Read The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids Online
Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
What we so often observe in the old-fashioned cultures is a Stoical attitude to life, an inspiring lack of self-pity, and these attitudes are still to be found in societies which to us look extremely limited in terms of the life choices available. What you get in rich societies, by contrast, is a hell of a lot of moaning. And it seems that the richer people are, the more moaning there is to be done. Rich people always complain about poor service in hotels. They complain about lazy staff or staff who are always ill. They complain about airlines, call-centre workers, taxi firms. Indeed, riches seem to create more causes for complaint, possibly because riches multiply the number of transactions in a person’s life, thereby increasing the possibility of things going wrong. Whereas when you keep things simple less goes awry. Riches also create an arrogant lack of patience: I can pay, so why should I have to wait?
My friend John Lloyd, the producer of such TV shows as
Blackadder
and
Spitting Image
and more recently the originator of the
QI
series, has observed a phenomenon at middle-class dinner parties which he calls ‘moasting’, an unpleasant combination of moaning and boasting. Complaining about the chalet girl in Gstaad, or about poor treatment at the hands of Virgin Upper Class, or how the Eton English master is not up to scratch. To bring two unpleasant phenomena into one intensely awful new form of whinge takes a particularly British form of negative genius.
Both should be avoided at all costs by the idle parent (as with all these suggestions, bear in mind that the idle parent is against fanaticism in all its forms. A bit of whingeing in moderation will not have the Idle Police knocking). Whingeing is the adult’s mirror image of the child’s whining. When they hear us whingeing about things they assume that it’s normal to complain,
and therefore they whine (powerlessness is the other cause, as we have seen). Indeed, we encourage them to whine and complain by continually probing them for their judgement on things: ‘Did you have a good time? Was it fun? Is it a good book? What did you think of the film? How was school?’ It’s what the ancient Chinese called the ‘discriminating mind’, the false setting up of good things and bad things. This discriminating mind is really a way of making children into consumers, because consumers are the biggest whingers of all, always ready to fire off complaints to ombudsmen, whatever they may be, and always ready to buy better products. Living your life through your selection of products and services is the whingeing principle put into action. The non-consumer, the creator, knows that all things are equal. He is enlightened, he has the ‘non-discriminating mind’ and has nothing to complain about. He has a cheerful Stoic disposition, and would tend to agree with Epicurus’ epigram:
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Having many wants clearly creates whingeing. Having a vague, abstract idea of how things could be rather than celebrating how they are creates a sense of discontent. Let us rejoice in our own uniqueness, our own difference, our own eccentricity.
John Stuart Mill, himself the product of a hothouse education planned out by his father, James Mill, with the evil Panopticon inventor Jeremy Bentham, was in sympathy with the idea of the simple life, and indeed, he attributed its ongoing discussion in the mid-nineteenth century to the work of Rousseau. In
On Liberty
, he writes: ‘The superior worth of
simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralizing effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from the cultivated mind since Rousseau wrote…’
We must take personal responsibility. That way lies freedom from whingeing. Take Mill’s wise words on education, which most of us leave to an external agency:
If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. The objections which are urged with reason against State education do not apply to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State’s taking upon itself to direct that education: which is a totally different thing… A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another… it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
Why does the state have to exert so much control over state education? Why can’t they leave teachers alone? Mill is right that few parents would complain if they were given education vouchers that could be redeemed at any school. It is the ideological control that we object to.
So we whinge about our schools, whether they be private or state. Moaning about the private school we have chosen for our child is an example of ‘moasting’ at its most absurd, but moaning about any school is ridiculous, since there are
plenty of alternatives available, including home schooling and learning groups. Once you’ve made your bed you should lie in it, and if you don’t like it, get out.
It’s the same with children. We are not obliged to have children. We choose to have them. There are many other paths through life. By not whingeing about it, we are surely setting a good example to our children, who will learn by example that if we are unsatisfied with a situation then it is entirely within our power to adjust either the situation itself or our attitude to that situation.
Now, instead of whingeing and moaning and wishing that things would somehow change, take my advice and learn to say ‘Yes!’ to your kids. This very simple idea was suggested to me by John Lloyd. He said that he had noticed in his own life how much he was
fobbing off
his kids: from the early days, when he would linger late at the office because that seemed preferable to facing the mewling infant and general chaos of home, to later, when the kids were a little older, when he would become angry if disturbed by a child in the middle of a phone call. I have noticed this tendency in myself: sometimes I am staring at my computer screen and a child comes into my study and asks to play a game: ‘Will you play Tractor Ted with me?’ Self-importantly, I sigh and say something along the lines of: ‘I’m working,’ or worse, a querulous: ‘Can’t you see I’m working?’ The child persists for a while and then gives up. I then look at my screen again and wonder whether checking the Amazon ranking of my last book can really be considered to be important work. Can it not be left for five minutes? Lloyd pondered these questions and decided to start saying ‘yes’ to his children when he was on the phone or working and they asked him for something. He realized too that their repeated requests and irritating behaviour towards him were
a sort of demand for recompense for earlier love starvation. So he would put the phone down and go and play with the child.
Isn’t this rather a lot of work for the idle parent? Not really. The child will be delighted with its five minutes of mucking about. And in any case, it’s actually a pleasure for the parent. After all, you’ll have plenty of time to work and stare at the screen as they grow older and less interested in you. Enjoy them while you can!
John also points out that saying ‘yes’ can be seen as a sort of investment for the idle parent. After you have made a habit of saying ‘yes’ for a while, say a year or two, the kids will stop bothering you in the same way. Your yay-saying will have installed security in their hearts, so that they will no longer have the need to test your love and continually press for it.
Let us call this method the Lloyd Plan for Happy, Stress-Free Parenting. Here it is:
Despite the way it looks to those of us who are already parents – and making the customary hash of it – parenting is actually a glorious opportunity for a lifetime of idleness. There’s a really simple knack to this. Give children whatever they want, whenever they want it, as soon as they ask. If children know they can have your undivided attention for any reason, no matter how paltry, at any time of day or night, lo and behold, miracle of miracles, they stop asking. This leaves you free to fart around doing whatever it was you formerly considered more important.
The Lloyd Plan has something in common with the ideas in
The Continuum Concept
. If you give the kid unlimited ‘in-arms’
time, as Liedloff calls it, when small, it will leave you alone later:
The need for physical contact tapers off quickly when [the child’s] experience quota has been filled, and a baby, tot, child or adult will require the reinforcement it gives him only in moments of stress with which his current powers cannot cope. These moments become increasingly rare, and self-reliance grows with a speed, depth and breadth that would seem prodigious to anyone who has known only civilized children deprived of the complete in-arms experience.
The person in charge of the baby – whether that is the mother or father or a relation – does not hover and ‘do things’ with the child, but is always at hand:
Among the Yequana the attitude of the mother or caretaker of a baby is relaxed, attentive to some other occupation than baby-minding but receptive at all times to a visit from the crawling or creeping adventurer. She does not stop her cooking or other work unless her full attention is actually required. She does not throw her arms open to the little seeker for reassurance but, in her calm way, allows him the freedom of her person, or an arm-supported ride on her hip if she is moving about.
Liedloff goes on to praise the very passivity of the parent:
She does not initiate the contacts nor contribute to them except in a passive way. It is the baby who seeks her out and shows her by his behaviour what he wants. He is the active, she the passive agent in all their dealings; he comes to her to
sleep when he is tired, to be fed when hungry. His explorations of the wide world are counterpointed and reinforced by his resort to her and by his sense of her constancy while he is away.
The idle parent needs to harmonize the two at-first-sight different attitudes of doing nothing and saying ‘yes’. Let them come to you, but when they do come to you be there for them and try not to fob them off. This way you will have plenty of time to pursue your own business, whatever that may be, and the child will learn self-reliance and the feeling of being loved from the beginning. Being loved but being free. Do less! Passive parenting is responsible parenting.
Being hassled by your kids – I love my friend Heather’s comment to her imploring child, ‘Will you stop terrorizing me?’ – is a direct result of you having starved them of being-there time in the past. We are all told by our non-contemplative society to be active parents, so we rush around, work, and then jump into our kids’ faces when we do see them and get, like, really active. It is surely wiser for parents to arrange things so they are both at home as much as possible during the first one to three years of the child’s life, and to organize things so that there is a constant presence in that time of helpers in the form of relations, lodger, neighbours or nanny if funds allow. The more people around, the merrier. It lightens the burden for the lone mum, who was never, ever meant to do all this on her own. Crazy idea! Better to have lots of time than lots of money in those early years. There will be time later for earning.
Stopping the whingeing and saying ‘yes’ to your kids could help you to accept your life as it is in other areas. One simple
trick is to turn off the radio. Here is Aldous Huxley writing in 1946:
Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthlies – nowadays, this is described as ‘taking an intelligent interest in politics’. St John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietude’s sake.
Dissatisfaction breeds moaning, therefore we need to remove the causes of dissatisfaction. As well as media, another cause of dissatisfaction is a tendency to feel a failure, that things are not perfect, the way they are portrayed by images in magazines and on screens. So we need to abandon the quest for perfection and give ourselves up to Providence. Huxley again:
The popular philosophy of life has ceased to be based on the classics of devotion and the rules of aristocratic good breeding, and is now moulded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.
Perhaps we need a little more quietude, a little more rest, a little more kindness, a little more cheerfulness and a lot less greed.