The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (23 page)
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Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
Learn How to Live from Your Kids
A man shall become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born
.
Meister Eckhart
The idle parent will never sacrifice him- or herself to his or her children. He will carry on with his own life and the kids will learn and grow in the slipstream. But he will respect his little creatures and observe their ways with interest. They say funny things. And you can always learn from them. The important thing in parenting is not what you
do
but your relationship with the child. It is how you
are
that counts. Rather than trying to follow a list of somebody else’s rules, we must concentrate first and foremost on our mental attitude towards the children. And a certain sense of gratitude towards them for being in our lives may be one way to start.
When your first baby is born you learn the meaning of unconditional love. It’s a new kind of love, different from the
love you may or may not feel towards your parents and different from the carnally charged love that you feel (or felt) towards your partner. Every human heart is touched by the presence of a baby because it has not yet been conditioned and commodified. God knows, the businessmen try! When our eldest child was born we were presented, minutes after the birth, with a gift pack containing a free branded nappy, a pack of wet wipes and some money-off vouchers for some awful baby-industry product. From the cradle to the branded grave, we are ever exploited as money-spenders and consumers.
But the baby is as yet unaware of this. He has only his animal-like body and big staring eyes. Is it wonder or is it just a sort of oneness that we see in the child? An undivided self, perhaps. My friend Penny Rimbaud is of the opinion that small children are neither naturally good nor naturally bad – but are rather simply passionate. They are full of passion for living. Their crying and their laughing are both expressions of the same fundamental lust for life. Well, I hope this is true because at this very moment, as I write, I can hear Henry pumping out the most horrifying screams. He sounds like he is being tortured. Maybe he is being tortured. Any moment now Victoria will call out for my help. Oh woe!
What is the fate of the baby coming into the world? Not a happy one, according to Blake in ‘Infant Sorrow’:
My mother groan’d, my father wept:
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
(A note on swaddling: it was a common medieval practice, but Rousseau thought it cruel and unnatural and so clearly did Blake. Swaddling has made a comeback recently, promoted by books on strict baby routines. But the idle parent surely wants to let the kid wave its arms around freely?)
It’s a dangerous world indeed for the poor infant to be thrust into. He resists it, he rebels against its strictness and regimentation and isolation. He screams for people to come and hold him. But they ignore him. There is something wrong here, he seems to be saying. And then mothers are told that he’s just crying out for attention, and best to leave him to cry. This seems a little cruel. Anyway, the small baby has not yet been tamed and forced to accept capitalist clock-time and the man-created work ethic. All is one to him. He is in the moment. Some of our most unpleasant scenes as a family have happened during the morning rush for school. The school bus leaves from the end of the lane at 8.30 am, and the children have to be dressed, washed, bagged up and ready. How they resist being told what to do and torn away from doing something they were enjoying! ‘Put your shoes on!’ ‘
Put your shoes on!
’ ‘PUT YOUR SHOES ON!’ Why do they resist authority? Because they are living in the moment, in the here and now. And maybe – just maybe – when kids dawdle, it is not they who are at fault but the system that attempts to regiment them so strictly. When the kids rebel against it perhaps they are really the sane ones. They still have some dignity: like the young Thomas De Quincey, who was
described by his parents as the ‘imperious young sultan’ of the family.
That is why we should listen to our children more. They have much to teach us about the natural ways of life. Such as:
a) Living in the Present
As adults we perpetually make efforts to remove our children from the present and thrust them into the future or the past. We ask questions that emphasize past experience: ‘How was school? What did you do today? Which was the best bit? Did you enjoy that film? Was it fun?’ We also plan for the future and teach them how to look forward to things (perhaps in order to make the terrible present more bearable): ‘Are you excited about Christmas? Are you looking forward to our trip to Funderzone?’ From an early age it seems that we attempt to teach children that the ‘now’ is not a good place – but rather that life was lived in the past or will be lived in the future. Children’s resistance to answering questions such as ‘How was school?’ (always a conversational non-starter) is perhaps a sign that really they want simply to
be
, to continue doing what they are immersed in, right now. This would also explain their resistance to punctuality and unwillingness to be called away from something they are enjoying in order to come and eat their tea. (I’m planning to buy a dinner gong, so I don’t have to keep shouting for them. I also have a fantasy where they play outside all day and I go outside and ring a big bell at six o’clock to summon them in from the fields…)
Every parent knows well the frustrations of going for a walk with a toddler. They simply do not seem to understand the idea of destination, of getting from A to B. Instead, they
insist on dawdling and pootling, bending down to pick things up, looking at signs, even – maddeningly – going backwards. Enjoying themselves, I suppose, is what it is. Very frustrating to the goal-centred adult. ‘Come on, Henry,’ we bleat with false jollity, in case we are being observed, with that little indulgent half-smile on our lips. But walking with toddlers, if viewed from a different perspective, can be enjoyed. The toddler may teach the adult to engage with the pleasure of the here and now, without a care for what has been or what is to come. The toddler can plant the adult firmly in the moment. Yea, cease striving, and give in to what is happening! And the more you allow them simply to be in the moment, the more chance they have of teaching you in turn how to live in the moment, and therefore how to free yourself of anxiety, regret and fear. Small children are providential creatures: they think of their passionate lives right now, and the future and the past are meaningless abstract concepts. The future is not real. It does not exist (in fact, as I have often argued, the future is a capitalist concept, because our fears about it can be manipulated to make us spend money on insurance schemes, pensions, property, etc.).
b) Being Silly and Laughing in the Face of Disaster
‘You’re a poo-poo head, Daddy,’ the little ones say to me and titter. The substitution of words with the word ‘poo’, and indeed the word’s liberal use in any sentence, is, as has been observed by the semiologist Gregory Rowland, a cornerstone of the wit of small children. But they’re right, it’s funny. Children love to play with words, they love jokes, and most jokes are based around puns or wordplay. And they love
pulling faces and tumbling and making farty noises. And so do I. Face-pulling is a good one: it was a medieval game. Make everyone in the room pull a horrible face. Take pictures, if you like. Then judge the winner. It’s an idea I might take to our village fête next year. Maybe with a Polaroid camera. Anyway, it’s great fun. And it’s wonderful to have kids as an excuse to be able to express all that silliness again. Human beings are naturally fun-loving, but we lose this instinct as we grow older, serious and businesslike. Kids remind us of the things that really matter.
Children also seem to possess an innate delight in the rupturing of everyday order. Put the wrong word in a sentence and they will guffaw helplessly. They also love it when things go wrong in the adult world, when, as Penny Rimbaud would put it, ‘consensual reality breaks down’. That is the reason for their fascination with fire engines – somewhere the ordered universe of the grown-ups has gone kaput. In the same way that Mexicans love a road accident and will crowd around the scene of the crash offering advice, so kids love it when the clock-bound parental systems grind to a halt. That, after all, is when all the natural humanity and generosity of people emerges. Disasters can be a sort of liberation from the grim efficiency of industrial capitalism. When my brother and I were growing up one of our favourite stories was about the time we had to be rescued from the rocky coast of North Devon by a helicopter, because my dad had got the tide times wrong. And indeed I can remember that incident almost perfectly, even today, such was the intense pleasure of that rapture. Another time we were on a skiing holiday and my brother and I went each morning on our own to buy a Fanta. One morning my brother dropped his glass on the floor, smashing it into tiny pieces. We looked up at the café owner,
expecting to be told off. But instead he gave a huge bellowing laugh, a wonderful and entirely correct response to mess. I am always getting angry with Henry for spilling things. But wouldn’t it be better to laugh at the mess? Getting angry doesn’t help to clear it up.
They say that children like routine, but do they? The times that stand out for me from my childhood are the times when the routine was broken: fire alarms at school, broken glasses, the stray match that landed in the fireworks box, cars breaking down. Broken routine adds intensity to life. I am slowly learning from my own children to enjoy disasters when they happen. On Christmas Eve last year my van broke down on a roundabout on our way to visit relatives. I was on my own with three kids in the back and no mobile phone. I suffered a moment of irritation, but what followed was in fact quite enjoyable. We walked over the roundabout to the petrol station, where the staff let me use their phone to call the AA. The children had a McDonald’s milkshake and fries, a rare treat in this anti-consumerist family. Back at the van, by pure chance, someone I knew from home, 100 miles away, saw us and pulled over to help. He towed us off the roundabout and out of danger. Then the AA man arrived. And the police. And then Victoria, who was travelling in the other car. It was quite a party down there on the Hazelgrove roundabout on the A303. I met lots of people and had a good time. And I came away with a good story to tell. When I mentioned that I’d broken down to adults at parties they put on a sympathetic face, automatically assuming that it was a ‘nightmare’ (that overused word), but I’d put them right and explain what enormous fun the whole thing had been. Somehow, in the middle of disaster you give yourself up to Providence and delight in the failure of man’s plans. And it was the children
who taught me how to enjoy it. I distinctly remember making the deliberate choice to view the incident as an adventure rather than an insupportable inconvenience. I looked at the situation from their point of view and saw a story, a tale, an adventure. The secret is not to take life too seriously and to laugh at it all the time, like children do. That way lies the strength to cope with hardships.
c) Drawing and Playing Tricks and Games
Delilah sits and sketches for hours. Yesterday she said she wanted to stop watching the video they had on – it was
Babe
– and go to bed to draw. Her cats are particularly delightful. Henry’s scribbles are improving. He asks for a tray in the evening so he can scribble in bed like Delilah. Arthur wants to draw birds. Magic is another of Arthur’s interests, and I recommend any parent to learn some tricks. Now we can perform a trick together where the spectator chooses a card from the pack, then Arthur hurls the pack at the window, whereupon all the cards fall to the floor except the one chosen, which is stuck to the glass – on the other side of the window! We also play chess and draughts and backgammon. And why oh why do people not play cards more often? A pack of cards costs a mere pound, but it offers infinitely more fun and variety than a Sony Playstation, is more portable, can involve any number of players and can be meditated upon in quiet moments. And, of course, it is self-sufficient, requiring no power source. A simple idle parenting tip would be to play cards every evening after tea, at least in the winter months.
d) Discovering That Work and Play Can Be the Same Thing
Henry loves nothing more than loading up logs into his tractor and unloading them at the other end of the yard. In this way he taught me to regard what I had previously regarded as an irksome task as a pleasurable pastime. Isn’t it crazy that a forty-year-old man, with all his years of experience and all his self-satisfaction, cannot use his mind to enjoy working, as a child does? We have already seen how Locke and Rousseau developed this idea when planning their ideal education. The same idea is in Plato. It emerges also in Cobbett’s
Rural Rides
from 1830, when Cobbett describes how his son Richard taught himself to read and then how he got his son to begin to learn arithmetic: ‘He had learned from mere play, to read, being first set to work of his own accord, to find out what was said about Thurtell [a notorious murderer who was hanged in 1824], when all the world was talking and reading about Thurtell.’ Cobbett set Richard some sums, but first he explained that there was a practical purpose behind arithmetic, which was to keep business accounts. Then he simply left sums lying around, and Cobbett said that Richard learned much very quickly, because he had chosen to learn:
Now when there is so much talk about education, let me ask how many pounds it generally costs parents to have a boy taught this much of arithmetic; how much time it costs also; and, which is a far more serious consideration, how much mortification and very often how much loss of health, it costs the poor scolded broken-hearted child, who becomes dunderheaded and dull for all his lifetime, merely because that has
been imposed on him as a task which he ought to regard as an object of pleasurable pursuit.
Children, then, teach us that work and play can be the same thing, and we in turn can use that insight to help them to learn useful things. If work is voluntary, autonomous, creative – freely undertaken – then can it really be called work? It is the urgent task of the idle parent to collapse this distinction in his or her own life and in the lives of his or her children, if he or she craves self-reliance and happiness.