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 (14 page)
e) Put a Mattress on the Floor by the Bed
This was a very helpful strategy that I hit on during our toddler years. Before I discovered it I would begin each night sleeping in the marital bed. But all too often, someone would wake me up by slapping me in the face or kicking me in the
back. And, after lying there for half an hour trying to get back to sleep, I would stomp off to the spare room in a rage. So I made up a little bed and laid it alongside the main bed. Now if a child came in to wake me, I simply rolled off the big bed and into my snug little burrow. I suggested this trick to my friend Marcel and he says it works very well. He rolls over into his nest with great pleasure: ‘It’s not much,’ he says, ‘but it’s mine.’
f) Separate Rooms
By the time we’d had our third child there was no room for sentiment. I moved straight out and for ten months or so I slept in the spare room This way at least one of us was not sleep-deprived. And there are great pleasures to be had in sleeping alone. You can read as late as you like, you wake up when you wake up. Some mornings I was really lucky and Victoria would bring me a cup of tea at 7.30 am – bliss!
g) All in the Same Room
Another strategy I have heard about is for every adult and child to sleep in the same room, the idea being that when a child wakes up it will feel warm and secure in the company of the others and will simply go back to sleep again. Again, this is something that can be experimented with. Move mattresses in and out of the main bedroom, try different approaches. Probably the very worst of all is to put the young baby in its cot alone in a nursery next door. As for sleeping with baby, this may be a matter of practice: in
The Continuum Concept
Jean
Liedloff says that parents don’t give it a proper go. This may be true, but anecdotal evidence suggests that parents find it hard to sleep with a toddler writhing around in the bed.
But however you do it, the message is clear: more sleep required.
The Power of Music and Dancing
Maxima debetur puero reverentia. (Children are entitled to the greatest respect.)
Juvenal,
Satires
(1st–2nd century
AD
)
One thing that strikes me when reading John Locke’s
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
, or when studying accounts of everyday life in medieval Europe, or indeed when reading anthropological reports about the customs of contemporary tribes, or even reading about English life as little as one hundred years ago, is the amount of dancing and singing that goes on. Right into the eighteenth century it was customary for children to have singing and dancing lessons at home. Adults, too, had dancing masters – often caricatured in Hogarth prints as skinny, effete Italians. Coleridge writes of after-dinner dancing as a routine occurrence in his account of life in Nether Stowey, Somerset, around 1798. People danced
nearly every night. Locke recommended dancing lessons from a young age, partly as a means of instilling confidence:
And since nothing appears to me to give children so much becoming confidence and behaviour, and so to raise them to the conversation of those above their age, as dancing, I think they should be taught to dance as soon as they are capable of learning. For though this consist only in outward gracefulness of motion, yet, I know not how, it gives children manly thoughts and carriage more than anything.
It is important to remember that Locke’s ideal child is home-taught. Therefore his advice is not aimed at schools, on to whom we customarily shift responsibility for the education of our children today, but at parents. And so it is today: if we want our children to dance, we must arrange it ourselves – do not wait for the government to do it.
It is terrible to be someone like me in matters of dancing. I watch others dance with envy and it is generally only after I’ve ingested large amounts of alcohol that I lose my inhibitions enough to venture on to the dance floor. Once there I rehearse a couple of dimly remembered moves picked up in my raving days, when we used to dance all night in warehouses. But this lack of confidence is not a result of innate uselessness, as most of us think. It is a direct consequence of never having been taught how to dance. Just as I would be nervous to drive a car without having had lessons, so I am nervous to tread on the dance floor untutored. But if we’d all been taught dancing and practised it all our lives, then we would have sufficient confidence. We’d have a repertoire of moves. Dancing is not actually spontaneous: it needs to be learned and practised. Those break dancers, those carnival
paraders, those rock’n’rollers, those waltzers and tangoers: they’ve been practising. We are still a Puritan culture and the Puritans (most of them) frowned on dancing as an indulgent pleasure wholly irrelevant to salvation. For other religious cultures, of course, dancing is absolutely central to the whole experience. It’s fascinating to note that the ecstatic, pleasure-loving ‘whirling dervishes’ branch of Sufiism is making a comeback. This Islamic mystical offshoot took the form of various sects, mostly founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Turkey. One such group, the Mevlana, was founded by the radical Muslim preacher and poet Mevlana Jalalu-dinn Rumi. His doctrine preached universal tolerance, and the whirling was about losing the ego. I recommend his collected poetry. It’s a good one for the idle parent to have by the bed. He writes things like:
Get drunk on Love, for Love is all that exists.
Unless you make Love your business,
you will not be admitted to the beloved.
I suppose he was the Lennon of his day. He also writes in favour of living in the now: ‘The Sufiis the child of the present moment, my friend. The word “tomorrow” is excluded from the doctrine of those who travel the path.’ And dancing is a way of connecting with the present moment.
Such ecstatic dancing was not confined to Sufidervishes. The great Barbara Ehrenreich, in
Dancing in the Streets
, quotes the following description of the goings on in a twelfth-century Welsh church:
You can see young men and maidens, some in the church itself, some in the churchyard and others in the dance which
wends its way round the graves. They sing traditional songs, all of a sudden they collapse on the ground, and then those who, until now, have followed their leader peacefully as if in a trance, leap up in the air as if seized by frenzy.
Ehrenreich characterizes the medieval period as one long party. Every week or two, she says, there was some kind of festival which involved music and dancing. This is a view shared by the historian Ronald Hutton, who in his work describes the culture of merriment and partying in late medieval England. But then: the clampdown. From the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, the ecclesiastical tendency to regard dancing and joy and merriment as somewhat suspect, possibly devilish, gains ground, and pleasure begins to be outlawed officially rather than merely disapproved of as before.
There were signs of hope: later, as Aldous Huxley insisted in a recorded interview: ‘The Quakers
quaked
and the Shakers
shook
,’ in an attempt to recapture the spiritual joy of physical abandonment. But the general trend was away from dancing and fun: ‘[I]n the long-term history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century… there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life.’ So write historians Peter Stallybrass and Allon White of the effects of the Reformation. Protestantism and the emerging hard-work capitalist culture had no time for festivity. In the new world, where time was money, dancing was to squander, to waste money. Dancing was useless. The Puritans had a new world to build, and time was short. Contemplation, dancing, merriment: these were all simply a waste of time.
In the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, dancing
for many of us is something we watch other people doing on television. We can sometimes be persuaded to pull some moves at weddings or the disco, but the results are usually embarrassing. There is hope in the hip-hop scene and break dancing: kids are teaching themselves the most fantastic routines. But this is still a minority interest, whereas we all used to dance. Now dancing has vanished into the realms of the spectacle. To be sure, pockets of sanity still exist: in the Scottish Islands they still know how to dance, and on many islands there is a weekly ceilidh. Fifteen years ago, on the Greek island of Ithaca, my friends and I stumbled across a village dance, with about 200 islanders, of all ages, dancing in a huge circle. Lately the rave movement saw an outbreak of ecstatic dancing, but this outbreak of merriment was soon controlled by the double-edged sword of authority: legislate against it, then commodify it. The Criminal Justice Laws made it illegal for groups to gather together for the purposes of dancing, without a licence. But at the same time, the commercial world began to exploit the popularity of rave by installing DJs in a nightclub called The Ministry of Sound. Tourists were imported to pump some money into the capital, and the very movement that the authorities had cracked down on became an important source of revenue. Together with a British art boom, it helped to attract big finance into London.
But children dancing for their own pleasure? Children dancing and no one making a profit? People organizing their own dances outside of the commercial system? What’s the point? Where is the money to be made? Every school should have dancing lessons every week, twice a week.
It’s a similar story with music. Only the hard-working and talented tend to continue with music beyond primary age.
And then, unless they get really good, they might be put off for life. Victoria, for example, reached Grade 6 on the piano, but she never goes near one (even though we have a piano in the kitchen) because she still has no confidence. Grade 6 seems not really very good to her (it seems like genius to me). Schools tend to turn out adults with many skills and lots of fear. There is a wrong-headed notion that something’s not worth doing unless you’re the very best at it, which leads to most of us doing nothing at all.
And self-consciousness gets you quickly. I’ve noticed that Arthur already seems shy about singing and dancing, whereas younger kids will spontaneously hurl themselves about when the music starts, waving their arms and moving from side to side. I think every house should have music playing all day, and piles of instruments everywhere.
So music and dancing tend to disappear from young lives. It’s only when they become teenagers that they pick up their guitars, dye their hair, listen to Nirvana and start playing in bands. And it has to be said, there are a hell of a lot of young people playing in bands these days. That really is an encouraging sign of life.
Before the total commodification of music, whereby music was bought and sold on vinyl or cassette or digital format, we sang for ourselves. Yes, of course there were top composers and performers who were commissioned by grand families and courts to play and write. But in the streets, we all sang. If you walked down the street in fourteenth-century Florence, for example, many centuries before the invention of the wireless, you would see every artisan singing outside his own workshop, as the following story about Dante testifies:
One day in Florence, [after eating, Dante] came upon ‘a smith who was beating iron on the anvil and singing Dante the way one sings a popular poem, and mixing his verses up, shortening some and lengthening others, so that it seemed to Dante that he was receiving a great injury from the fellow.’ Without a word Dante went into the man’s workshop and threw his tongs, his hammer, his balances, and all his other implements into the street… ‘You are singing from my work, but not the way I wrote it; I have no other art [skill, trade], and you are ruining it for me.’ The irate smith, at a loss for words, gathered up his things and went back to his work; and after that, when he wanted to sing, he sang of Tristan and Lancelot, and left Dante alone.
So: how to bring music and dancing back into our lives and the lives of our children? As far as music goes, I have started to teach the ukulele at our local primary school. The uke is an ideal starter instrument for children because it is small and easy to play. Most children can learn ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and the chord of C in about half an hour. So you get good results quickly, unlike, say, with the violin. Having to teach the children also motivates me to practise and to think about the instrument. The other great things about the uke are that any number of kids can play it at the same time and, unlike the dreaded recorder, it leaves the mouth free for singing. It is also cheap: good ones can be bought for £20.
The ukulele is by nature cheerful. It was born when Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii in the late nineteenth century jumped off the boat playing small Portuguese guitars. The Hawaiians adapted these instruments and soon the whole island was playing them, including the Hawaiian royal family. Therefore they embody a sort of joyful Hawaiian spirit.