Read The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids Online
Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (13 page)
Let Us Sleep
I used to think booze and sex would bring me joy. Now it’s a nap
.
P. J. O’Rourke
The most trying aspect of being a parent is the disruption to your sleep. As someone who had been accustomed to his nine or ten hours a night in pre-kid days, I found the sleep loss hard to deal with. It is undeniable that in a culture where to be a hard-working family is an aspiration, sleep in general is devalued. Successful high-achievers boast about how little sleep they need. We would rather drink giant cups of coffee or take pep pills, herbal or otherwise, to boost ourselves through the day than accept nature’s call and simply take a short nap. In any culture or situation, though, where we are in control of our own time we tend to take naps and sleep a lot. Think of those long, luxurious siestas that you manage to take on holiday. Ah, the nap! We lust after naps. Naps are a paradise.
And rightly so, because lack of sleep is a terrible thing. I
remember when our eldest child was small waking in the night to find him kicking my back. We’d attempted to ‘get him into a routine’ as current childcare orthodoxy suggests, and failed. He was in bed with us again. I wish instead we’d embraced co-sleeping right from the start. Babies should be held as much as possible when they are small, by mum, dad or anyone who is around. Parents can have sex in the bathroom. Routines, separate rooms and strict nanny regimes are the enemy of the idle parent. I know, because we have tried them. Our copy of a certain guide to getting your baby into a routine is the most battered and dog-eared book I’ve ever seen, so frequently was it consulted by the nervous mother. Strict routines are intended to give the parents some peace and to get the baby to sleep well, but this was not our experience. The routines seemed to set the baby up as an enemy, to be controlled, abandoned, separated, confined, ignored. And they were extremely hard work: so complex that V. talked of nothing else for a year. It was exasperating. There is only one book on babies that you should read, if you read any at all, and that is
The Continuum Concept
(we’ll come back to that later).
Nights of being kicked in the kidneys and screaming and saying ‘your turn’ to the other parent create serious sleep loss, particularly if you make the other mistake that I did, which was to work in an office all day, a long way from home. I found it very difficult to catch up. No chance for a nap. It would make me grumpy. Very grumpy. Enraged would be a more accurate description of my mood. Livid. Then in the evening we would drink, in an attempt to inject a little bit of pleasure into our lives. Then at night I would be woken by Arthur’s surprisingly heavy hand flopping on to my face.
For eight years we’ve had sleeping problems. At one point
everyone seemed to wake up in the morning in a different bed from the one they’d gone to sleep in. I have woken up in children’s beds, in the spare room, on the sofa. During the night various children have taken my place. One friend said that his family of four ended up in a sort of square formation, one along each edge of the double bed.
We still have the occasional broken night. But it’s so much better now. The eldest two have been trained – the idle parent way, by their parents simply staying in bed – to get dressed and make their own breakfast without disturbing us. The smallest one still sometimes ends up in our bed. But it’s fun! So, although I’m not fond of handing out top tips, because this book really is about a single general principle which you can apply to your life in your own way, I thought it might be useful to pass on a few ideas garnered from our long, hard years of experience of kids and sleep.
a) Going to Bed Early
Clearly, for the idle parent, going to bed early seems a little, well, square. When the small ones have finally got to sleep, following an elaborate ritual consisting of bath, massage, story-time, lullabies, platelets of sliced fruit and beakers of water, it’s surely time for Mum and Dad to indulge in a little pleasure? This is the time when I generally drink as much beer as I can. And with each subsequent beer, the desire to go to bed recedes. Why would I want to go to bed now, when I’ve finally started enjoying myself? But we’ve found over the years that unless we were in bed by half past ten, particularly if there was a child under two in the house, we’d find the daytime almost intolerable. And we’d get angry with each
other. It’s temporary, and I think there’s some comfort in that knowledge. The whole thing gets easier when the youngest is past two and a half or so. The way, though, to make going to bed early enjoyable is to have a good book on the go. As far as pure pleasure in reading goes, I don’t think Keats can be beaten, and that goes for his letters or poetry. He’s got a sort of cheerful melancholy which is immensely comforting. And he’s also a great lover of sleep, of course. I suppose the other good reason for an early night is sex, however rarely that seems to be on the cards. Going to bed early can become a pleasure rather than a penance, and whether that pleasure is found in reading, sex, cocoa, writing poetry or reading the seed catalogue is of no account. But it should be the ongoing goal of the idle parent to inject pleasure into the day, constantly. It is one of the tragedies of serious Western attitudes to raising children that fun and enjoyment seem to vanish from the agenda in favour of money-making and conversation about the kids. Do not become a slave to your children! You will become resentful and they will hate you for it.
b) The Lie-in
Yes, I know that this is easier said than done. But this last summer holiday, quite remarkably, we found ourselves lying in bed till ten or eleven on several occasions, and this with children aged three, six and eight in the house. Sometimes, agreed, they would come and wake us by doing horrible things, jumping on our legs, ‘rampaging’ as we called it, and hitting each other. But after we’d chucked them out a few times they began to look after themselves. They are all quite capable of pouring milk on cereal, and Arthur, as I boasted
earlier, can make tea and porridge. Children actually have an inbuilt self-protective sense that we destroy by over-cosseting. Children become independent not so much by careful training but in part simply as a result of parental laziness. Last Sunday morning Victoria and I lay in bed till half past ten with hangovers. What a result! And the more often you do this, the better, because the children’s resourcefulness will improve, resulting in less nagging, less of that awful ‘Mum-eeeeeeeh’ noise they make. They can play and they will play. So lying in bed for as long as possible is not the act of an irresponsible parent. It is precisely the opposite: it is good to look after yourself – the idle parent, I say again, must constantly guard against resentment – and it is good to teach the children to fend for themselves. Our offspring will be strong, bold, fearless, much in demand wherever they go! Capable, cheerful, happy. It is also the task of the idle parent to ensure as far as possible that all members of the family are enjoying themselves here and now, in the present moment. There is far too much emphasis on that imprisoning capitalist abstraction ‘the future’. Yes, we have one eye on future adulthood, but the best way to ensure that the adulthood is happy is to provide a happy childhood. Not a competitive one, filled with prizes and awards or the wasteful ephemera of capitalist overproduction. No. A happy one, with plenty of everything: love, music, games, laughter galore. There is no point in sacrificing pleasurable todays for the promise of more prosperous tomorrows. So stay in that bed as much as you can.
c) Take a Nap
All over the world, the sane take a nap after lunch. I don’t need to convince you, idle reader, of the many pleasures and many benefits to health and well-being of an hour’s kip each day. It is so important – particularly when the kids are small – that I would go so far as to say this: if you have a job which makes it impossible to have a nap – a full-time job far from home, for example – then quit that job. I regret spending too much time in the office when Arthur was small, and Victoria and I also frequently reflect on how much better our life would have been if we had bought a small flat near the office rather than a house one hour away. Victoria was working in the same area of London as me, so we would leave Arthur with a babysitter, trek across town, and then come back again. If we had lived near our places of work, we could have ensured a greater crossover between work and home. We could have popped back for lunch and a nap and even taken Arthur into work sometimes. Later I changed my work situation and started working from home, and that was a great improvement.
So, quit that job. Your health and happiness and that of your family is more important than the profits of the corporation that you slave for. You don’t need much money. ‘Eat nettles!’ as the Austrian artist Hundertwasser suggested. There are a host of books out there that can show you how to live well and plentifully on small amounts of money, and your own imagination is a wonderful resource.
Taking a nap with your little kids is also a great pleasure: it’s like sleeping with a small hot-water-bottle teddy-bear creature. And they do look cute when asleep. Father can put
his feet up by the fire and nod off while reading ‘Ode on Melancholy’, retreat into dreamland and wake refreshed. All right – you do not work at home. And you can’t quit your job. Then take a pillow to the office. Sleep in the back of a church in your lunch hour, stretched out along a pew in the delicious cool. Nap on a park bench or under a tree. Indulge in daytime sexual reveries. I heard recently of a New York company that is attempting to combat our sleep shortage with a power nap service. After lunch you enter their nap emporium, where you are shown to a comfy reclining chair in a dark room. They play ambient sounds to drift you off to sleep and then wake you after the allotted twenty minutes. The problem here, of course, is that the nap costs money. So typical of New York to commodify something which is actually free: sleep! These nap centres are also built on a troubling premise: they say they will return you to the office refreshed, in order that you can toil more effectively for your paymasters. It is a power nap, taken not for its own pleasure but in order to serve the capitalist machine and make you more productive. Well, that is not the motivation for the idle parent’s naps. We take our naps because we enjoy our lives. And it is for that reason that partners should make it a rule to ensure that the other one enjoys as many naps as possible. We should not begrudge our wife or husband their siestas. It is all too easy to slip into that slavish, resentful morality whereby we imagine that the other person has somehow got it easier. I can’t stand that dreadful evening stand-off where each partner tries to convince the other that their life is harder. We should be overjoyed when our partner naps: they are not slacking off, they are being merely sensible. We need sleep!
Sleep-deprived people lack reason. They are dark shadows of gloom. They become tetchy and irritable. Everyone seems
an idiot, and the world is hostile. One friend says he gets into a sort of murderous rage, and he doesn’t realize that his fury is directly caused by his lack of sleep until he finally gets some rest. Then he wakes up and feels like a different person. Sleep is a care-charmer. So follow the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Africans. Wherever people have a greater degree of control over their everyday lives they nap. It was common to see workers in China napping by the roadside till recently. Sleep will make you strong and beautiful. If there are any idle-friendly employers out there (which I doubt), then introduce nap rooms into your office. We are always banging on about how rich we are in the West, yet we cannot organize our time efficiently enough to allow ourselves a nap in the day. What fools. Let us sleep. As soon as the first baby is born, prioritize the nap. Make that first couple of years together a pleasant sleep-filled haze.
d) Take a Sleep Holiday
Could you possibly ask that great unpaid team of volunteers – friends, relatives and neighbours – to look after the kids for a few hours so that you can nap? I don’t know why we are so fearful about admitting that we need to rest. We organize childcare so we can work or go out in the evening. But sleeping somehow seems less essential. Victoria and I hired a nanny so we could nap. Au pairs, babysitters or nannies are the commodified version of the extended family. In more sane societies childcare is shared between large numbers of people, reducing the burden on individual parents and creating wide margins for error, margins in which sleep can be inserted. Marvel at the guilt-free, hammock-based nap of
the Mexican parent, safe in the knowledge that their children are surrounded by friends and family. The nuclear family is exhausting. The lonely parent is tired. Therefore gather people around you. You need callers all day long. They will help, they will wash up. Don’t feel you have to entertain. Some of my readers have criticized me for hiring an au pair, arguing that I should take my own advice and spend less and work less. But for us, nannies and au pairs were a way of extending the family. They were not a necessity since both of us were at home most of the time. Sometimes we did it on our own. Out of eight years, we had full- or half-time help for four. And did it alone for the other four. The nanny and au pair allowed us time for naps and sleep and pleasure. And they provided company too. We afforded them by extending our mortgage! That’s how reckless we were. But it was worth it, just not to feel completely exhausted all the time. And for the children, it was far better to have that continuity of care (nanny Claire was here for three years) than to be dumped in nurseries from a young age (and indeed, we found we were spending less on a full-time nanny than some friends were spending on nurseries). And there really is no comparison as far as fun for the kids goes between a nanny and nursery.
Best of all, though, is to do it with friends and family, to arrange swaps and organize your own little crèches. You could organize a rota and do it at different local parents’ houses. Help each other with the cleaning too. Why should all household work be done alone? That is the worst part of it. Organize a laundry day. Put the children on the floor and do the laundry together.
If you want more sleep, then you must also abandon that other fiendish invention of capitalist parenting orthodoxy: Family Days Out, which make it impossible to take a nap.
You cannot nip off for an hour while queueing at a theme park. In fact, shouldn’t theme parks introduce free nap rooms for parents? Surely that would swell numbers.
One dad friend of mine has a neat trick. He takes his three boys to the cinema after lunch to give his wife a break. Having deposited the boys in front of the screen, he then returns to the car, puts the seat down and goes to sleep for an hour or two. This is genius: he saves the money for his own ticket, he doesn’t have to sit through an American animation, he has given his wife a break and has a good sleep into the bargain. Now that’s idle parenting.
We should not wait for the government or our employer or a partner to grant us sleep. We must simply exercise our sleep rights without asking. Do not petition, just take. Sleep is free, sleep is a gift, sleep is good. It is not directly useful to the economy and that is why the idle parent recognizes that a lot of it is essential to the individual. From lack of sleep results many evils: door-slammings, shoutings, swearings, miscarriages of justice and unhappiness.
We need to accustom ourselves to calling the neighbours and saying without fear or shame: ‘Can you keep an eye on the kids for an hour or two? I need a nap.’ We need to give each other breaks, frequent little holidays from the nuclear family.