What the Children Absorb

They are watching who does what. They have been watching for years.

I know this because I watched, as a child, and what I saw became the blueprint. I know exactly which household jobs were done by my mother and which by my father, not because anyone told me but because the information installed itself, quietly and completely, over the years of my childhood. I can still tell you which cupboard held the ironing board in the house I grew up in. I can tell you who put the ironing board away.

Children absorb the distribution of household labour. They note who cooks and who compliments the cooking. Who arranges and who shows up. Who knows where things are. They are building their model of how adult life works, and the model is being built from observation of what we do, not what we say.

I think about this often.

Not with guilt — guilt is a different thing, and it leads somewhere different. I think about it as information, as a reason to keep working on the distribution even when it would be easier not to. The children watching us now are the adults who will divide their own households later. What they absorb is not inevitable. It is what we build.

He does the school run. He makes the weekend breakfast. They see this. It matters.