The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (16 page)
Read The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids Online
Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
But the system does not approve of wildness. In the UK the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) gives the police the power to remove truanting kids from public places. One newspaper reported: ‘Ministers want to make it an offence to allow children to roam unsupervised in a public place.’ This idea of taming children has its roots in the Puritan attitude to small ones, which is more or less that they are wild and need the wildness knocking out of them. Here is the Protestant preacher Jonathan Edwards: ‘As innocent as children seem to be to us… [they] are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers… they are naturally very senseless and stupid…’
Such a view clearly justified the Puritans in the ferocious taming of their kids: ‘Break their will that you may save their souls,’ John Wesley would say. (They had similar attitudes, by the way, to the American Indians, whom they saw as barbarous, despite the fact that they had saved many early settlers from certain death.) So it was that discipline and factory work were introduced in order to tame the infant beast. One brainwashed eighteenth-century worker in a Massachusetts mill recalled of her childhood:
The discipline our work brought us was of great value. We were obliged to be in the mill at just such a minute, in every hour, in order to doff our full bobbins and replace them with empty ones. We went to our meals and returned at the same hour every day. We worked and played at regular intervals, and thus our hands became deft, our fingers nimble, our feet swift, and we were taught daily habits of regularity and industry; it was, in fact, a sort of manual training or industrial school.
Or just read Dickens to find out how that approach to things was later expressed in British schools and factories. When Victorian philanthropists finally began to raise objections to child labour they neatly introduced compulsory schooling to do the same job of accustoming children to rigid routine and long, boring days. State-funded education was introduced in 1833, in part to tame our children to the point where they would meekly submit to wage slavery.
Yet we crack down on wild behaviour in the home from early in a child’s life. For example, nudity is generally frowned on.
Idler
contributor Sarah Janes tells a wonderful story about how her nephew shocked his grandparents. The four-year-old boy was listening to music through headphones for the first time:
To see his enraptured face, tears twinkling in the corners of his eyes, his perfect body glowing with pleasure, was a sight I will never forget. The boy in his joy then started to take off his clothes, and the family tried to make him put them back on again. He wiggled his bare bottom at us, and then, not feeling sufficiently exposed – perhaps not making sufficient intimate contact with every joy-filled particle of air, he pulled apart his bum cheeks and showed us his arsehole. My mum and dad said: ‘That’s enough now, Jack. That’s not funny.’
I’d noticed my own children doing precisely this. Before I read Sarah’s piece I’d been tempted, like Joyce Grenfell, to say: ‘Henry – don’t do that.’ But after reading it I thought, who cares? If we tell them off for being joyful, the little Jacks will learn to hide and conceal both their joy-filled arseholes and their own wild spirits. We tame, repress and smother our children. Again, it’s a post-Industrial obsession.
Look at medieval cathedrals and you will find bare bottoms and exposed genitals peeping from the pillars and buttresses. A corbel at the church of Notre Dame des Miracles in Mauriac shows a carving of a naked female contortionist with her arsehole and vagina opened wide. A carving on the church of St Pierre at Campignolles has a man showing his buttocks. There is a wonderful arsehole in the courtyard of the Hosta de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela. And that is not to mention the many medieval church carvings of men and women having sex. Such architectural features would be unthinkable today, so prudish we have become, on any building, let alone a church. And yet we consider ourselves to be so liberated! Clearly one hundred years of Victorian prudishness has damaged our psyches, bar the occasional coach of football fans, exposing their bottoms in the window on the motorway. Maybe things have improved slightly since the 1950s, when schools commonly banned masturbation, according to A. S. Neill. But it appears to me that we are nowhere near as free-thinking as we like to believe, and to congratulate ourselves for our supposed freedom is simultaneously hubristic and stupid.
The great ordering and taming of the world, which covered up a new brutality and willingness to exploit, began in the fifteenth century and is still going on today. Medieval childhood was far less strictly supervised, controlled and regulated than modern childhood. But on the other hand, there existed all sorts of educational establishments and indeed many of today’s universities were founded in the Middle Ages. Medieval doctors adopted the Roman idea of dividing childhood into three stages:
infantia
– birth to age seven;
pueritia
– seven to twelve for girls and seven to fourteen for boys; and
adoles-centia
– twelve or fourteen to twenty-one. The medievals
were very careful about small babies: in fourteenth-century childcare manuals mothers are advised to bathe the child every morning and play with it.
Children started working earlier, and this may have been no bad thing: lads and lasses like to be useful and to contribute. School actually prevents children from contributing to society. It separates them. It is also true that there were far fewer books on child-moulding. It hadn’t yet occurred to the moralists that children could be objects of experiment for moral training. Locke says that he wrote
Some Thoughts
for a particular gentleman’s son, who ‘being then very little, I considered only as white paper or wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’.
Respect the child, for each is unique and different. Help your child to follow its own course. I am not saying that you should indulge bad behaviour. You have to have some rules, otherwise they will mess up your house. No boots in the house is one of ours. But we give the rule not as part of the child’s moral instruction but simply as a practical and personal matter: I do not want to have to clean up their mud. Our rules are subjective, not objective. We do not hold up some higher authority, or say ‘that is bad’. Better than ‘that is bad’ is to say, ‘I don’t like that.’ A. S. Neill says that he would shout at a child for walking into his study with muddy boots on. But that is different from having a cold hard rule that is punished coldly. Personally, I think screaming and losing one’s temper, while certainly to be avoided, is preferable to a calm telling-off, along the lines of: ‘You have done wrong. And now I’m going to punish you.’ With the former, you remain a human being. With the latter, you are attempting to act as some kind of higher power, an Old Testament Yahweh.
Fear not the wild spirit. I remember when the noted heavy-metal
band Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction played a gig in our barn. An eight-year-old and a ten-year-old in the audience completely lost themselves to the music: they were jumping up and down, banging their heads, staring wildly, rocking out! I have seen similar primal expressions on boys’ faces when gathered around the bonfire. ‘Boys love a bonfire,’ as William Cobbett observes in his pig-killing chapter in
Cottage Economy
. A bonfire allows the primal spirit to be expressed. It is a connection with nature. It can also encourage a meditative gazing. I suppose bonfires will be outlawed next, on health and safety grounds.
I should add also that I think men and women need the occasional Dionysian orgy. A blow-off a couple of times a year is important for parents. Dump the kids on your parents for three days. Put on the Detroit techno, intoxicate yourselves and dance all night. Parents are apt to become over-serious after their children are born. But we need to treat life as a dance, not as a trial, not as hard work.
We should fill our own worlds and the worlds of our children with pleasures. These need not be costly, and for what it’s worth, here are a few practical suggestions from me. But of course, once your mind starts to work in this way, you will come up with your own ideas.
a) Build Fires
Make fires as often as you can. Burn stuff. Not barbecues, those prim, polite, enclosed suburban fire substitutes, but real fires. Make a fire pit in the garden and surround it with stones. Fill it with household paper and cardboard. Pick up sticks or bits of wood from skips or from the park. A bonfire after
school is so much more fun than telly and computer games. Arthur’s idea of heaven is toasting marshmallows on the fire. And it’s something that parents enjoy too, because, after all, they need to be connected to the primal a lot more often as well. Dads in particular enjoy fires. And perhaps you could get a big cooking pot and hang it over the fire on a tripod and cook and eat outdoors. A good fire will last until the morning, doubling the pleasure: before school (assuming that, unlike us, you will have the time) show them how to scrape away the top layer of ashes to reveal the hot embers smouldering below, hot enough to relight the half-burned twigs that are lying around and get the fire going again.
b) Get Out
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of weekends spent in the large gardens of my parents’ friends’ house, where we played without supervision but near enough the house to run back and find someone if things went wrong. When older we would spend hours in Richmond Park. My father used to take us for days out there when we were smaller, with a camping stove to fry sausages – such intense pleasure. And so as we grew we came to know the park so well that we could safely go alone. Now things are even better: when the kids are asleep the parents can have sex in the woods. Reconnect to the Green Man within.
c) Sofa Games
Why get up? It’s amazing how much fun you can have with your kids without leaving the sofa. I’ve already mentioned Tickle or Trap. You can also fend off attackers. The kids can run around the room while you try to trip them up or grab them. They can throw balls at you. They can climb all over you. I’ve often thought that it would be fun to see how long you could play with them while remaining on the sofa.
d) Woodcraft Folk
If you are lucky enough to have access to a local Woodcraft Folk group, then join. My friend Sam says that she always hated school but loved Woodcraft Folk, which is a kind of non-competitive version of Cubs (which I hated, because it was so over-organized, and so hierarchical too). They go camping and play in the woods and learn about nature and making things. For Sam, Woodcraft Folk released her from the gaze of school and of her parents. It allowed her to be wild.
e) Wrestling Time
This, though I say so myself, has been a great success. We now do it every evening after tea. My motivation was that the boys, in particular, seemed to have an abundance of pent-up energy, which was being expressed in unhelpful ways, such as screaming and tantrums and generally smashing things
up. But wrestling is also great fun, for kids and for Dad, and leaves Mum free to do some jobs without being hassled. It’s me against them. The three children stand on one corner of the rug in the sitting room, with me at the other corner. I say: ‘Round One, three, two, one,’ and then Henry says, ‘Ding ding.’ We then prowl around one another in the ring. I lock arms with Arthur, making growling noises, and then hurl him in the air. The other two jump on my back, like little monkeys trying to bring down a bear. The game is either that I hold all three of them for ten seconds, in which case I have won that round, or they hold me down for ten seconds. We do three rounds (and that’s enough for me). The children absolutely love it. Henry wants to do it all day: ‘Daddy, can we do Wessling Time?’ he asks me while I’m working. It’s just really good to holler and shout, and to watch their faces flush red with excitement. It tires them out and I hope provides an outlet for the wild thing within.
No More Family Days Out
He who binds to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
William Blake, ‘Eternity’
There can be no more absurd invention of modern industrial society than the family day out. All week you have been stressed out at work, as you have tried to conform to someone else’s idea of who you should be. You are tired, grumpy and guilty because you have hardly seen your children. It’s time, you reflect, to give the kids a treat, do something together. I know! Let’s chase some fun! Let’s pile everyone into the car and join all the other desperate families at the local theme park! We can spend a pile of cash there and everything will be all right again.
The trouble starts with the inexpressible headache of
getting everybody out of the house. Before children, I just used to stroll out of the house. Now this process cannot be achieved without an hour of screaming, searching for lost socks and shoes, huffing, puffing, shouting, cursing Britax and their cruel inventions in the name of child safety. (Those accursed car seats might restrain the child but they do a huge amount of psychic damage to the father, not to mention causing him physical pain as he tries to get the seat belts in their slots.) Then you have to find various toys that the children seem to find completely indispensable for the journey. Recently we made the terrible mistake of installing one of those DVD players in the back of the car, in the hope that it would keep the kids quiet on long journeys. It can help, I suppose, but the darned thing never seems to work properly, and fixing it is yet another task to add to the interminable torture of leaving the house. (And what was wrong with I-Spy and daydreaming?)