I have a set of stainless steel frying pans of medium to high quality that I've been using for quite a few years now (20'ish??). It's not that you can't get something stuck to them, it's that they are relatively forgiving to clean. Most of the time a person can just put in a quarter inch of water and whatever is stuck will easily come off after you boil the water for a minute or two. If you really char the pan, it takes about 30 seconds with stainless steel scrubber to clean, and if your son set off the smoke alarms by really burning the oil into the pan...you can buff it out pretty quickly with some 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper. Yep, just had to do that last week with the son home from school.
I still have a couple of cast iron skillets, but haven't used any of them in over 5 years now. Probably the best thing about them is their heft, which makes them top of the line for heat distribution.
The teflon or ceramic coated pans are nice at first, but eventually someone's going to scratch them or use too high of heat and muck it all up. I can't even count how many of them I went through in my life before I went to cast iron and heavy SS pans.