In my family it's more of a sexist thing than an age-ist thing. Your parents were clearly just really enlightened. My mother, otoh, hardly ever has to do anything unpleasant for herself. She just makes my dad do it. Fixing any sort of plumbing problem, doing dishes, cleaning out the fridge, taking out the trash, ANYTHING mechanical or car-related (even filling it up with gas!)... all his domains & always have been. To me it's really weird, and obviously impractical, so I learned most of them pretty early, but it could easily have been different.

That said, my ignorance of everyday things generally comes down to my brain just working differently from most people's.