Kids, cooking, then and now

I was raised by a single mom.  My parents split up when I was about 10 and my sister was 1.  Luckily, my mom had a teaching degree, (from 15 years earlier but only taught for 2 years) but had also been a secretary, and got a good job in a government office relating to post-secondary education.   Now my sister and I were daycare or latch key kids.  My sister went to daycare, where she got hurt from jumping down from too high and had to have a cast, as well as escaping out the fence with a buddy and getting a mile from the daycare along busy streets.  I was left to my own devices.

Because my mom worked full-time, I would sometimes make dinner, and I started doing this when I was 12 or 13 years old.  I would make the same type of meals that she did, nothing fancy but edible.  It would have been Kraft Dinner with sausages and cole slaw, or spaghetti and green salad, or homemade submarines with bacon, or meat pies with corn and baked potatoes.  Nobody showed me how to cook, I just happened to notice and it really isn't that difficult. 

So as my kids got older, they wanted different things, and because I hate cooking now, I have started showing my boys how to cook.  Tonight was hamburgers.  Because we don't have a large frying pan, the frozen burgers were baked.  There was the usual talk about E-coli and the invisible trail of contaminants that they must be aware of.   There was also the talk about the heat of the oven, the hot pans, the oven mitts, the dripping grease, the meat's wrapper, etc. 

But they still aren't eating like I used to eat.  Those burgers I made were from a pound of hamburger mixed with oatmeal, egg and onion.  That spaghetti sauce was homemade and from the freezer.  Cole slaw from scratch and green salad not from a bag.   Today, it seems that home cooking is considered something that is made at home, even if it is totally precooked, prepackaged, loaded with preservatives and costing just as much.