Shocker: Modern Moms Don’t Have The Time To Bake Or Sew
Modern mothers are a lesson in time management. Somehow, they manage to feed and clothe their children, keep up on all the current parenting trends, monitor the recall website, volunteer in their children’s classrooms, read a bazillion books before pre-school, make awesome crafty projects that inspire intense jealousy in those around them, and the list goes on and on. And plenty of us do all this while holding down a full-time job. Everyone, let’s give ourselves a nice round of applause for attempting to raise decent children and working our butts off to be able to pay for their college.
Oh, but wait. Don’t celebrate just yet. The Daily Mail would like me to remind you that while you’re kicking butt at the office and bathing butt at bedtime, you might be missing a few key domestic duties that your mother was awesome at. Namely, women today are nearly as capable of sewing on buttons or baking bread from scratch.
Well, we could’ve told you that. No, we didn’t do a survey of all our friends and colleagues. I don’t have any statistics to give you, though if you’re wondering the percentage of young mothers who know how to starch a shirt, The Daily Mail can fill you in. (Okay, okay, it’s 10%) I can tell you that modern moms are losing some of their home-maker skills simply by recognizing that the culture has changed since my mother and grandmother were raising kids.
First of all, more and more women are working. So it should not be shocking that they buy new socks instead of darning the old ones. First, they work all day and don’t have time to mess with socks. Second, they have more disposable income to make things like socks easier to afford.
More importantly, even if you aren’t a working mother, our parenting priorities have changed in previous decades. I would imagine that mothers today spend more time trying to engage their children in thoughtful play, trying to socialize them in extra-curricular activities and worrying about the number of possible toxins in their house. We research safety hazards and discuss discipline techniques with others mom. We take Mommy & Me Yoga and stress the importance of physical activity.
Moms today are busy!
I suppose it might worry me that women today can’t bake a pie or arrange flowers if we were all sitting around spending our time playing Angry Birds and ignoring our kids. But I don’t think that moms are doing that. (We save our Words with Friends until we’re waiting in a doctor’s office or in a boring meeting.)
It’s not that women are losing their homemaking skills. It’s that our homes are different.
What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to make jam, gravy or curtains. Moms today shouldn’t feel guilty that some of those tasks have fallen by the wayside. We have plenty of things occupying our time. And really, the kids are alright.
(Photo: The Undomestic Project)
