Bad boy: Caring for children is, quite frankly, a feminine role

Wife has been gone for 10 days now, and your responsibility of caring for the little ones is taking a toll on you. Kids are too demanding. Given the choice of going to hunt a python for food and staying home with kids, you are better off being swallowed by the snake.

Even kids hate the presence of men, if overdone. For a good relationship with his children, a man has to avoid being around too much so he can maintain enough authority to instill discipline and order when the mother becomes too overwhelmed.

Our ancestors had these things figured out but too much education is really messing up marriages. Ask ten men if they like spending a lot of time with children and eight out of ten will tell you forthrightly that they hate that stuff. Take the other two to a safe space where they can confess without reprisals, and they will admit that they were kidding.

You have helped the kids with assignments, but the assignments are mostly idiotic and irrelevant. Whoever who came up with the idea of homework was a homewrecker. Now, luckily, Carol’s sister and the house help have come in handy. But Caroline’s sister is a young girl on phone 24/7. The only time she is not scrolling through her phone is when sleeping. Any inconvenience that takes more than two minutes is met with tantrums.

Only a few years back, younger sisters to wives were more helpful. They performed all household chores with no supervision. But your in-law is not into that kind of madness.

You have learned that the worst thing about children is their concentration spans. You agree that there is no TV until homework is done. You go in for a bathroom break, you come back and they are back on phone or tablet. You take the gadgets away and it is a crisis. They don’t want to talk to you. In your strict anti-gadget policy, you discover it is impossible to parent without distracting kids with some piece of technology. How are you to respond to the WhatsApp messages, respond to your boss’s emails or even pick an important phone call if kids are not kept busy elsewhere?

You change the rules for this period -- they can have access to gadgets. The house help sometimes gets overwhelmed and Carol’s sister wouldn’t know what to do with the children if she were left with them for more than two hours. You wonder what kind of mother she will become -- beyond posting pictures on Instagram.

In the past, if you had two teenagers in the house, you would not worry, as they would know what to do with their lives. Nowadays, if you have someone aged 25 in your house, he or she will die not knowing how to open a fridge or cook eggs and sukuma wiki.

The house help and Carol’s sister are adults by every stretch, but they have to be micromanaged. Most cool men hate issuing instructions every minute. And here is where female authority often pumps sense into them. Men are clearly not cut for the stuff.

You still have two weeks of this. You will need a holiday when Carol comes back.

@nyanchwani

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