Posted on 07/13/2023 5:32:33 PM PDT by mowowie
I was in a fabric store once and the clerk cutting my fabric was sharing small talk with me. She folded my fabric as always and I said there was a new young man at the cutting table the last time I was here and he was trying to fold the fabric in the smallest square he could. He was struggling. She laughed and said when he was on his first day, she had to show him how to use the broom to sweep the floor. He honestly didn’t know how. I’ve had kids come to help me do yard work and I had to show them what to do. No experience, none.
What has happened to parents that their children don’t know how to use a broom or a rake?
Kid’s faking it.
Ya know I didn’t even think of it...
Probably because my age.
I tried to teach my young teen daughter to run the riding mower. She did run it - in pretty patterns around the lawn that didn’t cut all the grass. Also ran over a few ornamental bushes. I did it myself after that.
I guess the good news is, that he IS teaching him how to do it. People across the street, actually quite a nice family, has 3 sons, now grown and on their own. (And 2 daughters, BTW). I don’t think I EVER saw any of the kids mowing, raking, doing any type of yard work. Nor washing cars, or other outside chores.
Next door on both sides as well as across the street and one to the north, all the family members over 13 seem to take turns doing the mowing and other yard work. Even the moms.....
None, and I mean zero, teenage kids do yardwork at their homes in my neighborhood.
None of them that I know of even have part-time jobs.
I was doing a paper root at age 10.
Have never stopped working since then.
I think I was 11 before I started mowing lawns for money.
My dad. Manual Mower. Taught me Age 7. Ummmmm.....
You are never too old to teach. At the end of my construction management career I was in charge of a fifty million dollar project for the military. We were down to tiny punch-list items and all of my crew but one laborer were gone. We had a large lobby and entry area with a terrazzo floor and I had this young 18 year old laborer get a mop bucket, squeeze wringer and a big mop from the janitor’s closet as the lobby was going to be photographed the next day and it was late.
I watched this kid scrub forward and back with a mop making a bigger mess on the floor than what was there. A civilian facility manager (retired military E-8) in charge of the monster building was standing there with me. I patiently took the mop away from the kid and going back to what I had been taught 53 years earlier showed him how to wet and then dry mop a floor as to not to leave streaks.
This military manager could not get over how I had shown the kid, mopped a fourth of the floor myself and given him a detailed skill set. He laughingly talked about how this Project Executive running his building knew everything in tiny detail down to properly mopping the floors.
It is amazing how often people just need some patient detailed instruction and how many of our peers can’t figure out how to provide it.
Dad is probably extra mad because mom in the house wouldn’t let him do it for the 5 years when he should have been because he might get hurt.
So he’s mad that the kid should already know how to do this and mad that he let mom talk him into doing the wrong thing.
When my sister was a teenager and I was still too young, we had the old corded Black and Decker lawn mower. She hated it, and eventually ran over the cord on purpose. She only fessed up decades later.
Hook a phone to it with a GPS track and virtual reality glasses and game seat and he’ll be fine.
I had a lawn tractor & I put a brand new belt on it & had my then 15/16 year old son mow. Next week I mowed & it felt like the belt was 3 years old so I had my son show me how he mowed & he was mowing in a square blowing the grass & leaves into the middle to be mowed over and over and over again.
I used to mow 12 lawns, around 12 and then started installing new telephone lines in neighbors houses around 13. Some new law allowed that. My kids learned to mow young but also know how to set up some wifi. Not much use for landlines these days.
10? Sheesh, I was doing it at 5!
In all seriousness, what kind of lazy-ass father waits until teaching their son to mow the lawn at 16?
What was he waiting for?!
It's his damn' fault that boy is lazy/doesn't know how to do it/won't be self sufficient.
Men not being FATHERS and examples to their sons to set standards for themselves, have principles, live with integrity, put the work in to being a man and I can go on, and on.
If we had to fight WW3 today with this crop of males (I refuse to call them men at this point) we may as well surrender becuase they aren't gonna fight.
And this is why this country is lost. Masculinity, what it means to be a MAN isn't being passed down. So sad.
I’m 47 and have never touched a lawn mower in my life. I leave certain things to the professionals: https://youtu.be/iEh7xyRAteYmy
I was plowing and disking with the Farmall H when I was 12. Learned to drive a stick shift car when I was old enough to see over the steering wheel of grandpas ‘60 ford.
Pathetic.
The kid is damn lucky he doesn’t have to deal with the PUSH mowers we had back in the day, I as a girl used to mow my neighbors lawns for something like 2 dollars WITH that damn PUSH mower!! If the grass had ANY length to it at all it was a nightmare!! THEN you had to rake the grass up and put it into trash bags!!
The only damn way to guarantee your car won’t be stolen today is to have a manual transmission!! Took my Escape to the car wash and I had to drive it through the wash NO ONE knew how to drive a manual transmission LOL, LOL
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