Make That Bed

I must have fallen asleep on the job! All these decades in which I was busy guiding parents passed, and I didn’t notice a major societal shift. I still regularly encountered parents who insisted on teaching their kids to make “military corners” on their beds in the morning so I didn’t realize that the vast majority of people had, somewhere along the line, stopped making their beds.

The first light dawned for me when a parent asked me about the type of “chores” (is that a word anymore?) that children under the age of ten ought to be doing. I listed all the regulars: cleaning up toys, helping to set or clear a table, and so on, and mentioned making the bed (pulling up the comforter toward the pillow). The parent said that since neither of the adults in the house make their bed, it might be unrealistic to ask the child to do this task.

Yes, that was a good observation. But I was shocked! “What do you mean ‘neither of you make your bed’?” I asked in complete confusion.

“You know, no time, it’s not a priority, we didn’t grow up that way…”