Welcome!

Our What Would You Do question this week (page 26) caused a lively conversation among the team. A reader wanted advice on how to get her adult children to help around the, she wrote. Plenty of parents will sympathise. Until I left home to live in a share house, at 19, I did my best to help around the house. When I was 13, Mum showed my sister Lenore and me how to use the washing machine and told us that if we wanted clean clothes and bedding, then it was up to us to use it. Oh, the mishaps! One morning, with no clothes dryer and wet school socks we’d left overnight in the machine, we tried to dry them in the oven. Suffice to say, that’s one really bad idea that will never make it into our Brainwaves page! Jude says although she hated vacuuming as a kid, her dad was happy to do that. ‘Washing dishes and washing clothes was just something my brother and I did,’ she said. Jude passed on that same sense of responsibility to her sons, Myles and Billy. ‘The best birthday present I ever received was when I came home to find Billy had cleaned the whole place from top to bottom!’ she said. Beth was not as diligent with the home help side of family life. Although she and her sister Jemimah did the washing up and drying after dinner every night, Beth admits that her bedroom was ‘a pigsty’. ‘There were just so many other things I’d rather be doing than cleaning my own bedroom,’ she told us. But what Beth said next will give hope to all parents of unenthusiastic home helpers. ‘When I lived in Berlin in my 20s, I spent some time as a cleaner, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed the satisfaction of closing the door on a spotless apartment,’ she said. ‘My late mum, Dot, would have been incredulous at all the 5-star ratings I got!’ Like I said, there’s always hope!