Do you remember learning how to do domestic tasks?

My mother (single mom) taught me and my sister.

My wife and I have always added age-appropriate tasks to our three kids’ responsibilities, including loading/unloading the dishwasher, doing their own laundry, folding household towels, helping to clean the house, etc. My wife and I still do most of the cooking, but the kids have taken over most baking (due to their interest in cookies, cakes, etc). We also got chickens last year, so caring for chickens and gathering eggs is another household task that everyone is all expected to contribute to.

Grandmother taught me. Mom is hopeless at cleaning and says she’s amazed that my training stuck. No kids but I’ve given advice to young neighbors when asked.

My Mom taught me many like cooking and doing laundry. She had our cleaning lady, who was a dear friend to us all, teach me how to iron.

The only thing me and my two brothers had to do, in turns, was drying the dishes that my mum had just washed.
You could say that when I started living together with my then girlfriend I was a housework noob.
These days I let the dishes dry by themselves.

@rebbel So, did your girlfriend teach you? Or, you figured it out for yourself?

My boyfriend taught me how to wash dishes (in my mid teens). A girlfriend of mine taught me how to sweep (also in my mid teens). My mom taught me to cook and bake. She also taught me how to do a back stitch, but my Home Ec teacher taught me how to thread a sewing machine and use it.

<giggles>

My mother taught me how to iron (a skill, BTW, that I never practice). The rest is pretty common sense stuff, easily learned by watching. I’m a lousy housekeeper, but that’s mostly because I don’t really care that much, my home is comfy, not a showplace.

My mother detested cooking, so I am mostly self-taught, which has really helped, because I am unfettered be the notion that things have to be done exactly a certain way. Baking is not a precise science; there are all sorts of things you can throw into soups and stews; etc etc.

Mostly my Mom, cooking was both Mom and Dad. I can still run a mangle iron for doing piles of laundry with five kids.

I (the baby boy) learned a lot from watching my older Sisters. They never gave me any instructions. Leaned how to make a ded, wax floor, vacuum rugs, clean a latrine and scrub the under carriage of trucks in the US Army.

The thing about cooking with my mom was she taught me the terms. Mix, fold, stir, combine, bake, broil, sauté, rise, dice, julienne, etc. I find a lot of people don’t know all of the terms, and the differences between them. I learned them again later in school, but I already knew them all. In school I learned some additional things like making cheese and butter, and how to chop with a knife safely, etc.

interesting. I guess I just figured they were all self explanatory. My Mom moved out when I was 12 and my Dad was not good at any of this. His instructions were couched in terms like “clean up this shit hole”. My brothers and I did the cooking and dishes but nothing complex. We had the same things every week. I still can’t wash clothes without shrinking them. I can iron but it’s no longer necessary. But I can rebuild a car from the ground up. @JLeslie said that a lot of people don’t know the difference on all those baking terms and I certainly don’t. Stir, combine, fold, spindle, mutilate, I thought they were all the same.

@Jaxk Folding is much more delicate than mixing or stirring. For instance, when I make merengue cookies you whip up the merengue (I use an electric hand mixer/beater) and then I gently fold in with a spoon some chocolate chip bits and walnuts. The word fold makes the word gently almost unnecessary. It’s just what you think, basically putting the spoon beneath the mixture and folding the merengue over the added cc bits and nuts so it is throughout the mixture. Folding usually implies just moving the batter, or in this case merengue, a few times, while mixing is more rapid and might have more strokes.

Some mixtures fall apart, or get gooey, or get air bubbles, or some other negative if it’s over mixed.

Yes, I remember learning how to do domestic tasks. I was taught from a young age how to do many of these things (cleaning mostly from my mom, cooking from my dad). I was surprised when I got to college at how many of my friends didn’t know how to do anything. They couldn’t load a dishwasher properly, the only cooking they knew was how to boil water for Kraft Mac’n’Cheese, it was disgraceful. I taught most of them what I knew :) I will certainly make sure my kids know practical tasks and won’t feel helpless when they’re on their own.

@JLeslie – Thanks but I’ll never need the advice on merengue. I don’t have a clue how to make that. My baking ended with cake and that was a long time ago. I never was able to put frosting on a cake without ripping it to shreds. I tried many times but never got the knack. Growing up in the 50s there were no dishwashers but I could defrost a freezer like a champ. Baking these days is a simple matter of how long to leave the TV dinner in the microwave.

Just to answer the original question, I learned to crochet from my grandmother as well as darning socks. Skills I no longer need or want.

@Jaxk Always use cold water, then you don’t have to worry about the clothes shrinking, unless they are not to be put in the dryer, of course. I only use Hot water on white clothes, and people here on wells usually always use cold for everything.

I was very eager to help my mom with vaccuming, and dusting and polishing our wood furniture, and washing windows, and washing dishes from a very young age.

Although the cooking bug didn’t hit me until I was in my 20’s, I enjoyed helping out in the kitchen, and learned a lot of my basic skills from my mom. My mom, and grandmas were all very good cooks, and cooking was just something you did, at least girls did. The only time my dad, or his brother, my uncle, cooked, was when they were barbecuing outside, so not very often, but they knew what they were doing. My dad also cooked pancakes, bacon, eggs, and burgers when we went camping. My brother never caught the cooking bug, but he is very appreciate of my cooking skills.

When I was little, we had one of those push mowers, and sometimes my dad would let me mow some of the lawn, but I wasn’t really strong enough to push it for long. Later, when we had an electric mower, that simply became a “dad chore”. My brother sometimes mowed, but he was an ambitious, and excellent student, and was always busy with academics, school government, and sports. When my dad had to have heart surgery 10 years ago, right before he had the surgery, he gave me the low down on how to properly and safely use and empty the electric mower, and how to use the weed whacker, to get the string to come out (I had always guessed that it was the same string, I didn’t realize that every time you used it, pieces of the nylon string would snap off, and you had to press down to get more string to come out.) I refused to use the leaf blower, because the sound of it makes my skin crawl, so I got real good workouts with the broom.

I’m not a neat freak, but I like a clean house, and can’t stand clutter or filth. It saps my energy, so although I don’t particularly enjoy housework, I do it when it needs to be done. I try not to let things get out of hand. I have one friend, and some relatives who are slobs, and I know two people that are hoarders. I am always thinking about that in the back of my mind, how I would never want my home to devolve into that state, because I would go mad.

Um…if I was actually “taught” to clean it would have been Mom who taught me. But I don’t think she taught me the right way, as much as yelled at me for doing it “wrong.” I guess that’s one way of learning.
Cooking was kind of the same thing. “Val, cut that chicken up for fried chicken.” So I did. I learned how to cut through the joints.

Oh @KNOWITALL I feel the same way, but oh, if you could see / smell my house right now… :( :( :(. My dining room is torn to bits while I finish up my curtain project, the living room is torn to bits while Rick finishes his wall project for his 52 flat screen, the kitchen is torn to bits while he works on the back half of that wall, which is in the kitchen. The house STINKS due to Dakota’s inability to control herself, and he doesn’t know why I’m walking around mopping all the time.

@Dutchess_III I’m so sorry, that would drive me bonkers, especially all at once. Ugh!

Oh, I’m bummed out for sure! I Took this pic just now, just for you @KNOWITALL!

@Dutchess_III Oh wow, nope, I couldn’t do it all at once. It makes me nervous just looking at the picture lol

I had a friend once who said a couple of the oddest things to me. One time I was showing her something that my then 8 year old daughter had come up with, and that was using a clear glass to peer through the soap suds so she could see the silverware below, especially the knifes. I thought that was very clever indeed.
I told my friend, who ad two kids about the same ages as mine, and she said, “What? I know I taught you to put the silverware in a cup and set aside until you’re ready to wash it! You’ll slice your hand wide open on a knife if you just stick your hand in there.” (Note: The kids and I have been washing dishes by hand for all of our lives and never, not once, has any sliced their hand open ona hidden knife.)
I thought it was weird that she came up with the idea that she somehow taught me to wash dishes!

She did that on something else too….“I taught you to…” No, girlfriend. You never taught me any chores, or how to cook. What you DID teach me is not to swallow a burning roach just because you think the cops are coming.

@Dutchess_III hahaha, funny story!

I asked a friend if she had a steamer (for potstickers) and she said ‘you mean like a Kirby?’
I said no, like for vegetables. She says I just put water in a skillet.

Aaaaggghhhhh!

I learned to sew when I was three. I remember having a toy machine. It really worked. After I was able to stitch pieces together with straight lines, no puckers, etc., my mom showed me how to stitch squares together for a quilt.
I was four when I started baking. Brownies were my specialty.
I was three the first time I drove a tractor, but seven the first time I had permission.
The winter I was four, my dad showed me his pocket knife. It was brown, the ends were silver. He showed me how to open the blade, and close it safely. He showed me how to use it to cut the binder twine off hay bales. He showed me how the bales broke off in segments easy. He put me on a wagon, and told me I would push off hay segments to the cows while he drove the tractor.
They were so pretty, with those big eyes. They were mighty hungry too!
I held my first baby chicken when I was nearly three. We were robbing the nests of the wild hens, raising them in the chicken house with the domestic chickens.
I started washing dishes when I was six or seven. That didn’t last very long. My brother and I liked to hold drinking glasses upright in the water, mostly submerged, to see what gross stuff was floating around under the suds. The water would get cold with nothing yet cleaned.
I’m pretty sure I was seven when I started ironing. I did my dad’s t shirts and handkerchiefs, but mom showed me how to do pleats and darts.
I was thirteen when I learned how to clean fine silver. I worked occasionally for a retired pediatrician. She taught me a few things, like how to organize a pantry, and how to get rid of a dandelion and know it won’t come back.

“I was three the first time I drove a tractor, but seven the first time I had permission. ” LOLL!!

@PattyMelt, the idea of trying to iron pleats sends me into a cold sweat. But you should write a book. Your memories sound like a more modern version if the Little House on the Prairie books : )

I’m writing books, but no biographies. I tried once. A friend read the first five pages and said, “yeah, nobody’s going to believe this stuff, ”

Funny you mention the Ingalls series. I thought I was a modern half pint.
My Nellie Olsen was named Cindy.

My father liked to clean and was good with his hands. He taught me how to scrub, mop, make beds (US Navy style), clean toilets, etc. He and I would house clean together on Saturdays while mom slept.

My mother taught me her chores (laundry, ironing, grocery shopping) so I could take them over from her. Soon as I got good at ironing and laundry that became my job, and she’d stop doing it.

Later, I learned how to sew in 8th grade Home Ec class.

I then went to a vocational high school where I learned basic electrical and plumbing and woodworking which all have come in handy.

I learned to cook as an adult by watching my wife (who’s a fabulous cook) and the Food Network (which I was obsessed with for a while).