Getting others to do your dirty work is shirking - big time!
Within a week of my son, James, going to university, I got a text which proved that, no matter how hard you try, you cannot prepare your kids for every challenge in life. “Quick, Mum – what can I do with an aubergine, two carrots and a chicken breast?” He was hungry, and he’d grabbed a few ingredients from the campus shop, knocked down to just a few pence as they ticked past their sell by date. I sent him back to the box of groceries I’d packed lovingly for him and stored in his kitchen locker, where he found tins of tomatoes, dried herbs and wholewheat pasta. Bung it all together and you could call it “Italian chicken”, I suggested. “But next time, try to buy an onion as well!” A couple of hours later, I got another text, this time with a picture impressive enough for a cookery book. “I’m quite proud of this and it tastes good, too!” Thus started a crash cookery course by text, which built into a pretty impressive databank of quick and easy Twitter length recipes – from omelettes to frittatas, paellas to soups. But he’d have been lost without the basic home cooking he’d done for years at home, within the family. We’re hardly a cordon bleu family, but, being a single mother of four boys, I’ve always had a steady supply of sous chefs who think they know best – and so I let them have free reign in the kitchen! So he already knew about poshing up bland ingredients with herbs, spices, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, wine and even beer. He knew about olive oils, stir-frying and baking spuds until they crackle. University life has now turned him into a whizz at making the most incongruous of vegetables and left-over meats into tasty meals. In fact, when you get to the end of a week in our house, and you have a fridge full of Tupperware boxes with little bits and bobs in them, I often call on James to make something spectacular from it all. But , according to my both of my university age sons, most of their peers know hardly a sausage about the most basic of life skills ( Gordon Ramsay famously said that UK students are the dumbest at cookery) – with the huge exception of students from Asian backgrounds. When I used to visit my eldest, Oliver, who was at a college with a very high proportion of Chinese and Korean nationals, the kitchens in his halls of residence were always full of chattering youngsters cooking up a storm – and the resulting aroma was to die for. I can’t help thinking their mums, or perhaps their cultures, are doing a better job equipping them for life than the rest of us. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that many British parents are sending their pre-university kids off to special residential courses to teach them how to boil an egg, make a meal, change a duvet cover, separate the laundry and work the washing machine or even iron their own shirts. We were shocked when some years ago the blessed Delia included lessons on how to boil an egg in one of her best selling cookery books. Sign of the times, we clucked in despair. Well now the next generation knows even less than those who bought the book presumably just for its pretty pictures – and they need to go to special schools to be educated in lifeskills that should be amassed by family osmosis – from grandparents to parents to child. In fact, now I think of it, it was my Great Aunt Lilian, a very old relative who was living with us when I was knee high to an oven hob, who taught me how to make a pot of tea – the ultimate lesson for life!. It’s not funny – it’s a failure – a big, giant, parenting failure. And it’s not good enough to blame it on today’s hectic lifestyle. If you cannot spare two minutes to teach your kids how to boil up a soup, use the vacuum cleaner or make a bed, and instead you do it all for them, then you are sending them naked into a cold, windy world. Or you’re doing what the third world charities reckon is the worst sin of all – you are giving them fish and feeding them just for a day, not teaching them how to fish and enabling them to feed themselves for life. The latest survival course, at the Surrey Hills Cookery School in Leatherhead, Surrey, has apparently been overwhelmed with demand , even at £175 a go for quickie lessons in laundry, shopping, cooking and how to clean a bathroom. 'Most of them think the fairies do it', says organiser Sara Gyngell, herself a mother of three. She says students come to her from both state schools and public schools, suggesting that this shameful parental negligence extends across all classes. She reckons boys especially are frightened of anything that can’t be microwaved. I think it’s even worse than that. At one university I visited with my sons, the house warden explained the total lack of microwave cookers in the kitchens. “Exploding potatoes,” she said. “They put food in them, leave them on for hours, and are shocked when they find everything blown up. That’s why we don’t provide them anymore.” So I bought one for James in his first term. He felt guilty about being too protectionist about it, so was relaxed about other students on his floor using it. With a fortnight, it had been nuked. I do agree with the likes of Sara Gyngell on one aspect, though. She reckons even those kids whose parents do try to teach them, have a “firewall” which blocks out the information, and is impervious to nagging. I know it. I’ve tried to tell my sons about the importance of hanging stuff up on the hooks neatly provided in cupboards and on the backs of doors – and especially wet towels in bathrooms (which always end up harbouring a big, black spider) – all to no avail. I just hope that one day, something will click. Until then, I keep trying but I’m darned if I’m going to do it for them. And I’d be ashamed if I had to resort to sending them off to someone else to teach them what should be learned at home. You have to find a way to make them listen, a way to get them to eat their veggies, a way to do little chores for pocket money, or mow the lawn for an ice-cream. No-one said parenting would be easy. You just have to keep trying different ways of getting through some of the vital life skills that make us, well, civilised. Will we be shortly expecting someone else to teach our toddlers how to brush their own teeth? Way back in the 80s, I became known as “Britain’s most famous mum”, largely because I went through five pregnancies on air, hardly missing a programme! Watched on breakfast TV by 14 million people in the UK every week, my audience was mostly a generation of young mums, breastfeeding their babies as they caught up with the morning’s news. Now those babies are going to uni, but they’re ill-equipped. Perhaps their mums watched too much TV – especially cookery shows, and didn’t actually do enough cooking for, or with, their offspring… It’s reckoned that, every year in the UK, 3 million students leave home for the first time and have no idea how to cook for themselves. In a country which is beginning to understand the importance of nutrition and balancing diets, parents must give their kids the best understanding they can of what is, after all, a primary concern – what to eat, how to shop and how to cook – and, of course, how to budget! One thing my Mum taught me – you don’t dodge your responsibilities. When you become a mum or dad, parenting is your first call – and writing a cheque for others to do your dirty work is shirking big time.
This article first appeared in the Daily Mail 18th June 2009 |
