Our Daughters Are Told to Adjust. Our Sons Are Told to Dream

My father cooks. He cleans. He irons his own clothes and manages the house without complaint when my mother is away. He has never once looked at a mop or a pot and thought it beneath him.

Growing up, I thought this was normal. It took leaving home to realise how rare it actually is.

When I moved to university in Islamabad, I shared a room with a girl from a different city. One evening she came back from a visit home and said something I have not been able to forget. She told me that when she walks through her front door after weeks away, exhausted from travel, the first thing her mother asks her to do is take a glass of water to her brother.

Not rest. Not eat. Not tell us how you are.

Take water to your brother.

He is tired, she said. We came in together. But I am the one handed a glass.

I listened and said nothing, because I did not know what to say. Then I started paying attention, to my peers, to their homes, to the conversations around me, and I realised that what she described was not an exception. It was the rule.

In many Pakistani homes, a daughter returning from university is expected to pick up exactly where she left off: cooking, cleaning, managing, serving. A son returning from the same journey is expected to rest. He earns, or is expected to earn one day, and that is often treated as a reason to exempt him from the running of the house.

The daughter also studies. The daughter is also tired. But she is a daughter, and so she adjusts.

This adjustment begins early. Girls are taught to cook because one day they will go to someone else’s home. They are taught to be quiet, to be accommodating, to make themselves small enough to fit into whatever space they are given. Boys are taught to dream, about careers, ambitions, futures they will build on their own terms.

We prepare our daughters for someone else’s life. We prepare our sons for their own.

What makes this more painful is not just that it happens, but that it is justified, often in the name of Islam, a faith that actually says the opposite.

The Qur’an does not assign housework to women only. It commands something far simpler and far harder: mutual kindness. “And live with them in kindness.” (Surah An-Nisa, 4:19). That is the instruction. Not: she cooks and he sits. Kindness. Shared, mutual, unconditional kindness.

And then there is the Prophet ﷺ himself.

When Ayesha was asked what the Prophet did at home, she did not say he waited to be served. She said: “He used to keep himself busy serving his family, and when it was time for prayer, he would get up for prayer.” (Sahih al-Bukhari). In another narration she described how he mended his own clothes, stitched his own shoes, and helped with the work of his home.

The Prophet ﷺ helped with the work of his home. The culture we have built tells our sons that such work is beneath them.

Something does not add up.

I want to be careful here, because I am not saying every Pakistani home is the same. I know families where sons cook and fathers clean and nobody thinks twice about it. My own father is proof that this is possible. But those families remain less common than they should be.

The problem is not individual families. The problem is the idea, the deeply embedded, rarely questioned idea, that certain work belongs to women simply because they are women. That a girl who does not know how to cook is somehow incomplete. That a boy who does know how to cook has done something optional and admirable, rather than simply human.

We praise men for doing what we silently demand of women every single day.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that girls should never cook, clean, or help at home. Most families depend on everyone contributing. The problem is not that daughters are expected to help; it is that sons are so often excused from helping. A healthy home is not built by one exhausted daughter serving everyone else. It is built when everyone who lives there shares responsibility for the work that keeps the home running.

There is a cost to this that we rarely talk about.

The girl who gives her brother water when she is equally tired learns something from that moment. She learns that her exhaustion matters less. She learns to place herself last. She carries that lesson into every relationship, every workplace, every space she inhabits, and we wonder why women so often struggle to ask for what they need, to take up space, to believe their time and energy have value.

We taught them they do not.

My father never taught me that. He showed me, by example, that a home is something two people build together, not something one person maintains while the other is served within it.

That is not a feminist idea. That is not a Western idea. That is what the Prophet ﷺ modelled fourteen hundred years ago in his own home.

We do not need to import new values. We need to actually follow the ones we already claim to have.

Our daughters deserve to come home and rest. Our sons deserve to learn that caring for a home is not a favour they do for others. It is simply part of being human.