The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (9 page)

So if you want to make life easy for yourself and fun for your kids, you must organize things so that they are in large groups as much as possible. Don’t coop them up in cars, in the nuclear household, in front of a screen. And in your own household, why separate them into individual bedrooms? We found that our children wanted to be together, like a pile of hamsters. So now they all sleep in the same room. First Arthur asked to be with Henry. And then daughter Delilah said she was lonely in her bedroom alone. So now, although they fight, I think they are happier.

And that brings me to another point: adult friends. We like to sit drinking in the kitchen with our adult guests while the kids run wild around the house or in the garden, doing whatever they like doing.

That was the great revelation that came after we moved to the country. Instead of shuffling the children off to bed and holding a stressful dinner party, we find that families locally get together for a late lunch at weekends. Piles of adults everywhere and piles of kids everywhere. And I, who had been missing my late-night drinking sessions, found a solution: start drinking earlier! By the time nine o’clock came round I was ready for bed. But I’d had a great time drinking beer all afternoon. With other adults. While the kids looked
after themselves. This is the way of societies that are less industrialized than ours: people, people, everywhere! Conviviality and merriment, these are the keys.

It’s also true to say that a little bit of booze weakens the authoritative dad. You become less strict: ‘Of course you can eat that huge pile of Haribo Tangfastics! Eat away! What do I care?’ It is astonishing what a relief it is to stop trying to be an authority figure and instead be a partner to your kids. Be imperfect, let go. My friend Kate told me what a relief it was when she stopped hassling her teenage son about smoking and just let him do it (an approach recommended by Summerhill School founder A. S. Neill, by the way). Give them respect and let them do what they want. This is not, incidentally, the same thing as licence. You do not allow them to smash up the car, spit at people, hit them. No. But you can be strict and free at the same time.

When we live in a large group of people we are given a glimpse of what living without authority feels like, of living in a self-governed, self-determined way. No longer the tin-pot dictator in the home, flailing around, trying and failing to instil discipline, shouting and raving and slamming doors. We become, when tipsy, detached, amused, an equal with the child. They are running about in a gang doing whatever they want, and we are running about in a gang doing whatever we want. For a short time, before we return to the everyday tyranny of the family, we are living in a tribe, with no bosses, no timetables, no buses, no money to be earned or tax returns to be filed.

This weekend we held a big party for eighty or so friends and neighbours and their kids. It was a huge pleasure to see the boys dashing here and there, all different heights, like the Bash Street Kids. There was no whining or pleading, just
unsupervised play all day long. Yes, there were one or two bleeding noses and a bit of rubbish to clear up, but the day was more or less harmonious. Yes, they left their jumpers lying everywhere, but they are children and cannot be expected to think of others in an adult way. A. S. Neill wrote that he picked up piles of jumpers from around the grounds of Summerhill every day. However many times you tell them to pick up after themselves, they will not do it. So don’t bother. Let that one go. Accept that you are going to be picking up jumpers. It’s not really that bad.

Kids belong to a different species. We can respect their ways but we cannot get into their heads. And every time we think we have come close we find that they have changed, grown out of that phase. The sentence ‘It’s just a phase’ is a great friend to the idle parent, and it is often true. You start worrying about some particular aspect of their behaviour – clinginess, for example – only to find that while you were worrying they have grown out of it. So why bother worrying? As A. S. Neill writes: ‘By nature he is self-interested and he seeks always to try his power.’ Children are selfish, but they grow out of it.

We start this chapter with a paradoxical idea, that in order to best educate your child you must give him as little education as possible. There is far too much organized, formal education in the world – education meaning moral brainwashing, free babysitting, academies of stupidity, schools, which in the words of The Clash ‘teach you how to be thick’. John Lennon, too, was anti-school: just recall the lyrics of ‘Working-Class Hero’. It’s worth remembering that the explosion of grammar schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was motivated by the Protestant notion that you could mould children to be faithful servants of the economy and of God. In contrast to the medieval system, which admitted a huge variety of approaches to life, including beggary and idleness, after the Reformation human existence began to be standardized, idealized. Contemplation was out and hard work was in. An abstract idea of perfection began to enter the culture, and the idea that man was put on this earth to work at perfecting himself. Those who promoted the idea of education tended to argue that it improved the general level of morality: that kids could reform parents. One White Kennett wrote in a 1706 publication entitled
The Charity of Schools for Poor Children
:

A similar point was made by the Protestant philosopher Richard Baxter in 1673: ‘By all means let children be taught to
read… or else you deprive them of a singular help to their instruction and salvation.’

It was felt also amongst Protestant educators that if people were taught how to read then it would be easier to control the ideas they were exposed to. Books could be chosen for the people in a way that preachers could not. In this way salvation changed from a public spectacle – medieval churchgoers would stream from the churches in floods of tears – to a matter of private study. Another educational writer made the point that ‘misorders’ and ‘disobedience’ could be avoided in young people if they were taught to read.

Here we see the ideological foundations of the school system that still exists today: education as moral instruction, and reading valued insofar as it makes brainwashing easier and helps the individual to play their part in the commercial world. Today teachers’ moans tend to be of two sorts: firstly they complain about the bureaucracy and centralization of education, the iron control imposed by central government, but they also complain that they are merely preparing children for the job market, turning out obedient little worker bees ready to be enslaved by the corporations and thinking it is freedom.

So history gives us a confusing picture. Education is seen by some as a route to liberty and by others as a means of brainwashing.

It is the object of the idle educator to turn out children with wit and guts, as D. H. Lawrence put it. It is also the role of the idle educator to ensure that children are enjoying themselves right here and right now, in the present. Practically every modern book I read about childcare, however liberal and well-intentioned its ideas might be, talks about ‘investing in the future’; I would prefer to read about ‘contemplating the present’. We still persist in believing that the present is not
really very important and it is the future that we should be interested in. That word ‘invest’ fills me with horror too: as if children are little capitalistic enterprises that we must invest in now in order to get some sort of return in the future. The word ‘investment’ turns children into the objects of greed. The whole idea of the ‘future’ is a capitalist concept, whose religious counterpart is in the Protestant idea of ‘salvation’. No, we must work to ensure that every moment of every day is intense and filled with pleasure, joy, fun, laughter and passion.

For D. H. Lawrence, education should be a simple matter of teaching children to read and write and any kind of moral instruction should be avoided altogether.

Today in schools, much emphasis is put on moral instruction from a very young age indeed. In typically arid fashion, children are given targets for ethical achievements. On a hideously over-designed school report for Delilah, who is six, there are the following tick boxes:

These are just three of 120 such achievements to be ticked off. (And are not point 6 and point 7 mutually incompatible?)

Well, I won’t go on, but really. What a load of poppycock. ‘Joshua, I really respect your views regarding that toy that you have just snatched from me, and I respect that you have a different view as to its current ownership. But I really do think that you need to respect my belief that the toy should now be in my possession.’ I’ve noticed that kids use adult morals for their own ends: ‘Share, share!’ they screech when attempting to take a toy from another child.

This idea of her ‘cultures and beliefs’ is repeated again and again in the report. Six-year-olds don’t have cultures and beliefs, do they? It’s absurd. I also object to the training in computers: six-year-olds should apparently find out ‘about and identify the uses of technology and uses of information and communication technology and programmable toys to support his/her learning’. What if the parents have a culture that has decided to throw the computer and programmable toys out of the window? What then?

We may agree with some of these ethical precepts or we may not. The real point is that the state is interfering to such a degree in the first place, in trying to mould the ethics of a
whole nation. The state! Which itself is entirely free of morals and is built on the self-interest of an oligarchy. Why should it tell our children how to behave?

Bertrand Russell tells us that state-run education is a recent phenomenon:

We must resist state control. Elsewhere we find the sinister word ‘appropriate’ being used when discussing, really meaning ‘in such a way as we approve of’. As Bertrand Russell pointed out about the famous headmaster Dr Arnold, ‘moral evil’ meant whatever he wanted to change in his boys. Morality is a relative concept and should not be state-controlled.

School days are too long. Lawrence recommends three hours a day of intellectual pursuits, with one hour for ‘physical and domestic training’. This idea would fit in with the idle parent’s working day: three or four hours and that’s it. The rest of the day can be spent lying around in the sun reading (you) and playing somewhere in the distance without you (them). Both you and they should also spend time learning plumbing, carpentry, gardening, painting: skills that will make of your children proud, capable and independent individuals.