The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (12 page)

What a sensible man. What on earth is the point of spending money on expensive toys that you will worry about and which will get broken anyway? And why do relatives insist on giving expensive presents? ‘This is a very special thing, Arthur. You will look after it, won’t you?’ Arthur nods obligingly, but you might as well have been singing the National Anthem for all the moral instruction he will have received. He’ll be just as careless with it as with anything else – and that’s good. Surely that shows a healthy disrespect for manufactured objects and the whole panoply of consumer baubles?

While Locke and Rousseau were lucky in that they didn’t have to deal with the horrors of plastic, the basic issues remain unchanged. So I repeat: throw it away. Don’t buy it. Keep it simple. Make your own. Accustom them not to abundance. Particularly when they are small and have not yet been seduced by the commercial world. You can save a lot of money when they’re young. My friend Dan said he felt mean because he had ‘only’ spent £100 on his two-year-old’s Christmas presents. One hundred pounds? That would keep me in real ale for nearly a month. Was he crazy? A tenner would have sufficed. As if the kid will know the difference. Keep your cash while they are small. It will be more difficult later on. Take pleasure in exercising your revolutionary duty. Stop buying and a new world of pleasure and creativity awaits you.

One toy that I do approve of is the wooden train set. To build tracks using this stuff can actually be quite enjoyable for adults as well as kids. The train set, being wooden, does not offend the parents’ aesthetic sense as violently as plastic rubbish. And you can buy more trains and buy more track. Friends and relatives can add to it. We started with a small set for Arthur and now Henry plays with a wonderfully elaborate system. (One tip: avoid the battery-powered engines. They run out. All the time. And you have to find or buy new batteries. And fit them, which requires a tiny screwdriver, which is not always easy to find. I hate batteries.) The wooden nature of the train set means that somehow tidying it up is not such an irksome chore as tidying up plastic toys.

And it’s true that there are some beautiful things out there, made with love and skill. So save your money by avoiding the mass-produced rubbish and buying instead the occasional good-quality item.

Keep it simple. Here is a list of medieval toys which archaeologists have found, according to childhood historian Colin Heywood. We might do well to stick to them: ‘Rattles, wooden tops, spun by a whip or the fingers, dolls, miniature cooking utensils and dinner sets in ceramic or base metals, model boats, lead soldiers, little clay animals.’

The fewer the toys, the better. Then your child will be unspoilt and rich in imagination.

Is it possible to ban telly without banning telly? In this chapter I want to explore how to remove the pernicious influence of evil television while not banning all screen-based entertainment. After all, who could deny the genius of
The Simpsons
? And who wants to ban things? That’s what Puritans and governments do. And the idle parent has to confess that the television can be quite handy if you want some peace and quiet to drink a cup of tea, have a doze or potter in the garden.

But really, the television is bad. It is useless. It is disabling. Firstly, there is the absurd expense. One hears that people are spending over £2,000 on a giant plasma screen. Add to that the annual subscription charge for digital channels, which could be anything from £200 to £2,500 a year, plus the TV licence –
well, taking the average income as £2,000 a month, you’re talking about two months’ worth of work. Two months! Which you could take off and spend doing nothing! No wonder television advertises debt reconciliation companies non-stop. The television itself has created a debt-heavy nation and the television now tries to solve the problem it has created. Or as Homer Simpson says: ‘The answer to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle. They’re on TV!’ TV also encourages the spending of money, the natural result of the constant advertising that beams from the screen. It actively and ingeniously works to create a series of wants. It is said by free market libertarians that big supermarkets do not force people into their shops at gunpoint. No. But they do something far more pernicious, which is to brainwash millions of people by firing adverts at them in the break in the middle of a soap opera. All those millions are hit with the most sophisticated marketing techniques known to mankind. The marketing departments of the supermarkets employ the country’s finest brains to manipulate us. So it’s no wonder that we think the supermarkets are wonderful. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker don’t really stand a chance, with no budget for TV spend.

So banning TV will make you richer overnight and it will remove a host of temptations. You will no longer be advertised at and neither will your children. The financial savings are incalculable. Put the money you’ve saved towards reducing time spent at work: you will have more time for loafing, lollygagging and staring at the ceiling. The advertisers get parents into an ‘emotional vice’ as Victoria puts it. You want your kids to fit in with the other kids and therefore you buy them rubbish. (My parents were lucky because when I was a teenager, jumble-sale clothes were fashionable.) But the
rubbish costs money and to get the money you have to work. And then, because you are all tired from overwork, you collapse in front of the television every night, exhausted and susceptible to suggestion. You watch it for three hours every day and then complain that there aren’t enough hours in the day. There would be more hours in the day if you quit telly. Plus it makes you grumpy.

I don’t make an exception for educational programmes. Many middle-class parents think that so-called educational TV is superior to
South Park
. That is completely wrong. TV is a medium, human beings are artists, and some of these artists have created art in TV form.
South Park
,
The Simpsons
,
Doctor Who
and
The Sopranos
may be some examples.
Blue Peter
, though, is not art. It is ‘patronizing rubbish’, in the wise words of Auberon Waugh. Better to watch good-quality telly in bad taste than bad-quality telly in good taste.

Worse still, so many children’s programmes promote the capitalist work ethic. Think of the busy world of Richard Scarry, where everyone is encouraged to be gainfully employed and there are no layabouts. Bob the Builder is the foremost example of the plot to brainwash children in this way. ‘Can we fix it? Yes we can,’ goes the glib catchphrase (strange, actually, because building is supposed to be about making things, not just fixing broken ones). In Arthur’s early years we used to watch a lot of television. I remember sitting there at 5.30 am, in my underpants, watching hours of rubbish and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ I remember one particularly chilling episode of
Bob the Builder
in which Bob gave his machines the day off – but they came into work anyway! Just for fun! So servile were they that they had no idea what to do with themselves when released, and willingly put their time back into the control of their
master. What kind of message is that sending out to kids?

Clearly watching television is passive: instead of playing their own games, the children are meekly submitting to somebody else’s creation. As David Hockney points out in his brilliant study of the use of lenses in Renaissance art,
Secret Knowledge
, telly, compared to a still painting, is a tyrant: ‘Film and video bring their time to us; we bring our time to painting.’ You cannot contemplate the television. It imposes on us.

In his book
The Disappearance of Childhood
the US social critic Neil Postman makes the point that watching TV is not a skill. You do not become better at it if you do it more often. He also points out that it is a negative medium: for example, soap operas show the adult world to be full of strife, pain, misery and rage (Plato had the same objection to the poetry of his time). You could argue that the TV is a mechanized story-telling device, a sort of magic lantern, and what’s wrong with that, but the stories that are broadcast are either quite horrifying or so bland as to be practically non-existent. Then, after you have watched the bad news of the soap opera and the TV news, as Marshall McLuhan puts it, the commercials are the good news. Life bad? Well, buy this and it will get better!

TV also encourages blind belief in technological progress. It constantly expresses the dominant ideology of the West, which is: Technology Will Save Us (a false notion first put about by deluded writers such as H. G. Wells). Says Postman: ‘In TV-commercial parables the root cause of evil is Technological Innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress.’ Technology has become a god, and TV and the Internet are the modern means of spreading the gospel, as was the printed word for the Puritans. If you don’t believe, then turn it off. The medium is the message and the message is: put up with
your boring job and then splurge your wages and your debt on useless rubbish. The more both children and adults are kept away from this propaganda, the better.

But let’s not get too fanatical: at home we have kept the telly for watching DVDs and videos. We love
The Simpsons
, of course, but also great old movies like
Great Expectations
and my favourite of all time,
Mutiny on the Bounty
with Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian. Videos are a thrifty buy: they cost next to nothing in charity shops. As I have argued elsewhere, it is possible to live luxuriously on small amounts of money – you just have to go backwards ten years. Go back five hundred years and you can literally live like a king.

A further problem is that adults have invaded the playground. Just as kids’ TV is created by committees of highly paid adult TV executives who make money, more or less directly, from the brands who advertise on their shows, kids’ games are being taken over by adults. This process is particularly advanced in the United States. Children’s games are disappearing, Postman reports, replaced by ‘highly organized, expensive and adult-operated sports clubs like Little League baseball and Pee Wee football.’ Americans are ‘insisting that even at age six, children play their games without spontaneity, under careful supervision, and at an intense competitive level… children’s play has become an adult preoccupation, it has become professionalized, it is no longer a world separate from the adults.’

Give childhood back to the children. Resist the American way. Keep rebelling! Make family life into a revolutionary act. This is the message of Postman’s excellent book:

And the easy way to do this is to throw the telly out of the window. We have now finally unplugged, and it is a great liberation. The children rarely ask for it back, and they read and play instead. And of course we can still watch movies and collected TV shows on DVD and video. This means we can watch good stuff at times of our choosing with little or no ads.

Then, of course, there is the Internet. It seems that you can watch all sorts of stuff via the web. Arthur, for example, found some great old Beatles clips on YouTube, and we greatly enjoyed watching them together. With broadband there really is no excuse for television at all. TV is dead.

Last week the kids had neither TV or computer, as both were broken. After a couple of days they got used to this, and after school, instead of dashing to a screen, they were to be found drawing at the kitchen table, or making things or playing self-invented games. There is no doubt that minimizing screen-time maximized their inner resources. This is good for the present because they are enjoying themselves properly. But it’s also good for the kids’ future: they will be able to snap their fingers at employers and do their own thing. Television breeds incapable people.

So save money, improve your life, improve your kids’ life. No more telly and limit screen-time. But again, let’s not be too fanatical.
Tom and Jerry
on video or
The Simpsons
on DVD: we’ll make an exception for those.