Dear silvers,
Have you ever felt annoyed when you approach someone younger for some technical troubleshooting on your laptop or smartphone, only to have them scoff and say something to the effect of, “This is so easy. I guess nobody from your generation knows how to do anything anymore”?
Congratulations, that’s exactly how most young adults feel when they get derided for not knowing life skills like how to wire an electric plug, sew up a hole in their favourite t-shirt or seal a leaky pipe.
Now, we’re not trying to say that basic skills like maintenance, sewing and cooking are less important than they once were – though some of them arguably might be; we’ll get to that later – but instead, make an age-neutral point that the household, like many other areas in life, has changed immensely over the years.
How many people do you think today know how to write in cursive, operate a fax machine, drive a manual transmission car, navigate through the physical maps, balance a cheque book or burn a CD? And for that matter, how many people will still know 50 years from now? Chances are, pretty few.
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Dear Silvers: Why life skills are a disappearing art
That being said, we’re not trying to make excuses for millennials either.
Though data pertaining specifically to young adults in Singapore isn’t readily available, there are plenty of articles online bemoaning millennials’ want for proficiency in cooking, home maintenance and cleaning across the world.
It’s hard to imagine the youngsters in Singapore are exempt from that, especially since factors leading to basic household skills disappearing elsewhere are just as prevalent here.
For one, many families around the world are simply doing less chores. The rise of dual-income households (where both parents remain working full-time) has led to a reliance on outsourced cooking or cleaning, even house repairs.
In Singapore, our dependence on live-in domestic helpers is well-documented. We have about 286,300 migrant domestic workers in the country as of December last year, up from roughly 214,500 in 2013.
Even in families where parents are the ones taking up the chores, they’re less likely to rope children in to help due to lack of time.
After all, a good portion of Singaporean children are perpetually over-scheduled with countless enrichment and tuition classes (according to the last government Household Expenditure Survey, families here spent a collective $1.4 billion on private tuition in 2017/18). This phenomenon is seen all around the world – but especially in highly competitive countries like South Korea, China and Singapore.
Realistically, the first time many young adults in Singapore pick up a broom or wash their own clothes comes only when they leave the nest – only we’re doing that later as well too with the skyrocketing house prices.
Apart from isolated stints during National Service for the men, or staying on campus while at university, most people here only move out after marriage. As of 2022, the median age at first marriage came up to 30.7 years for the grooms and 29.3 years for the brides, up from 30.1 and 28.0 a decade ago.
In any case, society itself has shifted to value convenience over longevity. Products have become much cheaper and far less durable – meaning it often makes more sense to toss them and get a new one rather than try to repair them.
With more electronics integrated into appliances like cars, fans and refrigerators, they’re finickier to repair too, forcing us to head into the repair centre instead of trying to do it ourselves.
Use it or lose it
However, the very fact that younger adults, when they move out, are able to live apart from their parents without wallowing in filth or dying of salmonella proves that, when push comes to shove, people can pick up any skill they need to (or at the very least, pay for it to be done for them).
Additionally, with the Internet, the only thing that separates most people from any tutorial, guide or recipe is just a single Google search.
Admittedly, this doesn’t quite make up for practice – cognitive offloading, or the act of reducing mental process requirements of a task through physical actions like writing it down (or in this case, bookmarking it on Pinterest or YouTube), means that you don’t take the trouble to make the connections in your brain and body for long-term skill retention.
Plus, if you’re learning everything from online tutorials, you don’t often get to know the tricks of the trade – those hidden shortcuts discovered by practitioners incidentally after years of diligently plugging away and learning by trial and error.
Little things, like keeping the lid half off to keep a pot from boiling over or using a newspaper to clean glass, might be lost between generations. It’s akin to the difference between a driver who navigates purely by GPS, and a more experienced one who has memorised the roads and daily traffic conditions. You’re almost guaranteed a smoother, more confident drive with the latter.
Parents and grandparents now have the chance to make the change, at least among the next Gen Alphas who are still children (those born from early 2010s onwards). While their charges are still young and can still learn quickly, involve them in daily household chores.
I’m grateful that my parents always took the time to rope me into tasks like replacing light bulbs, slicing onions, stripping wires and chopping chicken, instead of shooing me back into the study room.
On the flip side, silvers, too, can stand to learn new tricks. Don’t give up on the “modern” household chores like fixing a wireless router that’s on the fritz or updating the antivirus on the home computer, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
As my mother used to say when I’d break the yolk while trying to sunny side up:
"Never mind lah, just do scrambled egg."
