We Teach Girls to Care. What Are We Teaching Boys?

In many Zambian homes, the script is so familiar it barely registers as a choice anymore. A girl is handed a broom before she can spell her own name. She learns to cook nshima standing on a stool before the pot, to wash plates, to scrub floors, to mind a younger sibling on her hip while she works. Her brother, often in the same house, at the same age, is left to play. If he wanders into the kitchen, he is shooed out, not because he cannot learn, but because, as the thinking goes, "that is not for boys." It is one of the most ordinary habits in Zambian family life. It is also, this series has argued, one of the quiet ways the boy child is being forgotten.

The first article in this series asked whether Zambia had forgotten its boy child amid growing national attention on girls' empowerment and protection. This one asks a narrower, more domestic version of the same question: what happens to boys who are never taught to look after a home, and what does that exclusion actually cost them, their future partners, and the households they will one day run?

A DIVISION OF LABOUR THAT STARTS YOUNG

The pattern is not unique to Zambia, but it is deeply embedded here. Research into household chores and child development in Ghana, a country with comparable social and domestic structures to Zambia, surveyed over 5,000 children aged 8 to 17 and found the gendered split begins early and hardens with age. Girls dominated indoor, caregiving-adjacent tasks: 68.1 percent cooked, compared with 35.7 percent of boys; 90.4 percent cleaned the home, compared with 73.4 percent of boys; 91 percent fetched water, compared with 55.5 percent of boys. Boys, by contrast, were steered toward outdoor and manual labour, 71.4 percent weeded or cleared land, compared with 54.8 percent of girls, while tasks like washing vehicles were almost exclusively theirs.

The researchers' conclusion cuts in two directions at once. Girls, overloaded with domestic duties, often pay for it in exhaustion, interrupted schoolwork and lost sleep. One 17-year-old girl in the study put it simply: "I am always exhausted doing chores… I wish I could just be a kid." But the same study found that boys pay a different, quieter price. Excluded from cooking, cleaning and caregiving, they are not simply spared work, they are denied the chance to develop what the researchers called "relational and nurturing skills that are essential for holistic growth." The study's authors did not frame either outcome as the "better" one. Both, they argued, are forms of harm, just distributed unevenly across gender lines.

WHAT GETS LOST WHEN A BOY IS NEVER TAUGHT

It is worth being specific about what is actually missing when a boy grows into manhood without ever being asked to cook a meal, iron a shirt, or clean a house. These are not decorative skills. They are the basic competencies of an independent adult life, the kind every person, regardless of whether they marry, eventually needs.

Zambian social life is full of the downstream jokes about this gap: the bachelor who cannot boil an egg, the husband who does not know where the broom is kept in his own house, the widower or divorced man who, after years of marriage, suddenly cannot function without a woman managing his domestic world for him. They are jokes, but they describe a real and often painful dependency, one that was quietly built in, chore by chore, from childhood. A boy who is never shown how to run a home does not magically acquire the skill at 25, or 40, or 60. He simply remains without it, often leaning on a mother, then a wife, then whoever is available, to do for him what he was never taught to do for himself.

There is a deeper cost too, one that goes beyond domestic competence into character. Cooking for someone, cleaning up after a household, caring for a younger sibling, these are also a child's earliest lessons in responsibility, patience, and consideration for other people's needs. When boys are routinely excused from this kind of work while girls are immersed in it from a young age, the message absorbed is not subtle: this kind of care, this kind of labour, is beneath you, or simply not yours to learn. It is a short step from there to adult men who see domestic and caregiving work as inherently someone else's job, usually a woman's, rather than a shared responsibility of any functioning household.

ZAMBIA IS ALREADY TRYING TO CLOSE THIS GAP

This is not an abstract concern in Zambia. It sits inside a wider, serious conversation about boys, masculinity and violence that government and development partners have already begun to act on. UNICEF Zambia, working with the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services, runs a programme called Coaching Boys into Men across six districts, training coaches, 135 of them so far, to work with boys aged 10 to 14 and 15 to 19 on exactly this terrain: positive masculinity, respectful relationships, and household responsibilities, using soccer as the entry point to reach boys where they already gather.

Notably, the programme's own rationale states plainly that working only with girls has proven insufficient to shift outcomes like gender-based violence, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy in Zambia, and that part of the work with boys is directly challenging the assumption that household work is "just" girls' responsibility. In other words, Zambian institutions working on child welfare have already identified the same gap this series is describing: boys who are never brought into domestic life grow into men less equipped for equal, respectful partnership, and in the worst cases, less equipped to see women's unpaid domestic labour as labour at all.

NOT ABOUT PUNISHING GIRLS, BUT EQUIPPING BOYS

None of this is an argument that girls should stop learning to cook or clean, or that chores themselves are harmful. Housework is, and will remain, a necessary part of life for everyone. The argument is narrower and, in some ways, more uncomfortable: that Zambian households have built a system where one gender is taught the full range of domestic competence and the other is systematically shielded from it, and that this shielding is not protection. It is neglect, dressed up as tradition.

A boy who grows up knowing how to cook, clean, wash his own clothes and care for a younger sibling is not made less masculine by it. He is made more capable, more self-reliant, and, if he eventually shares a home with someone else, more likely to see that home as a shared project rather than someone else's unpaid job. The question this series keeps returning to is not whether Zambia loves its boys. It plainly does. It is whether Zambian homes are actually preparing them, in the small, daily, unglamorous ways that matter most, for the adult lives they will one day have to run themselves.