The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (7 page)

The convenience of nature as a resource for the idle parent cannot be overstated. This became clear to me as I sat on a
rocky beach in North Devon with my friend Ged, while our children played together on the rocks. We noticed that they hadn’t hassled us for hours. They were playing without whining or complaining, and without any toys. ‘Nature doesn’t disappoint,’ said Ged. It provides plenty of pebbles to go round. There will be no fighting over pebbles. This is in direct contrast to the commercial world, which disappoints at every turn. Indeed, disappointment is woven into its very fabric. You drop the ice cream; someone else gets a bigger one; you wanted the pink fishing net; parents are forced to say ‘no’ all the time. The last time I went shopping in town with the kids I thought I could have saved myself some bother by fixing up a loudspeaker on my head that was programmed to repeat the word ‘no’ every five seconds. Recently on Worthing Beach on the south coast of England, my mother and I noticed that all was harmony when the children played on the beach itself: they played with the stones and shells and the sea. But on reaching the pier, with its shops and rides and temptations, there the whining and pleading started. Disappointments, tears, fighting.

So the idle parent should make a point of taking children to the wildest and most shop-free places they can find. This is a cheap option: no money needs to be shelled out, and the idle parent is a frugal parent, because the less money is needed, the less work is needed. So avoid the shops. They also produce waste, which requires extra work, and the idle parent not only avoids work for himself but avoids creating unnecessary extra work for others. Not long after you have bought the plastic crap, it will be thrown away. Someone has to put your bin bag in a truck, drive it to a dump, throw it into some toxic hold somewhere. You’ll also be following the precepts of Locke and Rousseau, who recommend healthy doses of
nature. We like to be beside the seaside not because of the ice-cream shops or the fun-fair rides or the Punch and Judy. It’s because of the sea, the sand and the rocks: the elements of nature that resist man’s tampering. Yes, we build our huts and sell cans of coke and generally exploit the fact that there are large quantities of people here intent on enjoyment, but the main attraction is the sea, the water, the mysterious murk. We are drawn to the sea just as on holiday we may be drawn to horse-riding, because in our everyday lives we have lost contact with nature. Instead we engage with representations of nature, mere images, whether in books, on TV or on websites. Arthur, it seems, would rather spend time on the RSPB website than look out of the window or – heaven forbid – go outside with his binoculars and look for birds in the hedges and fields where we live. Why? This must surely be the fault of his parents, this love of his for the easy cop-out of the computer and his problem with going outside. Yesterday we had to drag him – literally drag him – from the house for the one-mile meander down the hill and through the woods to our nearest beach. Once on the beach, though, he didn’t want to leave.

Tether them no more, say Locke and Rousseau. Let them run free. Help: I am trying to let them run free but they are self-tethered to the computer. Arthur is staring at it now, as I write.

So: it is obvious that we yearn for nature, because we embrace it through the medium of holidays: at the beach or skiing or the car-free utopia of Centerparcs. But here we have allowed our wild spirit and yearning for freedom to be commodified and exploited by the holiday industry. Would it not be better to weave nature into the fabric of your everyday life, rather than consigning it to two costly weeks of freedom
per year? Nature lives in your city garden. Get a plastic cup, half-fill it with vodka, sink it in the flowerbed and look at your catch after a few days. You’ll be amazed at the number of beetles, spiders and weevils who are wandering around in your garden. Nature should not be separated into a ‘nature zone’. Even in the deepest inner city, nature can be found on the doorstep. Just look at urban birds! They are not prejudiced against concrete. They nest on convenient spots and eat caterpillars and visit bird tables.

Don’t waste money on expensive holidays. ‘It was awful,’ a friend told me yesterday of her £6,000 family holiday to Tobago. ‘It rained every day and there were four days of travelling.’ Everyone was thoroughly miserable. How much she would have preferred to have kept the money. It is low-cost, spontaneous, local trips that end up being more fun. You cannot plan your fun. You have to grab it as it passes, ‘kiss joy as it flies’, as William Blake had it. Take trips. Stay with friends, of course. Split up. The nuclear family on holiday, four of you, each with completely different and probably violently opposing ideas of what constitutes ‘fun’, is an absurd fantasy, a dream, a mere hope, sold to you as a reality by the pedlars of packaged products. For that £6,000 you could have bought a yurt for the garden or reduced your mortgage. And holidays are so horribly controlled: even as a child I remember I vaguely resented the over-organized nature of, for example, skiing holidays – now there’s a horrific waste of money if ever I saw one – as we poor consumers were herded from plane to bus to hotel with only a patronizing rep to negotiate between us and the outside world. Then it was mealtimes, lesson-times and break-times for a week. Like school. And after a week of this it was back to school again, only the family was now considerably poorer and depressed
by the return to grim, grinding reality. Yes, there had been a few moments of intense pleasure, skiing through woods; yes, there had at least been some sort of rupture in the quotidian routine, but was it worth the money? I would say not.

There exist much easier and cheaper ways to connect yourselves and your kids with nature. You need to disconnect yourself from the Matrix to discover them. I have already mentioned looking in the place too easily overlooked by most of us – directly under our own noses – but there is another trick, and that is camping. By camping I don’t mean lugging the family down the motorway in a £20,000 plastic motor home in order to park on a character-free municipal lawn next to a trunk road with no view, with concrete toilet-block and SKY-TV hook-up. I took Arthur to one of these campsites near where I live, and I was shocked: what I saw was lonely families inside plastic huts watching television. It was a lovely sunny evening but no one was outside. Everyone was indoors, switched on and plugged in. It seems that ‘getting away from it all’ has become ‘taking it all with you’. I remember going on holiday to the Isle of Eigg. My friend DJ walked into the bothy where we were staying and looked at me pityingly: I had already plugged in my laptop. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘You’re supposed to be getting away from all that shite.’ How right he was.

No, not that kind of camping. That’s the kind of camping practised by people who lack the freedom gene. Again, we need to exercise our own imaginations rather than just automatically reaching for the mouse when a decision is to be made. We idle parents want to sit round the campfire and drink beer and sing songs while our children play. Think of the great wandering artist Augustus John roaming the countryside with his wives and children and caravan. It’s
decommodified camping that we want. Find a friend with a field, get a bunch of mates or four other families and camp up for the weekend. Why not rent or buy a field with some friends so you have your own wild camping spot? Instead of the two-week family holiday, organize little trips all throughout the summer.

Last year we had great success with this approach and were lucky enough to be invited by friends who had access to some land for two or three such weekends. There were ten adults and about twenty children – no TVs, no computers – and the kids played with each other and left us alone. I woke up every morning in the tent surrounded by empty beds. The kids had already got themselves up and were inventing games in the woods. We did not need to make any effort to ‘entertain’ them. They entertained themselves, while we adults got on with the important business of making tea, talking and nursing our hangovers. If you can’t find a field, it’s possible to find wilder campsites, the sort where you can camp next to a stream and light fires. It’s cheap and easy, a return to nature’s never-disappointing bounty, where sticks and stones are toys. Or just camp in someone else’s garden, or even in your own.

And in addition to frequent camping trips, you can weave the fabric of nature into everyday life. Even in homes without gardens you can grow flowers and vegetables in pots and trays. Or get an allotment and make it into your own fruit and veg paradise, with dens and sheds. Kids love sowing seeds and watching them grow, and there is no tastier treat than peas eaten straight from the pod. Let nature do the work.

Blackberry-picking is a great activity. Brambles grow everywhere, and our family trips when I was young to a nearby wasteland to gather blackberries stand out in my memory with far greater intensity than listless mornings spent
watching kids’ TV. And blackberry-picking leads to the practical benefits of blackberry crumble and blackberry jam. Hunt for food in the hedgerows, get hold of Richard Mabey’s
Food For Free
and go foraging.

Streams, rivers, pebbles, rocks… this was the message of Wordsworth: nature will unite what man has rent asunder. It is a harmonizer, whereas the ice-cream shop creates rifts and enmities. For me, one of the greatest nature philosophers of recent times is Masanobu Fukuoka, author of
The One-Straw Revolution
, published in 1978. This remarkable book was written after Fukuoka had spent twenty years on his small farm perfecting what he called ‘do-nothing farming’. The Oriental concept of ‘do nothing’ is close to my own idea of idleness. It does not refer to slobbing out or giving up, but rather to letting go, going with the flow, a wise and merry detachment. It is, in Aldous Huxley’s phrase, an ‘active resignation’. So when Fukuoka talks about ‘do-nothing farming’, he does not mean that he sits around doing nothing while everything around him turns into a wilderness. What he means is that he creates situations where nature will do the work with minimum interference from man. Therefore he does not plough or add chemical fertilizers to the crops. Instead he simply puts the rice straw back on the ground after harvesting and scatters chicken manure on it. At other times he sows clover, which works as a green manure. That’s about it, but he says that with these techniques he can equal the yield of fields farmed with modern methods:

In the same way, Fukuoka says, we should let children grow up on their own, and refrain from our high-energy, high-impact, hard-work meddling, our high-intensity childrearing techniques, constantly requiring toil and money. We need low-impact parenting, do-nothing parenting, no-work parenting. Harness natural processes and nature will do the work for you. In the case of gardening, this may involve a lot of simply wandering about. Just sitting in your garden or strolling around it will produce umpteen ideas for low-effort improvement and refinement. So it is with children. Just sit near them with a book and watch them play and chatter. Here is some choice wisdom from Fukuoka, recommending we leave well alone:

In a similar spirit we must stop interfering with the lives of our children. This does not mean abandonment, any more than natural farming means that you let the brambles take over. Neither does it mean that you don’t think about what you are doing and take responsibility for it. You also need to provide good soil for the kids to grow in, for your little seedlings. The plethora of consumer objects and the non-stop advertising that pushes them on children is a commercial form of interfering. Consumer objects are like chemical fertilizer: they seem like a good idea at the time but as each year passes more and more are needed. And children become reliant on them. All are diversions from the natural life of the spirit, which can actually rediscover itself on the rocky shores, by the sea, on the moors, in the woodlands, in the wild places or even in the cracks between paving stones.

Rousseau talks about ‘natural’ childhood and Fukuoka talks about ‘natural’ farming. The message is the same: leave them alone. Trust them. Provide fertile conditions and they will grow. Create sturdy, strong seedlings. The idle parent would like to see his children thrive in groups, growing up strong and sturdy amongst the weeds, rather than hothoused and intensively cultivated.

Natural parenting is gentle and easy. It requires very little work and should produce strong, healthy, unique, confident children. It is not about imposing an ideology on the kids or about creating an ‘ideal’ adult. It is about letting them grow up in all their unique individuality, growing into who they are. Like courgette seeds: we carefully place them in a pot of high-quality compost before planting the seedlings outside when they have grown; we have gradually accustomed it to life outdoors.

And even more important than giving nature to our kids is
learning what nature is from our kids. As Fukuoka argues: ‘That which is conceived to be nature is only the
idea
of nature arising in each person’s mind. The ones who see true nature are infants. They see without thinking, straight and clear.’