticing that sexologists were often consulted by people whose partners yawned during or just before having sex.
Advertisement
This would cause me to think that the reason they were visiting the sexologist in the first place was because they had terrible sex lives filled with yawns of desperate boredom, but no — it prompted Seuntjens to come up with the idea that the yawn means “take me now”.
Another delegate, Bertrand Deputte, backed up the claims by explaining that male macaque and mangabey monkeys yawn more if they are alpha than if they are subordinate.
I am not making any of this up. Isn’t it amazing? Confusingly, there is no way of telling the difference between a tired yawn and a frisky yawn, so think carefully before you lunge.