The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (3 page)

Women, take heed! Stop working and start living! Mothers work too hard. They get jobs and they work too hard at home as well. Their hard work is bad for their own health and bad for the health of their children, who will grow up weak and dependent and therefore will become willing slaves in the job marketplace.

Capable, self-sufficient, businesslike: men and women should reject slavery to the corporation and grab back control of their own lives by making stuff at home. In the process, children will become useful little helpers, and they too will learn the arts of self-sufficiency. By working in this way you will start to enjoy fatherhood and motherhood, rather than suffering it, rather than grudgingly acquiescing, in Illich’s phrase.

When parents make the simple decision to enjoy their child’s company then what we call ‘childcare’ ceases to be a burden. There is a linguistic problem here. We need to ban the word ‘childcare’, with its connotations of toil, outsourced and professionalized, and use the word ‘playing’ instead. ‘Childcare’ is the commodification of play. It turns play into something that has to be paid for. It’s all in the mind. If we can make this mental switch, says Rousseau, then:

When parents do too much they tire themselves and weaken their children. Rousseau again:

We must concentrate not on removing pain but on strengthening our ability to deal with pain. Let them fall over and scrape their knees and get wet and muddy. Let them clamber over rocks. There must be danger in life, there must be pain as well as pleasure. ‘Dip them in the waters of Styx,’ urges Rousseau in
Emile
.

The conceit of the book is the raising of a fictional creation, Emile, from birth to teenagerhood. It was intended to encourage well-to-do women of the time to get back in touch with their babies. There had been a trend towards the outsourcing of breastfeeding to wet nurses and for mothers to rush back out to enjoy the pleasures of the town, leaving their children with servants. Rousseau hated this shirking of responsibility, but he also warned against overprotection. He wanted mothers to be ‘natural’, for example, to breastfeed their own babies, and the book led to a major vogue in
eighteenth-century French society for parents to bring up their kids ‘
à la Jean-Jacques
’.

It ain’t easy, though. This is because we live, more than Rousseau, more than Lawrence, in a dependent, over-mummied society. I have just returned from the kitchen, where I was trying to force the infants to put cutlery and plates away. Yes, they did eventually manage it, but not without a good deal of theatrical panting, deliberately slow walking, pouting, slouching, tutting, sighing, carrying the cutlery awkwardly in their arms and letting it slide to the floor, and with noisy protestations such as ‘Owah’. How they dawdle! It’s a continual struggle. They are spoilt. And I need to learn to manipulate rather than try to use my puny authority to coerce them into helping. To escape from a master/slave duality is crucial, because kids naturally rebel when compelled to do things by authority. And putting ‘please’ on the end of your order somehow makes it worse: it transforms a request into an order under the pretence of being well-mannered. But find a way of making your children contribute, like children in African villages, gutting fish and whittling at the age of five. In a wage economy, rather than a subsistence one, children are more or less useless until they get a job, and therefore school merely fills in the time and gives them the rudiments of an education in order to fit them for some miserable wage employment.

The idle parent is not preparing his or her offspring for the arid and spiritless desert of the corporate workplace. No: this child will be bold, self-sufficient, fearless. He or she will have the courage to be self-employed. So the child will be constantly encouraged to contribute work to the household. We must see the household as a sort of commune, an association of individuals who have come to live together under one roof.
Though this does not mean that the children have equal say: they need to be taught and you are the teacher, so you must take responsibility.

Don’t hover around them and ask what they want all the time. I see mothers hovering over two-year-olds like a sycophantic French waiter, saying, ‘Well, maybe this flavour of juice would suit sir? Would you like one of these?’ while the two-year-old shouts ‘No’ and throws stuff across the room. You are in charge, but you need to create a hierarchy without recourse to authority. As in the old medieval city, the ‘common good’ of the family is paramount. Much of the strife of the modern household comes because we have a selfish Enlightenment view of individuality and freedom in our heads. We see freedom as a matter of asserting our own selfish desire in competition with the selfish desires of others. Enlightenment philosophy has created a nation of self-indulgent egotists, intent on recklessly pursuing every whim. ‘I really need some me-time’ – oh, too sick-making! ‘Because you’re worth it.’ ‘It’s really important for me.’ ‘I need some space.’ But we are living together and pleasures should be shared and bread broken together. This is where I part company with Rousseau, who keeps Emile apart from the world. Emile seems to spend twenty-four hours a day with his tutor. Live together. And we must learn to live in the world – by which I mean the world out there, the consumer society, the world of jobs and money and shopping – while remaining unvictimized by it.

These days we create for ourselves an absurd panoply of ‘likes and dislikes’ and call it freedom. It’s a commodification of the notion of free will. Instead of behaving as free people and instead of feeling truly alive, we reduce existence to a list of products: ‘Likes: Red Bull, VW,
The Simpsons
, Apple Mac,
Arcade Fire. Dislikes: Robinson’s Barley Water, Toyota,
Ugly Betty
, PCs, Metallica.’ So what? Children pick up on this. They think that when they shout ‘I HATE pasta’ that they are asserting their individuality. Well, we’re moving towards a situation where each family member will sit at the table with a different meal in front of them, each wearing an i-Pod transmitting their favourite music into their brains. No talking. Soon we’ll have our own little i-TVs. (Consider the genius and the evil of the ‘i-’ prefix: entertainment you control! It is the fulfilment of the lonely ideals of Puritanism.) All wrong! So says the Third Patriarch of Zen:

And all too much work and costing too much money! Pleasures and pains should be shared. Let us listen to the same music.

The key is to make work into something enjoyable. Drudge work is lighter when shared and when there’s music playing. And you have a responsibility to enjoy your work as well, or else your kids will grow up with the idea of work as simply a necessary burden. Every moan you make will be listened to by those little ears. ‘Daddy works in a job he hates in order to buy
you
rubbish to fill your time until the day comes when
you
will work in a job you hate to pay the bills and pay the mortgage.’

Why not sing while you wash up? Before the days of radio we all sang all day long. The streets of medieval cities were lined with craftspeople and traders, all singing their hearts out. This custom persists in the cries of today’s street-market traders.

Yes, sing! You must not give your child the idea that work is suffering. That idea will only make it easier for the capitalists to exploit your offspring later. If children are brought up with the idea that work is suffering, then they won’t be surprised when they go to work one day and find the experience painful. And that means that employers need make little or no effort to make work joyful. But encourage the idea that all forms of work can be enjoyable and they will naturally create their own path through life rather than dumbly and meekly accepting the future that they’ve got mapped out, which, as Jarvis Cocker rightly pointed out, is nothing much to shout about.

One activity that demonstrates that work can be joyful, creative and self-directed is gardening. Here is a magical, mysterious, satisfying, useful, therapeutic and health-giving form of work. Every family should have some sort of garden, or access to one. If you live in a tenth-floor flat with no windowsill or balcony, get an allotment. Rousseau recommends gardening to Emile; that great English agitator and promoter of self-sufficiency William Cobbett, in
Rural Rides
, boasts of his son’s hoeing abilities. Make a hole, throw a bean into it, watch the plant grow and let the fruit of it be the property of the children.

Rousseau agrees that collapsing the distinction between work and play is essential:

Furthermore, if you can make, for example, putting away toys or washing-up into a game, then your life will be made easier. ‘Who can put most things into the box?’ you can ask. I realize now that my former techniques – shouting, ‘How many times have I told you to CLEAR UP THIS BLOODY MESS!’, or threatening to (and then actually) hoovering up their horrible little toys – were wrong. You have to get smart. In this way much can be achieved with very little effort on your part. For example, I can now make all my children go up to bed without moving from the sofa. I simply make it into a competition: ‘Who’s going to be the first upstairs? One, two, three…’ and they are off, out of the room and running up the stairs.

Another manipulative technique is recommended by Rousseau. Instead of ordering them to do something, tell them that you are going to do it and ask if they’d like to join you. I tried this out this morning and it worked. ‘I’m going down for breakfast, Arthur. Would you like to join me?’ ‘Yes!’ he said, and took my hand.

We must replace coercion and authoritarian rule with joint voluntary action. This is the way to make our children free, autonomous, self-determined, courageous, able to snap their fingers at government and big business, neither master nor slave. And to do this, we must learn a few tricks.

The great problem for the idle parent is to achieve the right balance between indulgence and discipline. And although Rousseau has been accused of sentimentalizing childhood, he is actually very firm. He is well aware that there is a difference between ‘a merry child and a spoilt darling’. The mission of the idle parent is to let kids play while avoiding spoiling them. This will stop the whining, perhaps the most painful manifestation of our wrong-headed modern parenting techniques.

Why do children moan and whine? Why do they make
those dreadful noises? We could start by asking which animals whine. Not many. Most animals simply accept their fate and get on with it. But this is not the case with the domesticated dog. Because pet dogs are so often pampered and accustomed to getting their own way, they whine when they do not get what they want or when they want something that they cannot get for themselves. This whining is an expression of powerlessness and dependence. When you cannot do anything for yourself, when you have come to rely on others to supply your needs and wants, then whining is the impotent response when things go badly. We know this too from our own experience as adults in the workplace. When we don’t get what we want we whine and whinge to each other. Sometimes the whingeing gets results: a bigger office, a promotion. But we are still completely dependent on our bosses. So it is with children. Because they have no freedom and are accustomed to everything being done for them by their slave-parents, they have to whine and wear us down with those unbearable noises to get what they want. So we need to replace the whining with a calm request for help, or better still, train them to resolve their own problems and satisfy their own needs. I am currently trying this out with my own kids. Formerly my approach to their whining would be a shouted comment along the lines of: ‘I can’t stand your whining!’ or ‘STOP WHINING! It’s driving me crazy!’ Of course, such reactions only tend to increase their feelings of self-pity: ‘Everything was already going wrong,’ they will be thinking, ‘and now, to make things worse, Daddy is shouting at me.’