Reply to how much are you willing to outsource?

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Reply to "how much are you willing to outsource?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm all for outsourcing, but does anyone worry that we're not teaching our LOs how to care for themselves?  How will they learn to cook, garden, grocery shop, do laundry, etc., if we don't teach them?  [/quote]

that's funny that you point this out.   And before anyone responds that kids don't notice, that would be incorrect for any kid over the age of 7 or so.

I married, then divorced, a man who grew up in a house with 97% of life's unpleasant or banal tasks outsourced.   Like PPs.  Like PPs, dad "traveled a lot" and mom was somewhat busy and essentially didn't want to "spend her free time" in line at Giant or Target.  Or sprinkling grass seed onto the lawn.

Fine.  The trick here is that exH's parents had the income to do all of these things (housekeeper, landscaper, babysitter who picked kids up from NWDC private, tutor, handyman/painter).  exH never had to: paint, mow the grass, run to People's drug store to pick up Tylenol for mom, shovel, walk to Safeway on Connecticut to get an onion for dinner, MAKE dinner, load the dishwasher, change his own sheets, etc etc etc.

And guess what?  when exH grew up, he was inclined to do none of these ^ tasks, ever.  So he paid recent immigrants to do all of these tasks in our busy NWDC two-income household. That was fine for a while.  And then guess what happened?  That HHI went down, way down.  But the laundry still needed to be done, the sheets changed, the meal prepared, the kids picked up from school, the sidewalk shoveled and the grass reseeded.

Do you imagine that exH rose to the task and grabbed a shovel?  Or woke up one day and announced he was going to fix the towel rack himself, since there was no more income to pay Joe the Handyman to be on retainer?

Nope!    No help = it doesn't get done.

So you "throw money at the problem" PPs .....  make sure your non-working kids always have plenty of money in the checking account to "throw" for themselves.

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