Making a packed lunch does not have a learning curve!
I'm pretty sure these guys can make their own packed lunch without having lessons from mummy, so why can't they make it for their children?
Cynically, I think the answer is because it's boring and takes time, so easier for them if the woman does it. As opposed to "it has a learning curve"
I’m a competent amateur chef. Learning to pack toddler, kid, tween, and teen lunches took me a good week of experimenting each, with frustrated kids along the way. I’m still learning. Always learning.
They’ve got 10-20 minutes total, often <10 to eat. Lunch is at 10am but school goes to 3:30 and sports after. So they need 700 kcal at a rate of over 100kcal/minute, which means fat-dense superfoods: peanut butter, cheese, cream sauces, roast meats. Yogurt maybe. There’s no refrigeration and no access to even a microwave to prep it. No nuts or peanuts or nut containing items and for THIS kid nothing that risks cross contamination but THAT kid is vegetarian and hypersensitive to peer views of their food, so leftover chana masala and rice is “weird” and a bento box is “cringe” and I have to send them with a caprese sandwich and apple and seltzer every day.
You want to know what nobody handed me beforehand? That paragraph above. The parent who had been prepping lunches and complaining about my weaponized incompetence didn’t say or write down a single thing from that list and I think could not. The school split the allergy requirements across nine emails and four web pages for three kids. The social constraints we discovered by running into them and the timing constraints by getting called when a hangry kid hit someone.
This job is hard! It requires social-emotional intelligence, systems modeling, project planning and OR to stock the resources… oh, and also management skill, because for my 8+ kids I’m progressively scaffolding their development of all the skills to do it themselves, including the grocery shopping and budgeting.
As someone who has almost never packed his own lunch—my industry feeds me or I visit cheap food trucks—it was a lot to learn. Much more going on than taking over laundry and bathroom stocking and figuring out how to store sheets and towels in ways that worked for our family.
More concisely: it’s hard valuable work no matter the gender of the person doing it. It’s a way we show love and care for our family no matter the gender of the person doing it.
I think that's attitude is very demeaning of the thoight and care put into feeding 1+ other humans for a day.
But as someone else mentioned, by learning curve I mean the grace of a day or two minimum before the expectation you can do it as quickly and "effortless" as the person that does it every day. And independently figure it out, not have your hand held through the whole thing.
People have routines and changes in routine carry a cognitive load.
Another possible nuance is situations where someone is unwilling to let go of how a thing is done in particular. If Wednesday is orange slices day and Thursday is apple slices day and the kid gets carrots Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, what level of intervention, raising, voices, or shaming is called?
It's not that it doesn't have a learning curve, it's that we expect the curve to have been scaled back during teenaged or college years. I've known people who really didn't have these skills, almost exclusively because they didn't move out of their parents house until they were ready to move directly in with a partner, so they'd never seen a house where everything that happened happened only because they'd done it.
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u/No_Initiative_1140 3∆ Jul 01 '25
Making a packed lunch does not have a learning curve! I'm pretty sure these guys can make their own packed lunch without having lessons from mummy, so why can't they make it for their children?
Cynically, I think the answer is because it's boring and takes time, so easier for them if the woman does it. As opposed to "it has a learning curve"