The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (2 page)

BOOK: The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids
2.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The idle parent is sociable. We recognize the importance of friends. Friends lighten the burden. One of the myths of modern society is the idea that ‘you’re on your own in this world’. Instead of talking to friends and neighbours, anxious moderns seek advice in books and websites and Internet forums. We try to do everything ourselves and resist asking for help or admitting weakness to others. No! Be weak! Give up! You can’t do everything. Lower your standards. Get friends to come and help you. Organize little nurseries at your house where parents can chat and kids can play. Ignore the children. I love D. H. Lawrence’s idea of childcare. He says babies should ‘be given to stupid fat old women who can’t be bothered with them… leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the streets or the playgrounds, and take no notice of them.’ Do not view them as raw material to be moulded into obedient slaves for the workplace of the future. Let them play. And yes, get your friends round. Life is so much easier when the work is shared. Friends bring laughter and joy. No sadder sight than the lone parent, pushing her child around the gloomy municipal park, trying to tell herself that she is having a good time.

My idea of childcare is a large field. At one side of the field is a marquee with a bar serving local ales. This is where the parents gather. On the other side of the field, somewhere in the distance, the children play. I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me. Give them as much freedom as possible.

But the life of an idle parent is not always easy. Children do not always adapt to the anti-consumerist model that the natural parent promotes. They want stuff. Children get in your face. They make a terrible mess. They scream and whine. And the mother and father seem to disagree on pretty much everything, from paint colours to mealtime manners, as a matter of marital policy. And there are more worries. Is it mean to deny your kids an i-Pod Nano or Nintendo Wii and give them a ball of string and
The Dangerous Book for Boys
for their birthday instead? Should I really put a broadband connection in the treehouse? Should I put more hours in at the office so they can go on skiing holidays and wear expensive trainers? Would I be less grumpy if I drank less alcohol? Sometimes we doubt our own gospel. So I hope to outline an enjoyable parenting philosophy in these pages, while also acknowledging that it ain’t always easy. I will confess my many and various parenting errors. I am a disaster-prone and chaotic layabout and so should warn you not to listen to my advice. Certainly my friends think that the idea of me advising other parents on childcare issues is absurd.

With that caveat in mind, let us go forth, throw away the rule books, forget what other people think, and enjoy family life and all its joys and woes.

When preparing this book I deliberately avoided reading any of the modern childcare gurus, since it is precisely the modern orthodoxy that I think is causing the problems. Instead, I have gone back to two of our greatest philosophers from more reflective times, John Locke, of the seventeenth century, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of the eighteenth century. Both seem to me to provide admirable thoughts and ideas for raising children. Locke published his
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
in 1693, and Rousseau published his guide to ‘natural’ education,
Emile
, in 1762. His idea was to ‘shield [the child] from the crushing force of social conventions’ and to produce a sort of nature boy.

As much as anything else, the book is a record of my own failures, disasters and mistakes. My friends all laughed when I told them I was writing a childcare guide. They had all seen me blowing my top with small children. So I do not present the words that follow as a smug guide, more a set of reflections that will open up a dialogue and free parents to invent their own approaches to family life rather than trying to follow a set of someone else’s rules. There are many paths. In rejecting the narrow, singular and uniform vision of life that has been handed down to us by our Puritan forefathers – which sees life as about hard work and money-making – we open up a million new paths, and we run into the fields with a new joy, liberated at last.

Tom Hodgkinson

North Devon, 2008

THE IDLE PARENT MANIFESTO

We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work

We pledge to leave our children alone

We reject the rampant consumerism that invades

children’s lives from the moment they are born

We read them poetry and fantastic stories

without morals

We drink alcohol without guilt

We reject the inner Puritan

We don’t waste money on family days out

and holidays

An idle parent is a thrifty parent

An idle parent is a creative parent

We lie in bed for as long as possible

We try not to interfere

We play in the fields and forests

We push them into the garden and shut the door

so we can clean the house

We both work as little as possible, particularly when

the kids are small

Time is more important than money

Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness

Down with school

We fill the house with music and merriment

We reject health and safety guidelines

We embrace responsibility

There are many paths

1.
Bring Back Child Labour

Children are much less apt to be idle than men

John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693

Work or play are all one to him, his games are his work;
he knows no difference
.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

How often do we hear that children are an encumbrance, a burden? That childcare is a regrettable duty, that children must be entertained, fobbed off, looked after? Such are the delusions that we in the West labour under when it comes to raising kids. We see family life as restrictive, busy, work-filled, exhausting, costly. We become slaves to the tiny tyrants. We sigh and moan and wish we had more money.

Well, there is an easy way both to lighten your own load and to help the child feel that he or she has a practical role in
the household and in wider society. The phrase ‘child labour’ has an unpleasant ring to it: chimney sweeps, the Industrial Revolution, sweatshops on the other side of the world, the exploitation of powerless urchins to serve the greed of the big-bellied mill-owner. But it’s time to drop those connotations and get the kids working for you around the house. They like it!

You can start by doing less yourself. Stop trying to be an efficient, hard-working parent. Lie in bed and see what happens. You will find that doing less for your children will make them self-reliant. And remember that in this book we are doing two complementary things: one, we are making life easier for you; and two, we are creating self-reliant, independent children, children who can look after themselves and will not go begging to an employer or other authority figure to look after them. A recent example of this is our son Arthur and the morning tea. Instead of being well-organized automatons, leaping out of bed at 6.30 am to get the breakfast ready, we decided to slumber, to stay in bed. At about nine o’clock a miracle occurred. The door opened and in walked an eight-year-old boy with two cups of tea. Oh joy! The boy was clearly loving the fact that he was making a practical contribution to the running of the household, and we, of course, were delighted. Now, if we had been up early, he would never have carried out this important domestic task. It was precisely through us being useless that he became useful. Being a too-good parent, doing too much for your children, I began to see, might result in a chronic lack of self-sufficiency on their part.

Children who have too much done for them cannot do things for themselves. Have you noticed how they expect their parents to know the precise location of all their
belongings at any point? ‘Where’s my Tamagotchi?’ the child tyrant whines. ‘I can’t find my socks.’ Piano practice is only done if there is a parent guiding him through every step. He needs his hand held, but we have only ourselves to blame. Listen to D. H. Lawrence:

From earliest childhood, let us have independence, independence, self-dependence. Every child to do all it can for itself, wash and dress itself, clean its own boots, brush and fold its clothes, fetch and carry for itself, mend its own stockings, boy or girl alike, patch its garments, and as soon as possible make as well as mend for itself. Man and woman are happy when they are busy, and children the same.

And the more folding and mending the child can do for itself, the less the adult will have to do for it. It’s actually shocking, by the way, to learn from this passage how useless we adults have become since it was written in 1918. After all, what parent today mends their own clothes? As Lawrence warned, the mollycoddling and overprotection of children has created a nation of ‘big babies’. If
we
are dependent and impractical ourselves, then what hope for our children?

Well, there is hope, because we can learn together. We can recapture the lost arts of domestic living. Simple jobs like making bread, jam and preserves can be done with your kids. Kids love kneading, stirring and licking the bowl. Learn to look after yourself and you will teach your children to look after themselves, and before too long they will bake bread for you.

And how do we make children help? Lawrence, like Rousseau, was keen to stress that we should not promote a work ethic – i.e., the idea of work as a necessary suffering – in
kids or try to make them help out of altruism or pity for parents. The purpose of work, he wrote, is

not to ‘help’, nor the ethical religious service of mankind. Nor is it the greedy piling up of stupid possessions. An individual works for his own pleasure and independence: but chiefly in the happy pride of personal independence, personal liberty… to be free, one must be self-reliant… what we want for every child is to be handy, physically adaptable and handy.

Do not become a servant to the whims of your materialistic brat. Instead of eating sweets and slumping in front of the telly or staring at the computer screen, they should be working. My New York friend Heather has two young kids, and here is her view:

I personally think there should be much more effort put into training children to mix martinis and do the housework. If Sam does a lot of dusting for me, he gets 25 cents pocket money. He is very good at getting into the corners, I find. I am also pleased that Clementine’s crisp-handing-out skills are coming along.

So let’s bring back child labour. And I really believe we should throw out the dishwasher. Instead of using a dishwasher, the whole family should wash up after each meal. One does the washing, one does the drying, one does the putting away. It takes a mere fifteen minutes. As Woody Guthrie sang, if we all work together, it won’t take very long. Put The Monkees on the CD player and the whole thing can turn into a real pleasure. The dishwasher, however, for all its promises of lightening the load, like machinery in general, in actual fact
turns washing-up into drudgery. Without it, the children will learn to help and what’s more, they really will make a genuine contribution. They will be useful. And it may help to prevent whining (a tricky problem, which we will explore in greater depth in the next chapter). This is because whining in children results from their sense that they are seen as encumbrances and have nothing to offer. Only the powerless whine. So make them useful!

It’s important to remember that the creation of incapable people is at the heart of the industrial-capitalist plot. Incapable people depend on other people, on professionals, on machines, and on money. If you can’t do something for yourself, or for yourselves in the case of a family or community, then you will look to the market economy to satisfy your needs for you. So it is that by doing too much for our kids we make them the commodity-dependent adult brats of the future.

In Ivan Illich’s lecture ‘Taught Mother Tongue’, given in India in 1978, the great thinker links uselessness and money: ‘Today, the individual’s feelings about his own needs are first associated with an increasing feeling of impotence: in a commodity-dominated environment, needs can no longer be satisfied without recourse to a store, a market.’ Therefore it has become practically an instinct to spend money, rather in the same way that when in need today we find ourselves almost instinctively reaching for the mouse. The computer, sold as a tool of emancipation, becomes difficult to live without. There is a power cut at home, the broadband connection is lost and the result is a terrible feeling of helplessness. We come to depend on the thing that was supposed to free us. So with money.

We need to return, says Illich, to ‘self-reliance and trust in others… in a world where “enough” can be said only when
nature ceases to function as pit or trash can, the human being is oriented not towards satisfaction but towards grudging acquiescence.’

‘That’s life,’ we lie to ourselves. Actually, the ‘that’ that we say life is, grudgingly acquiescing, is not life, it is a travesty of life, life as mere survival.

BOOK: The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids
2.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) by William Lashner
Bind by Sierra Cartwright
Before the Fall by L.G. Castillo
The Hour of Dreams by Shelena Shorts
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Aranmanoth by Ana María Matute
Judith E French by Highland Moon
The Celebutantes by Antonio Pagliarulo