The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (4 page)

So if shouting and swearing, understandable reactions though they might be, don’t work, we need to try another approach, bearing in mind at all times that the more
independent and self-sufficient the child, the more idle the parent. Idleness is not synonymous with chaos. In fact, efficiency can lead to more idling time. This morning, for example, we achieved a miracle: three children were dressed and breakfasted by eight o’clock, giving us twenty minutes of playtime before the school bus arrived.

Having recently created for ourselves a stressful and chaotic situation in the mornings, with children refusing to get dressed, then missing the bus, necessitating driving to school, we decided to invent a simple routine for morning and evening. I discussed it with the kids and they seemed to think it was acceptable. It went like this, and I pinned it on the kitchen noticeboard so we would be reminded of it. (Victoria, the mother of my children, accuses me of being a Fascist, but I argue that chaos is not the same as idleness, and since an easier life is my aim and since chaos makes life stressful, some kind of routine is helpful. Not that we were going to be overly strict in its enforcement. Every day is different, and who knows when we might decide to walk around under the stars and go to bed late one day? Or throw the homework on the fire and take the car downtown, as David Bowie sang?) Anyway, the routine goes like this:

This morning, inspired by Rousseau’s love of play, I discussed with Arthur the idea of ‘evening games’. Between tea and bath we will play. Wrestling Time is something they all enjoy, rolling around on the floor, attacking each other and making theatrical grunting noises. Running races around the house are easy for parents, as you simply have to stand or even sit in one place and say: ‘On your marks, get set, go!’ We also enjoy Stair Ball, where the kids stand at the top of the stairs, I stand at the bottom, and each of us has to try to throw the ball past the other and hit a target. Such games are far preferable to the commodities pushed at us by the toy industry. You can take your Pop-Up Pirates and your Hungry Hippos, with their huge cleaning-up time and mess-making potential, and their unbiodegradable oil-based ugliness, and consign them to the bin, or better still, don’t buy such vanities in the first place. (We’ll return to the problem of toys in a later chapter.) Physical games, though, will tire them out and should help prevent the whining, giving as they do an outlet for the aggressive side of their natures.

We need to impose our routines with a light touch. Otherwise we are in danger of creating factory-ready robots. Rousseau’s Emile is a creature of nature and is shielded from industrial work-rhythms: ‘He does not know the meaning of habit, routine and custom; what he did yesterday has no control over what he is doing today; he follows no rule, submits to no authority, copies no pattern, and only acts or speaks as he pleases.’

But in order to avoid being a slave to the caprices of the infant, we need to be able to look forward to a peaceful
evening without the kids, or go to the pub, or see friends. There is nothing worse than collapsing exhausted into bed at 9.30 after spending two hours getting the fiends to bed, and then being woken again at 6 am by a toddler jumping on your face.

So a routine, applied with a light touch and flexibility, can be a friend to the Idler. I’m not recommending a Von Trapp-style military regime. In any case, this would seem to cause more trouble and woe than it solves, because when oppressed we naturally rebel, and this is what naughtiness is all about, the child making an attempt to bring some autonomy – or even dignity – into its life. Just as skiving off work for adults is a way of clawing back some of the dignity we have lost through enslaving ourselves to the corporation, so naughtiness is the child’s attempt to resist tyranny. The more tyranny, the more naughtiness. The more rules, the more rules there are to be broken. Naughtiness is an expression of the will to freedom: ‘I love the imperious nature of children,’ says my friend Mark Manning (also known as the heavy-metal singer Zodiac Mindwarp). Children resist tyranny at every turn. Do not become a Captain Bligh, ruling through fear, hunger and the lash until the men can see no other option but mutiny.

The other way to cut down the whining is to stop your own. This means getting enough sleep and avoiding stress. In my experience, full-time jobs interrupt sleep to an insupportable degree: there is no siesta time. You have to arrive early at work. The modern workplace also creates stress: most are hellishly pressured places. It’s no wonder that the occasional American worker flips and goes into the office or factory with a gun and shoots his co-workers before turning the gun on
himself. It’s only a matter of time before we get a workplace massacre in Europe. Therefore the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself and one way to stop whining is simply to quit your job or go part-time. Resist the call to work ever harder and longer hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child’s first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy rubbish you don’t need in order to dull the pain of overwork? The mega-corp doesn’t need you; the kids do.

Better to be penniless and at home than rich and absent, certainly during the first three or four years of each child’s life. There will be plenty of time for hard work for you when they grow up. Your work, I’m afraid, is not particularly important and certainly not as important or as pleasurable as ensuring that your kids enjoy their first years.

This is not to say that between them parents do not need to work and earn some sort of income. They surely do. And the idle parent aims to make the money-earning something enjoyable and creative. So be clever about it. Overwork will kill you. It will wreck your life and your kids’ lives. And it will lead to whining – and as we have agreed, the whining must stop.

In order to prevent whining, do not give them everything they ask for. Says Rousseau:

We need to get out of our heads the idea that saying ‘no’ is an act of unkindness. We need to accustom our children to what is and isn’t possible from an early age. Perhaps as a result of guilt for over-working, we indulge and spoil our kids, thus creating a whole lot of unnecessary work. The idle parent is motivated by the goals of pleasure and lazing about, and ‘no’ can be an effective tool to serve these ends. Remember that the more idle the parent, the happier the child, because the idle parent is spontaneous: joyful, free of resentment and therefore better company.

Just saying ‘no’, firmly and quietly, and being backed up by the other parent (if there is one) should be a trick that every idle parent masters. It is not the same as cruelty; in fact, it is the very opposite. Saying ‘no’ to the child can also be seen as saying ‘no’ to the forces of branding, toys, money and the whole commodity culture. Rousseau: ‘let your “No,” once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it.’

When you say ‘no’ to
things
, you help your child to become useful and self-sufficient, because saying ‘no’ to
things
is saying ‘yes’ to humanity and ‘yes’ to life. Your child must not grow used to the idea that its needs can be met simply by an
injection of cash. Then it will come to want more and more cash, become dependent on money, and have to do all sorts of unpleasant things as an adult in order to get it. Toys break, fade and die, but love lives on. Be strict. We can see the results of the surfeit of consumer products all around us: adults have become spoilt children. We believe we can have whatever we want and, thanks to credit cards, we can have it now. I want, I want, I want. Postpone the pain till later. But this satisfaction of wants leads only to more wants and therefore we remain perpetually unsatisfied. Children teach us the joys of a cardboard box or a pebble or a twig. The other day we took Delilah and a friend to a pebbly beach, and they played for hours harmoniously, making stone circles. Then we went to the shop, outside of which was one of those mechanical rides designed to steal pound coins from our pockets. Cue whining and shouting and arguing over who was to sit in the driver’s seat. Commerce leads to inequality and whining. And we must resist the temptation to teach them that a remote-controlled Dalek is better than a twig. African children rarely cry. I guess that this is for two reasons: one, because they have more control over their lives, and secondly because there is less stuff to argue about.

The fact is that you can treat life as a game and be strict as well. It is perfectly possible to be strict with humour. Don’t worry, we are not going down the Puritan road. Susanna Wesley, mother of Methodist John, famously wrote to her son in 1732 advising him that children should ‘fear the rod and cry softly’. The Puritan conception of childhood was that children were sinful, lazy and mischievous, they were vipers, and that therefore a lot of interfering was required from parents and teachers to correct their evil tendencies.
The Office of Christian Parents
, a parenting guide for the pious, published
in 1616, called children ‘idle… vile and abject persons, liars, thieves, evil beasts, slow bellies and good for nothing’. Putting aside the harried parent’s reaction that they may have had a point, we utterly reject the ‘sinful’ model of childhood, as we utterly reject the ‘sinful’ model of adulthood. Indeed, we need to go beyond good and evil. Rousseau attempts to avoid teaching Emile about such dualities, arguing, for example, that so-called moral fables in fact introduce the child to evil (and in the process tend to make the evil-doers the more attractive characters. Who wants to be Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?). ‘What’s guilt?’ Arthur asked me the other day. Well, to explain guilt you would have to introduce the idea of doing bad things and then feeling bad about them later. Since I don’t believe in guilt anyway, I thought it better to avoid the whole issue and I replied: ‘Oh nothing. Just a silly adult thing.’

Rousseau analyses a fable about a fox, which aims to prove that lying gets you into trouble. Surely, he seems to be saying, it would be better not to read the child the fable and avoid the whole true-false duality in the first place, and even to pretend that there is no such thing as lying? To know good, you need to know bad. To the small child, all is the same. It is we adults who introduce notions of morality at too early an age. The natural child does not know the difference between good and bad and cavorts and frolics and cries in happy innocence of these man-made concepts. If I am not bad, how could I be made better? It was the dastardly Elizabethans who introduced the idea of ‘Houses of Correction’. Before that children were not in need of being corrected, and indeed medieval childcare guides concentrate on the practical aspects of the job. They are medical guides rather than philosophical ones, recommending, for example, that the small child wears a sort of leather helmet to protect it from bumps and falls. It seems
that it hadn’t occurred to the medieval mind that children can be moulded like putty by their elders and betters. They simply left them alone.

Whining and whingeing arise from powerlessness. Therefore to stop the whining, we must create powerful children. And this means less interference. I am not interested in creating a certain sort of child for a certain sort of role in society. I am interested in making everyday life enjoyable for both parent and child. We should give up the idea of an ideal or perfect education. Everything else will follow from the simple principle of fun, now. Indeed, attempting to look into the future is one of the most dangerous habits when it comes to kids, whose every instinct is to remain gloriously in the present.

So: learn to say ‘no’. Avoid situations that are likely to lead to whining, especially any place where money will change hands, whether the shops, the fair or the ice-cream stand. Stay away from McDonald’s, Tesco, Toys R Us. Keep out of the car. Do not confine your children. Leave them alone!

And always remember that the more powerful of spirit your children are, the less likely they are to whine. So set a good example and do not whine and moan yourself. The method is simple; again we say: leave them alone.