Dear Parents Who Refuse to Teach Their Boys How to Cook and Clean

Dear Parents Who Refuse to Teach Their Boys How to Cook and Clean,

I realize that you are working under the completely false security that your son will be mothered and nurtured at college somehow and then married off to the next Martha Stewart (minus the jail time).  But, in reality, you’re just setting your son, and possibly his future wife up for failure.

Let me first make clear the fact that I hold to a traditional view of family.  If I ever get married, I plan to stay at home with my children, nurture and teach them, and keep the house from being a pit of filthy despair by cleaning and such.  I don’t think that roles should be reversed in a family, and I do believe that both the husband and wife roles in a marriage are unique to them for a reason.

However, your sons still need to know how to operate at a basic human level of cleanliness and health.

Why? Well, because, first and foremost, there will likely be time between the day he leaves your house and the day he gets married; also, because his wife may not have been taught very well and may need some help; because his wife could get mono or be put on bed-rest or break all of her limbs in a freak accident involving a marmoset and a bulldozer and might be unable to vacuum or cook dinner for awhile.

But, also because we truly don’t know the future.  Many of us assume that marriage is a default setting, but not everyone gets married.  And not everyone gets married young.  Your son could get married for the first time when he’d sixty.  He could be single all his life.  He needs to be able to keep the filth in his house at bay and cook a week’s worth of meals for himself.

Do you really want your son eating off the McDonald’s dollar menu for forty years? Do you?!

In addition to being able to operate at a normal, functional, clean and healthy level, there is an added bonus to this.  You know those poor, misguided girls who like to mother their boyfriends/fiances/husbands?  They mainly do it because the boys in their lives haven’t been taught how to fend for themselves.  Seriously.  As females, we like to nurture, and when we see a boy at college who hasn’t eaten a proper meal in months and isn’t sure where the button to operate the Swiffer WetJet is, we think, “Oh, you poor thing.  Let me make you spaghetti and brownies and clean that for you.”

Yeah, I don’t know why we do this, but it happens.  And then the natural inclination is to treat the boy in question like a child in many ways.

So, those girls…the ones who have to mother their husbands…they are annoying, right?  They would make horrid daughters-in-law, yeah?  Well, you know how to make sure one of them doesn’t marry your son?

Make sure he can actually live on his own for a few weeks without resorting to eating chili fries for multiple meals in a day.  That way, she’ll have nothing to mother.

Sincerely,

Chelsea