... Personally I can't imagine why parents wouldn't teach their kids how to cook, it provides them with a necessary skill, they can learn nutrition and how to better care and fend for themselves, and can help with preparing dinner instead of waiting for mommy and daddy to do it.
Just how great would it be for some parents if their son or daughter were to call them and said, "When are you coming home, I'm HUNGRY!!!!" and for mother to be like, "Well there's pasta and sauce in the cupboard have at them," and hang up.
I cycled my 3 through a rotation: one set, one cooked, one cleared and cleaned up. Next night, same sequence, each kid in a different role. All three of them now greatly exceed my cooking abilities. It is a wonderful thing when they gently elbow me aside and do a meal while I set or clean up.
There were a limited set of family rules about food:
1. "You don't have to eat ANYTHING and you still get desert."/*
2. At the least hint of a complaint you lost everything./**
3. If you didn't like what was served you could go into the kitchen and cook something else for yourself./***
/* My mother always made these spectacular moist chocolate cakes, inches deep in creamy frosting, that filled the house with a rich redolence, and set it out on the sideboard beside the dinner table, on the nights when she made some loathsome italianate glop that extruded tentacles of pollution that flowed in rivulets of corruption and stench across your plate and defiled inoffensive potatoes. You had to gag those courses down into your rising gorge before you were allowed a slice of the cake. The risk for my kids was that I was not a very desert-conscious father, and they might cast their dinner into the outer darkness of the Disposal, all for a desert that wasn't there.
/** I never could abide those whiny-snot-shit little kids who say, "Yuck! DADDY?! What IS this Shit?" My kids grew to love this rule, and on nights when they invited their little pards over would eat until their junior fredbear bellies distended, elbow their little buddy and whisper, "Watch this! Wait'll you see what my dad does!" and then announce in their big voice, "Daddy, I HATE this shit," gesturing at a salad or some medium-rare elk-meat scraps. Instantly I would grab their plate, scrape it onto mine, and finish their dinner, while they were nudging their friend and saying, "See? Now you! You try it!" until some politely-raised little 9-year-old, convinced that if his mommy ever heard about it he would be
hided timed out, would peep, "Mr Fredbear, I, uh, I ... don't like this, uh, very much," and I would scrape their plate onto mine and finish it up while they giggled.
/*** If you could
find something else. Mostly we were a pretty active family (in addition to hunting, fishing, road and mountain biking, the kids lettered in 8 sports) and given to righteous hunger, so if you hesitated over your dinner, a spear-like forest of forks would be aimed at your plate from all sides, and little piping voices would be saying (as they said on the night we [may have, or maybe not] served dog to Bunter), "Excuse me, Ms Grimsqueaker. You gonna finish that dog?" And if you said, weakly, with Thyestean queasiness, "Uh, it's, uh, not really ... Dog... is it Mr Fredbear?" Nervously: "It's moose, isn't it? Or maybe, uh, pronghorn?"
"An airedale cross, I'd say. If it
is dog."
"This is some sort of awful joke, isn't, Mr Fredbear? Isn't it?"
"We don't Waste Protein in this house, Bunter."
And if after that you did say, "Uh, I'm not that hungry," the forks would stab down and lance the mystery meat off your plate and with a sort of polite intensity the little fredbears, like so many Malamute puppies,/**** would snap it all up and gulp it all down.
/****There be three things that are said to be Death: to be in the tower of Big Ben during the ringing of a Peal; to get between Senator Chuck Schumer and a tv camera; to interpose yourself between a litter of 6-month-old Alaskan malamutes and blubber.
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