The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (24 page)
Read The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids Online
Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
e) Learning the Pleasures of Dens
According to Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the great twentieth-century artist and architect, eco-housing pioneer and abhorrer of straight lines, everyone should build their own houses. To him, the most beautiful homes were self-built huts he saw in northern Africa and indeed children’s dens. He divides each human being into a spiritual trinity:
- 1) The person in the building
- 2) The architect
- 3) The builder
Hundertwasser says that in the ideal world 1, 2 and 3 will be the same person. And this is precisely what occurs with the self-built dens of children. Children instinctively want to design and build their own homes, away from the realm of professionals and parents. When they build their dens children take control of the means of production: they are the inhabitants, the architects and the builders. So the den helps
to unite in harmony three aspects of life which modern civilization so often splits up, professionalizes and outsources. This accounts for the deep and intense pleasure which den-building brings to children. Even just an old door leant against a wall is a statement of the will to independence and creativity. Den-building also accords with the spiritual principle of using what you already have under your nose: den-makers do not drive to the hardware superstore and buy the materials. Today our natural den-building instinct has been commodified and exploited by the IKEAs and the Habitats, the salesmen of flat-pack furniture and paint. Whereas to decorate our own den is a perennial pleasure.
So learn from the kids and make dens, build sheds, tree-houses, benders in the woods, Eeyore houses. My next plan, having sold my van, is to buy a dinky caravan and make that pretty inside. Caravans and camper vans are a version of dens for adults, this time on wheels. Think also of the child’s fascination with birds’ nests and animals’ underground houses, those self-built dwelling places. We should all build our own houses: it is not a childish thing to do, it is a natural thing to do, and the child is merely expressing a natural need that modern civilization takes away.
f) The Pleasure of Making Noise
Children make a real racket. We are always complaining about the noise they make. But we should learn that noise-making is, again, a natural urge that often goes unexpressed in adult life. I think we should indulge ourselves in the odd bit of pot-banging and shouting, preferably around a fire. You don’t need to be musically gifted to hit a saucepan with a wooden
spoon or sing a simple song. But it helps to get someone in who knows what they’re doing. To this end, I recently invited the conductor Charles Hazlewood to orchestrate a Christmas music event in our local village hall. He based the evening around the old tradition of wassailing, where groups of people go from door to door, singing and demanding to be given food and hot punch. What they sing is called a wassail, and what they get is also called a wassail:
Wassail and wassail all over the town,
The cup it is white, and the ale it is brown,
The cup it is white like the old ashen tree,
And so is the malt of the best barley.
A famous example of a wassail is ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’, which of course contains the lines:
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding
And a cup of good cheer.
And later the lines:
We won’t go till we get some;
We won’t go till we get some;
We won’t go till we get some,
So bring some out here.
Under Charlie’s tutelage we learned to sing these songs while banging pots and pans to keep ourselves in time. All the kids loved the singing and the noise-making. And so did the adults,
although of course the adults were much more stiff and awkward about the whole thing.
Another example of noise-making in ritual form is the old custom of Rough Music, a pre-industrial tradition that is described by the great historian E. P. Thompson. Rough Music was a sort of ritual expression of hostility against a local character, perhaps a wife-beater. It consisted, writes Thompson, of:
raucous, ear-shattering noise, unpitying laughter, and the mimicking of obscenities. It was supported, in Thomas Hardy’s description, by ‘the din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, ram’s horns, and other historical kinds of music’. But if such ‘historical’ instruments were not to hand, the rolling of stones in a tin kettle – or any improvization of draw-tins and shovels – would do. In a Lincolnshire dialect glossary (1877) the definition runs: ‘Clashing of pots and pans. Sometimes played when any very unpopular person is leaving the village or being sent to prison.’
The purpose of such ritualized noise-making was partly to avoid real violence. Rough Music can be seen as a release of pressure, an outlet for some innate human need. I recommend a bit of Rough Music at home. Just get the saucepans, put a stone in a baked-beans tin, hand out the instruments and make a procession around the house. Make up a song or a wassail. When you grow in confidence you could perhaps take your rough wassail out on to the streets and do it there. The point is that, just as children need to make some noise, so do we adults, and we would do well, again, to learn from the kids.
g) Loving Liberty
As John Locke wisely observed, children are lovers of liberty. They resist confinement. They appear to have naturally imperious, even insolent natures. Clearly the purpose of ‘civilizing’ through parental nagging and school-based education systems is to squash the imperiousness and introduce docility. To make slaves out of gods. That the kids resist the process tooth and nail should be celebrated. Might their resistance not demonstrate that there is something at fault with the enclosing system rather than the things enclosed? We should learn from these liberty-lovers to resist enclosure ourselves, rather than attempting to drag the kids down to our slavish level. Forget ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour. Keep instead the poles of ‘free’ and ‘enslaved’ in your mind. Reduce authority and enlarge freedom. Revere and respect the little creatures in your house. As Bertrand Russell wrote in ‘Freedom Versus Authority in Education’: ‘Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education.’
And the first step should be to revere your own human personality and treat yourself well. More noise, more freedom, more silliness, less importance, right here, right now!
Good Books and Bad Books
To most kinds of men it is an extraordinary delight to study. For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader
.
Burton,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Researchers are always telling us that a houseful of books will set up a child with a lifelong interest in learning. Books are useful. They are friends and companions. Technologically they have never been surpassed. They are perfect: portable, made from renewable materials, able to display both words and pictures, and with no need for batteries.
But we have to be careful. There are a lot of very bad books out there, which cost £5.99, contain about seventeen words, are too big and are deadly boring to the adult. The authors, for example, of a certain over-rated poem about a monster whose name rhymes with buffalo should be ashamed of themselves. Here is a very poor piece of work, a bad joke
extended into a piece of writing that resembles poetry because it sometimes rhymes, but scans so badly and contains such miserably chosen words that you could never call it a poem. Postman Pat takes you to Purgatory, and as for reading Noddy, I’d rather be stretched on the rack for nineteen hours.
So rather than submitting to popular opinion on these matters and allowing any old book to litter the house, just because it is a ‘book’ and books are seen as good, you should only allow good books, and by good I do not mean ‘containing edifying moral instruction’ but good in the sense of being well written and offering an entertaining story. We need to be on our guard against the moralists and remember that the early Puritans championed the spread of literacy because it made their job of brainwashing easier.
We should also bear in mind that Rousseau was against books: ‘I hate books’, he writes in
Emile
, a phrase intended to provoke rather than to be taken as literally true. Why? Because he was attempting to provide a natural childhood, naturalness and a rejection of the modern world being necessary adjuncts to liberation: ‘Civilized man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions… Society has enfeebled man…’
Nowadays, this sentiment seems truer than ever. And it is made even worse by the fact that we are not only ‘imprisoned by our institutions’ but trapped by commerce into existing merely as consumers. Books, says Rousseau, are not natural:
Without the study of books, such a memory as the child may possess is not left idle; everything he sees and hears makes an impression on him, he keeps a record of men’s sayings and doings, and his whole environment is the book from which he
unconsciously enriches his memory… I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
Plato had a similar attitude to books: he thought that they made people lazy. They would not bother to learn or remember something if it was written in a book. An over-reliance on books – our equivalent today would be an over-reliance on the computer screen, Google and the mouse – might well tend to retard the development of the memory. It’s hard, though, to imagine us returning to the bookless life of the noble savage, noble though the savage might be. And I personally derive a great deal of pleasure from reading aloud to my children, and in reading myself, and in seeing them read. But when I read to my kids I need genuinely to enjoy the book myself. This is the key: to find books that both parties will enjoy. And that really is the aim of this chapter: I want to suggest a few good books, not morally instructive books but rollicking good reads that will be with you for ever.
I’m going to recommend some poetry too, because poetry is often forgotten, and reading good poetry to your kids is a way of reigniting your own pleasure in it. And think how much good poetry there is out there to be discovered – thousands of years’ worth. It’s vitally important that the parent enjoys the reading. If you don’t enjoy the book, then you tend to rush through it, surreptitiously flicking ahead to see how many more pages are left. Not that we should feel too guilty about this: with kids of pre-reading age, why not skip words, phrases or even whole pages? They’ll never know, and you’ll reach the end, kiss them goodnight, turn off the light and bound down the stairs to the kitchen for that first bottle of Ruddle’s County all the quicker.
But find good-quality material and everyone is happy.
There is really no reason for the parent to be bored. Particularly to be avoided are those books that try to behave like a toy at the same time. For example, we have a book with wheels on the bottom, so it’s supposed to be a toy tractor and a book about tractors at the same time, but it ends up being a bad toy and a bad book. And have you noticed that many books glorify machines and amplify the myth of progress? Henry has one such book which keeps insisting that in the old days everyone had to work very hard, but today the combine harvester, for example, can do the work of twenty men and isn’t it wonderful. Pure propaganda. They don’t put the alternative view, that men used to enjoy working in teams and the combine harvester has helped to destroy farm life by making the work lonely, geared only around making a profit rather than combining work with a pleasurable everyday life.
Worse still are those book/jigsaw puzzles. All the pieces are immediately lost because there is no box to keep them in. Who comes up with these daft ideas? Ambitious young men in the big toy companies’ product development departments, I suppose. And why do we buy them? We should never, ever, buy costly nothings like Leap-pads and all the rest. You do not need a machine to learn how to read. And those gadgets date in seconds, whereas real books last lifetimes. Save the money for more beer or wine or real books.
So: here is my list. With little expense, you can assemble a superb library. Most of the following I bought second-hand or found in charity shops; some were mine when I was small and some seem just to have appeared.
1. The Ahlbergs (1938–, 1944–94)
I don’t much like modern kids’ books. Most are dull and work only to promote the dominant values of society to children, that hard work and machinery are good. But I make an exception for the brilliant Ahlbergs and, in particular,
Each Peach Pear Plum
and also
Peepo!
, the only novelty book (each board page has a hole through which you can spy a detail from the following page) that I recommend. The pictures are funny and I get a kick out of the lovingly drawn period interiors.
