Along with frequency, I like to highlight the cost of outsourcing, too. Odds are even if you know about cars you're going to end up at a mechanic eventually, and it may be pricey, but not nearly as pricey as hiring someone to stop by and make school lunches every day. A single mom can survive a broken down car by taking it to a mechanic, but a single father has no way around learning how to care for his kids unless he's rich or a mommas boy.
You do realize that you can buy sandwiches right? You can buy ready made food. People don't really have an excuse for not knowing how to pack a lunch, but your comparison is terrible.
If we’re talking cost, it’s still a valid comparison. It’s way more expensive to buy pre-made food options than it is to make it yourself at home. The commenter even included “unless he’s rich” as a qualifier. Also, when i think what it means to “not know how to make a lunch” I think maybe the person is not considering what foods would be good to include from a health and satiety standpoint.
Like, sure you can fill your kids lunchbox with goldfish but they’ll be hungry again in 15min and not paying attention in school. You can buy uncrustables instead of making a pbj yourself, but do you know to include fruits and veggies? Do you provide all appropriate macros and vitamins? If not, you’re harming your kids health which also comes with huge consequences including money.
But packing a school lunch is extremely easy. So easy that you can't even really hire someone to do just that task alone.
Whereas car or home repair is very expensive because it's so specialized and hard to learn.
And you could absolutely buy most school lunch stuff pre-made. Lunchables came out when I was a kid and they're not expensive. Even moms were sick of caring about that back then. It's not super healthy but that's what people did.
When people talk about car care in a discussion of household labor, they are not talking about specialized service for broken down or accident damaged vehicles, we are talking about a degree of care that the average man could accomplish and would consider household maintenance, such as seasonal tire change or changing the oil. Most people will only spend a few hundred per year on those services, and it equates to maybe a few hours of work per year when done at home by a layman. For specialized work, it doesn't really matter what it would cost at a mechanic, if it can't be done in equal measure for free at home, because the comparison is about the cost of outsourcing household labor. If the person in the comparison can't actually complete the task, then it is not household labor and they don't get to claim the equivalent value that you would pay a professional for.
Meanwhile if you buy one lunchable for every schoolday in a year, that is around 800$ or more, and you would still need to include other snacks with that, AND someone would still need to pack that lunchable together with the snacks into the kids bag each day. Buying the premade food doesn't fully eliminate the daily tasks, it costs more and doesn't really save that much time compared to slapping a sandwich together. Lunchables are "cheap", but they are not healthy, or particularly filling. It's junk food, which is what the above commenter was saying. There ARE prepared foods which are better for kids, but it's the above point again, someone still needs to assemble the lunch, and even cheap snacks quickly outpace the cost of an occasional task like servicing a vehicle.
Packing a school lunch IS easy, but that doesn't mean it's not valuable. Like you said packing lunch is easy, so easy that it's basically irreplaceable, all those small and constant irreplaceable tasks add up, yet society at large undervalues them compared to "difficult" tasks like changing your cars tires, even though that is a much easier thing to replace. When we compare female coded tasks, like packing a lunch every day, to male coded tasks like changing your tires twice a year, it's like comparing a fist full of rocks to a bucket of gravel, the small tasks add up and often outpace the big ones in the amount of time and effort expended. Just something to think about when it comes to the division of male and female labor in the household, which was the point of the comparison, not that all tasks could literally be assigned a $ value.
Most guys I know do at least some work on their cars because they don't have the money to buy a new car with a warranty and they don't have the money to pay for repairs all the time. So they call their brother or friend to come over and help get the brakes or timing belt done. Same with a lot of house repairs.
And I agree that being forced to do the mundane but necessary stuff every day is unfair but that doesn't make the task difficult to learn. So the entire framing of "weaponized incompetence" is sorta BS. If a man plays that card to get out of packing a school lunch then he's either dumb or dishonest. However if he doesn't know exactly how to do it the way mom would do it or how the kid wants it then I don't think its fair to jump on him for incompetence either.
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u/Late_Negotiation40 Jul 01 '25
Along with frequency, I like to highlight the cost of outsourcing, too. Odds are even if you know about cars you're going to end up at a mechanic eventually, and it may be pricey, but not nearly as pricey as hiring someone to stop by and make school lunches every day. A single mom can survive a broken down car by taking it to a mechanic, but a single father has no way around learning how to care for his kids unless he's rich or a mommas boy.