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Teaching our children life skills is so important, and can be tricky with the added demands of single parenthood.
With gender equality a hugely prominent topic in 2022, one dad has come under fire for teaching his daughter how to cook, with his reasons for doing so being taken as sexist and misogynistic by some people including his daughter's school. As a result of a throwaway comment by his child being taken the wrong way, he is now experiencing some negative scrutiny of his parenting, so he took to the Reddit AITA (Am I The Asshole) board to ask for some opinions...
Read the full post below...
"I am a single father to an absolutely beautiful daughter, 'Mary'. Mary's mother died when she was two, and except for the four years when her mother was alive, or we were living with my parents while I attended college, she has been raised solely by me.
I have been cooking since I was 14, always at home and for the people I care about. It is fair to say I am a pretty damn good at-home chef. It is also fair to say that my daughter blows my cooking skills out of the water.
She has always taken a keen interest in cooking and has been helping me in the kitchen since she was 4. At 12, I have been giving her 50 bucks a week to pick out her own ingredients at the store and cook dinner every Wednesday, and she has absolutely loved it.
To give an idea of how skilled my daughter is, last week she made a four cheese risotto, twice baked potatoes and sous vided a steak to a perfect medium rare and seared it perfectly. For dessert, it was a strawberry rhubarb crumble and homemade ice cream. Everything was completely from scratch. Since then, every time she tried new recipes on me and I loved it, she would always joke, 'If you love it, dad, then (her crush at the time) would love it and would be very happy!'
This semester at school, she decided to take a 'Home Cooking' option in hopes she would learn new recipes and cooking skills. Today the teacher asked everyone why they wanted to learn how to cook, and my daughter responded, 'To make my future husband and kids happy and healthy.'
The teacher was shocked at that answer, and I was requested for a meeting with the principal and teacher after school hours. They chewed me out for my unhealthy parenting and grooming my daughter to be a housewife for some man in her future.
I talked to a group of mothers that I go to for daughter advice and they said I am an a**hole for instilling such sexist ideals in my daughter and allowing her to think that is all her cooking is good for. I am ready to accept any verdict. So, court of public opinion, am I the a**hole?"
Read the full thread here on Reddit.
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What was the general consensus?
The single dad was voted, without doubt, NTA (Not The Asshole), with thousands upon thousands of readers heaping him with praise and pointing out that his motivation behind honing his daughter's culinary skills has been massively twisted out of proportion, and that the response by the school was presumptive and inappropriate. One commenter even drafted the dad a letter to send in, which he did!
"I never said it was to make her future husband happy... Only that it was something to do for people that you care about, the way I did for her. Besides, she was too young the first time we discussed it to have any inkling of her own sexuality. And I used the example of me cooking for her late mother as something I was very proud of. Frankly, I'm very disturbed that you assumed that her mother was the the one doing the cooking simply because of her gender, especially because you know that she died when my daughter was 2. I'm also extremely disappointed that you would squelch my daughter's heartfelt statements because of your own perceived sexist notions. I can't imagine that she will ever feel comfortable sharing her true thoughts in that class again. I only hope that your negative response doesn't discourage her from an activity that she loves."
Our verdict...
We think that the OP (original poster) sounds like a fabulous father, doing his best in an awful situation. Cooking is a vital life skill, but to be able to encourage and support your child to cook to such a talented level is beyond admirable; he's potentially setting her up for a very fruitful career that she clearly gets so much fulfilment and enjoyment out of!
The comment his daughter made in response to her teacher was taken completely out of context, leading to unfair negative assumptions about this man; we really hope that he complains and takes it further... they need to be served some humble pie! And not the delicious type that we're sure daddy and daughter could whip up in the kitchen.
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