Our grown-up children refused to do laundry, empty the dishwasher – and didn’t even know where the vacuum cleaner was kept. And it’s all our fault!

While preparing for a talk on the ­Mitford sisters at the Oxford Literary Festival this Saturday, I was struck by the mention of Nancy Mitford returning to home comforts after running away to art college and a bedsit. She came back, she said, because she had been ‘kneedeep in underclothes… I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away. Awful.’

I was reminded of a fight a couple of years ago between my husband and my then 22-year-old daughter. She and her boyfriend had just moved back in to our terraced home in West London after university and had immediately thrown our laundry system into overloaded paralysis.

‘Socks!’ thundered my husband. ‘So many bloody socks! Do you and he change socks five times a day?’

My daughter shrugged: ‘Maybe if you did the modern thing and got a dryer, you wouldn’t notice how many socks there are. I mean, it must take hours hanging them out to dry instead of which you could just put them in to tumble.’

I’m not sure she even noticed our stunned reaction.

Her brother meanwhile, now 22 ­himself, confessed something to me the other day that made me realise where we had gone wrong.

‘I actually thought, when growing up, that socks naturally gravitated towards each other,’ he said. ‘Because I would put them in the laundry basket singly and then they would magically turn up, paired again, in my drawer.’

The horrifying realisation that, without meaning to, we have pampered and spoiled our children by doing all their household tasks for them so quietly that they didn’t even notice, was echoed by a survey of 2,000 parents this week.

Like my husband and me, 61 per cent of those ­surveyed said they were expected to do chores as children, with 56 per cent admitting that, by contrast, their own ­children refuse to help out around the house.

A quarter have never emptied the dishwasher and a third have never hung out the washing. Nearly half have never vacuumed and more than half refuse to clean their room.

Clean their room? My teenagers refused to even tidy their room in time for our fortnightly cleaner to be able to enter without needing to put on a hazmat suit!

When our son turned 21 and we threw a party for him, he did at least come downstairs to help clear up the next day. But when I asked him to get out the vacuum cleaner, he had to ask where it was. He didn’t even know we had a cleaning cupboard.

I now bring this up whenever anyone complains about their teenagers – upstaging my friends like the men in the Four ­Yorkshiremen sketch performed by Monty Python (‘Ee, you were lucky… my son hardly knows what a vacuum cleaner is!) – but in ­reality utterly ashamed; horribly aware that in our case, because we both work from home, it has often just been easier to give in and do the household chores ourselves.

During their teen years, our daughter and son were hell to live with mainly because their moods were disarmingly precarious. Sometimes they were charming, affectionate, supportive, intuitive (thankfully they never grunted or shut themselves away like classic teenagers); at other times, loud and aggressively defensive.

Where this Jekyll-and-Hyde-ishness came into play was almost always on the subject of household chores – or ‘slavery’, as they called it from about the age of 14.

They were incapable of putting things into the dishwasher and would cite the fact they had ‘cleared the table’ as justification for not doing so. As for them emptying it? We tried. Oh, how we tried. But I am ashamed to say they often defeated us.

If we forced them to put the dishes away – it never happened spontaneously – they would ­simply do it wrong, knowing how much (for their dad especially) it would madden us. Saucepans into the frying pan drawer; frying pans under the sink with the cleaning products; side plates stacked up with full-size plates and stuffed into any cupboard haphazardly. Our son once put the clean butter dish into the freezer, triggering a long hunt for it.

He claimed pressure of work. He was doing GCSE mocks. You be the judge. But that was the straw that broke my husband’s back, and thereafter he just did it himself.

Any insistence by me that our children tidy up their own rooms was deemed an intolerable invasion of privacy of their human right to live as they wanted.

‘What, like pigs?’ I said crossly, and was told off by my son for being ­porkist: pigs are famously clean in their sty, he reminded me.

We allowed them parties – we are nice parents, I would wail to my husband – but made them clear up. With the result that one time, we came back from a ­weekend away to find out the hard way that the children had had a ‘gathering’.

As we relaxed on the sofa, we realised that, in their panic to make everything look tidy, they had stashed any mess under the seat cushions: leaking beer cans, fag butts, oily takeaway wrappers. That was a low point.

For our daughter’s 16th birthday party, she persuaded us to go out for dinner for the middle part of the evening. We returned to find each of our three lavatories had a teenager throwing up in it.

The next morning, our son said indignantly: ‘But I cleared up the one in the downstairs loo!’

All he had actually done was drag a cloth through the swathe of sick spattered across the wall, leaving three stripes of vomit and a stinking, unrinsed cloth in the sink.

At the beginning of lockdown, we sat down to have the chat where I said everyone had to put their shoulder to the wheel.

But this was where their generation’s brilliance at twisting the mental wellness debate to their own ends came into play. My daughter held up her hand and simply said: ‘I cannot do laundry.’

I tried to be reasonable. ‘OK, which bit is so offensive to you? The handling of others’ dirty pants? Emptying a wet load and hanging it out?’

She looked at me as if I were mad and shuddered theatrically. ‘All of it. I just have a phobia, OK?’

Things only improved when my son also moved back home after university. Reaching a rock ­bottom of filth in student ­digs had made him face up to the fact that ­household chores were not ­‘magically’ – like his socks – going to do themselves.

By then my husband and I had enjoyed some empty nest years, during which we had become firmer about what we would not put up with.

We sat down and had ‘housemates’ meetings with both children, establishing parameters from the start. These included doing all their own laundry; keeping their own rooms clean and tidy, otherwise we would charge ‘hazard money’; and doing the washing-up when they did the cooking.

But we were nearly undone by Ramengate.

One week night, when I was on a work deadline, our daughter and her boyfriend offered to cook ramen for all of us. Good, we thought, that’s basically posh Pot Noodle – this will be a quick and easy treat.

Four hours later, our kitchen looked like the Demon Barber’s basement: oily red Korean ­gochujang smeared everywhere, noodles spilled like guts underfoot, dirty cleavers and metal basins filled with liquid littering every surface.

The pork had needed marinading, then frying, then roasting, then slicing and marinading again, apparently.

We ate and asked them politely if they wouldn’t mind clearing up now while we went up to bed.

‘Er, no,’ said our daughter equally politely but with a hint of menace. ‘We cooked, you clean.’

She has never lived down that comment. Now 24, she has moved into a rented house in East ­London, but we may well bring it up on her wedding day.

We have paid the price for ­spoiling our children, but we still have some fight left in us.