I’ve written before about children’s household responsibilities and about the division of domestic responsibility between adults. There is a magic space between these two topics. Somewhere between a child whose mother tells him not to forget his water bottle and a grown man whose partner tells him to buy milk, something happens. A person can learn to carry out virtually any task without ever learning to notice, independently, that the task exists in the first place.
I’m raising an eight-year-old boy, and if one day he lives with other people, I’d like him not to “help” them around the house but to live there as a fully responsible adult. To notice when the toilet paper is running out, know when the child has a dentist appointment, be able to organise dinner without being given a set of instructions, and not need another person to keep his life inside their head. And if he lives alone, I’d rather his idea of looking after himself extend beyond flushing the toilet and defrosting a pizza.
Raising a child to reach that level feels difficult at the moment, because after eight years of solo motherhood I have become extremely good at keeping my son’s life in my head, controlling everything and reminding him of everything. Now, against the backdrop of yet another stage of separation, accompanied by the recurring soundtrack of “Mum, where is my…?”, I can see an urgent need to change something.
Зміст
The work no one sees
Imagine a very simple situation: a child needs new winter boots. Buying shoes sounds like a single task. But first, someone notices that the old ones have become too small, remembers that cold weather is coming, checks the size, decides what kind are needed, searches for them, remembers that this needs to happen not at some vague point in the future but before the frost arrives, orders them, and checks whether they fit. If they don’t, that person returns them and starts part of the process all over again.
That is why counting how many times each person washed the dishes does not tell us much about the real distribution of domestic labour. There is also cognitive household labour: anticipating needs, planning, making decisions, remembering and monitoring. Research on heterosexual couples shows that this part of domestic life remains particularly gender-unequal: women are more likely not merely to carry out tasks but to be responsible for ensuring that those tasks are noticed and completed in time.
Hence the famous conflict around the phrase “you could have just asked.” Formally, someone is offering to help; in practice, they are agreeing to carry out instructions on the condition that somebody else remains the manager. To ask someone to take out the rubbish, you first have to notice the rubbish; to ask them to buy milk, you need to know that it is running out; to remind them about a parents’ meeting, you have to remember the meeting yourself. And if one person is constantly doing this work, the other does not have to be lazy at all: they may diligently do everything they are asked to do while remaining completely helpless in everyday life.
Are men really just forgetful?
We could look for a biological explanation here. There are indeed some average differences between men and women in certain kinds of memory, spatial abilities and attention, but research does not show a general female advantage in executive control that could explain such remarkably selective domestic “inattention”. Biology, then, has a hard time accounting for this particular kind of forgetfulness. If someone remembers work deadlines, training sessions, plans with friends, car maintenance and the release date of a new game but systematically forgets the needs of their own family — or their own needs, such as personal care, food, laundry and cleaning — the problem is unlikely to be that their brain is physiologically incapable of retaining information.
It is more about what enters our field of attention as our responsibility in the first place. To remember to buy milk, I first have to notice that it is running out and regard that information as relevant to me. If I know that somebody else always keeps track of a particular category of things, I have no reason to monitor it myself. We constantly outsource parts of our thinking: our phone remembers numbers, our calendar remembers appointments, our satnav remembers the route. This is a normal and efficient way of conserving cognitive resources. But in family life, another human being can become that external storage device: they notice, remember, anticipate and remind — and the better they do it, the less the other person has to do it for themselves.
Learned helplessness — but slightly backwards
In psychology, learned helplessness has a specific meaning. Classic studies by Martin Seligman and Steven Maier showed that after repeated exposure to uncontrollable unpleasant events, an organism may stop trying to influence the situation even once influence becomes possible. The authors themselves later substantially refined the model: what mattered was not only the experience of uncontrollability but also the opposite experience — learning control, discovering through practice that your actions change what happens.
So a man asking his partner where his socks are is obviously not a classic example of learned helplessness. Today we sometimes use the term more broadly to describe an acquired dependence on somebody else’s noticing, planning and monitoring. Here, too, the central issue is the experience of your own agency: to learn to manage a particular part of life, you need to go through the entire cycle many times — notice, decide, act, see the result, and adjust your behaviour next time.
If somebody else constantly intercepts that cycle, the corresponding competence may simply never develop. Someone noticed that the shampoo had run out, so I didn’t have to notice; reminded me about the doctor, so I didn’t have to figure out how to remember; found my missing thing, so I didn’t have to develop a search strategy; rescued me from the consequences, so I didn’t have to redesign my system. This does not mean that helping people makes them helpless. The problem begins when entire areas of life are organised for you by somebody else for years, leaving you with very little practice in managing them yourself.
When helplessness is normal
With children, there is an obvious complication: at first, an adult is supposed to function as an external management system. Planning, working memory, attention management, impulse control and the ability to change strategies are all executive functions, and they develop gradually throughout childhood and adolescence. Expecting an eight-year-old to organise himself like an adult would make about as much sense as being annoyed that he cannot reach the top shelf. The question is not whether to help, but whether that help decreases as the child develops.
From “do this” to “this is yours to manage”
It makes sense to transfer responsibility not according to a rigid age schedule but by gradually expanding the part of life the child is already capable of managing independently. Paediatric guidance offers rough benchmarks: children aged 5–7 can already take responsibility for simple regular tasks; at 8–10, they can make themselves a snack, put away their belongings and help prepare food; and at 11–12, they can take on more complex household tasks such as doing laundry or preparing a simple meal. But these are only guidelines: children differ greatly in experience and in the development of their executive functions.
What matters more is which part of the management process the child can already take over. At first, the adult notices and plans, while the child executes: “put your clothes in the laundry basket.” Then the child gets regular responsibilities of their own: “you keep an eye on the cat’s water.” The next step is to notice the need independently, plan what to do and check the result. This is broadly how independence in executive functioning develops: first the adult provides structure and support, then gradually steps back.
And this applies not only to household chores but also to self-care: keeping track of clean clothes and hygiene, packing what you need, noticing that you are hungry and making yourself a snack. So it is more useful to ask not “what should an eight-year-old be able to do?” but “which parts of what I now automatically notice, remember and do for him is he already capable of taking over?” Sometimes the answer will be “not yet”, sometimes “with a reminder”, and sometimes “perfectly capable — I just do it first out of habit”. That becomes the next area of separation, with self-reliance as a bonus.
“Mum, where’s my jumper?”
It is much easier for me simply to tell him where the jumper is. Unfortunately, I often genuinely know and answer automatically. But it is more useful to rewind part of the thinking process: where were you wearing it last? What did you do afterwards? Where do you usually take it off? This way, the child learns not merely to look for a jumper but to reconstruct a sequence of events and develop a search strategy. In our house, the shorthand version is simply: “where you put it.”
If the jumper goes missing every morning, the next question becomes even more interesting: what could we change so that we stop having to look for it? A hook, a box, a shelf, a rule that certain things always go in the same place? The problem stops being moral — “you’re so inattentive” — and becomes an engineering problem: our system does not work, so let’s redesign it. After all, adult competence partly consists in knowing your own weak spots and building systems around them.
A calendar is a skill too
An organised person does not necessarily have a phenomenal memory. Perhaps they simply do not rely on memory where they can avoid it. Calendars, lists, reminders, fixed places for belongings, checking the next day’s plans in the evening — these are external tools for executive functioning, and learning to use them is itself a skill.
An eight-year-old does not need a corporate project-management system, but a checklist by the door may be perfectly useful: backpack, water, keys, whatever is needed that particular day. Better still if the list is not invented by an adult: “What do you forget most often? How could we arrange things so that you don’t have to remember it all the time?” The goal is not to raise a child who keeps everything in his head, but a person who knows how to manage the things his head does not retain.
The right to forget something
But no reminder system can replace cause and effect. If every morning I catch my child at the door and hand him the bottle he has forgotten, he learns that a bottle can be forgotten but will nevertheless mysteriously materialise before he leaves. If one day the bottle fails to materialise, he receives new information: my planning has consequences.
This does not apply to safety, medication or situations where the cost of a mistake is disproportionate to the child’s age. But between danger and the slightest discomfort lies a vast territory of ordinary life. Forget something non-essential — it is inconvenient; fail to put your gloves out to dry — they are wet; fail to check your backpack — you have to manage without something you needed. Such experiences contain something reminders cannot provide: a direct connection between your own decision and its outcome. And once the consequence has occurred, “I told you so” adds nothing useful to it.
In Sweden, they seem to understand this better than in Ukraine. Some examples may even strike us as harsh. From what I have observed, if a child forgets to bring a raincoat or warm jumper to school, they will still go outside with everyone else, getting wet or cold. If a child’s hair is uncombed and their T-shirt is on backwards, adults will not necessarily correct it.
The competent adult trap
A child’s helplessness can very easily be sustained by good care. I am faster, more experienced, I notice problems sooner, and I can do in one minute what will take a child ten. If the main goal is to get out of the house quickly or have a clean kitchen, the most efficient solution is to do everything myself. But then we are optimising for the wrong outcome: it is entirely possible to have a perfectly organised home in which the child has learned to organise nothing.
Transferring responsibility almost inevitably means that, for a while, the system will work worse: things will be forgotten, belongings will be put away strangely, tasks will take three times longer, and the child will find solutions I would never have chosen. But that is learning.
What if one woman is holding the entire system together?
In my case, there is another factor: I am raising my son alone. At home, he does not see the classic model in which Mum remembers, plans and organises while Dad gets involved when asked. You might think that at least this particular gender lesson is absent from our home. But I don’t know what lesson has taken its place.
He sees a woman holding the entire system together: I know his schedule, organise school and leisure activities, buy clothes, plan trips and remember a hundred small things because I am the only adult here. But to an eight-year-old, the distinction between “Mum does all this because she is the only adult” and “Mum is the person who does all this” is far from obvious.
The models we inherit
My sister and I also grew up in a family where our mother managed domestic life, and we became fairly helpless in practical matters. Living independently cured that remarkably quickly: it turned out that what we lacked was not ability but practice. But nothing taught us how to build equal relationships.
Around men, the familiar script is easy to reproduce: notice first, anticipate, remind, step in, eventually do it yourself. Partly because the standards are higher, and partly because it seems easier on your own nerves. You can understand this mechanism perfectly well and consciously fight it, yet still reproduce it automatically. Theory can convince me that I am not responsible for organising a grown man’s life, but it cannot erase thousands of childhood scenes in which this was simply what intimate relationships looked like.
So I am interested not only in what my son will one day think about gender equality, but also in what will feel so natural to him that he will never think about it at all. I cannot show him an equal division of cognitive labour between two adults at home. But I can gradually stop functioning as his external memory wherever he is already capable of building his own.
Why I think specifically about boys
All of this applies equally to boys and girls: executive functions do not come in male and female versions, and everyone needs independence. But the social environment does not treat boys’ and girls’ domestic competence in the same way. A girl who fails to notice other people’s needs is more likely to be called selfish. A boy who does not know where his belongings are may remain simply “a typical boy”. Girls are traditionally expected to become involved in household work earlier and more extensively and to pay more attention to other people, while male domestic helplessness can still easily become a family joke.
That is why I am not particularly interested in whether my son will one day know how to operate a washing machine: he can read the instructions in five minutes. What interests me much more is whether he will notice that it is time to do the laundry. Whether he will be aware not only of his own needs but also of some of the needs of the people he lives with. Whether he will see caring for shared spaces and other people as a normal part of his share of life rather than as a favour a man generously performs for a woman.
Because you can teach a boy to cook, wash clothes and clean and still raise a man who asks, “Is there anything I can help you with?” Or you can teach him something considerably harder: to look around and understand for himself what belongs to his share of the responsibility.
Helplessness requires cooperation too
There is an uncomfortable point that is easy to miss if we explain the entire problem in terms of lazy men or spoiled children. It may be convenient for one person not to take responsibility, but it can also be extraordinarily difficult for someone else to give it up. If I hand a task over to another person but continue monitoring, reminding, checking and correcting them, the cognitive responsibility is still mine. If I allow them to do it only my way, or intervene before they have had time to notice the problem themselves, they get very little space to learn how to manage it independently.
This does not mean that a woman is to blame if her partner does not take responsibility: often she takes control precisely because otherwise something genuinely does not get done. But the system can become self-reinforcing: one person notices less and less while the other controls more and more; the more the second person controls, the less the first person has to notice.
This is where my experiences as a daughter, a partner and a mother converge. I now have an opportunity not to make the old script the only one my son knows: to gradually hand over not just tasks, but also the right to think about them, organise them, make mistakes and change his own system.
At first I remember for my child, then we remember together, then I ask how he plans not to forget, and eventually I stop asking. Perhaps that is what raising a child is: spending years doing an enormous amount of invisible work so that, in the end, you no longer have to do it.
Related articles
Children and Household Responsibilities — about involving children in the real life of the family, partnership and shared work.
The Division of Household Responsibilities — about responsibility, role models and the organisation of domestic life between adults.
