The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (8 page)

But all too soon we move infants from this non-discriminating natural apprehension of the world to one which is mediated through books, teachers and websites: so, as I have remarked, Arthur would rather watch birds on a screen than stare out of the window at the bird-feeder with its huge and busy crowd of blue tits. Why? This is what we have taught him. Having said this, Arthur has just now come in and asked for a matchbox. He had a beetle in his hand and wanted to put it somewhere. So perhaps we need not fret too much.

But yes, we can learn from small children a non-judgemental acceptance of the ways of the world. A little child sits in the middle of a field and plays with the grass. He doesn’t think, ‘How beautiful this is! What a lovely day! Not a cloud in the sky!’ These are all man-made ideas. The little child just is. Not an idea in his head, no bookish notions, prejudices, morals, resolutions, self-reflective agonies, need to escape, doubts, fears. He doesn’t even look or examine. He does not watch a sunset – to watch something is to remove yourself from it. He
is
the sunset. But pretty soon we leave this Garden of Eden. Self-consciousness, pain and fig leaves come between us and the natural world and we spend the whole of the rest of our lives trying to get back in.

Packed with wisdom though they are, there is something that niggles about both Rousseau’s
Emile
and Locke’s
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
, and it is this: their charges appear to be friendless. The child is isolated. While both stress the importance of play and pleasure in the child’s life, and are filled with generous ideas about education and nature, this is a world apart from the medieval scene, where life was lived collectively. Just look at Bruegel’s painting
Children’s Games
, where 250 children play together, without a parent in sight. But Rousseau’s Emile and Locke’s imaginary pupil are kept away from the rough boys. This shift from a messy, sociable
conviviality to a hothouse isolation reflects, of course, the big historic shift that happened somewhere between 1400 and 1600, that is, the isolation of the individual. We compare Bruegel’s vast gangs of children with the formal portraits of Velazquez or Caravaggio, or later of Joshua Reynolds, which show melancholy posh kids, alone and dressed up. While medieval cathedrals, for example, burst with life at every corner, Renaissance art presents man as alone.

The problem with Locke and Rousseau is that they are concerned with moulding. This was very much a Puritan idea in education: that the child could and should be moulded in order to function effectively in a certain sort of society. And although Locke and Rousseau’s moulding is of the most kind and liberal sort, it is still a form of moulding; and in order to be moulded, the child needs to be separated from other people. For the idle parent, this sounds far too much like hard work and we question, anyway, whether it’s good for the kid.

It’s a theme that we find explored in US journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s book,
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
. She argues that an ‘epidemic of melancholy’ started around 1600, around the time when Robert Burton began work on
The Anatomy of Melancholy
. Burton wrote that melancholy produces ‘a cankered soul macerated with cares and discontents, a being tired of life… [who] cannot endure company, light, or life itself’. Ehrenreich quotes the historian Lionel Trilling, who wrote: ‘in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.’ The historian Yi-Fu Tuan, she says, writes of a new ‘isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world’. Ehrenreich argues that this new kind
of isolated individual does not find freedom but on the contrary suffers from a kind of dependency, a dependency on how they are seen by the outside world: ‘How am I doing?’ is the question that the new isolated self asks. With the loss of the medieval sense of community comes a new seriousness.

When I interviewed Barbara Ehrenreich recently I brought up the issue of the loneliness of the modern family. I mentioned to her the example of Alia Hartman, a Mexican journalist now living in Germany with her German husband. ‘Life is so much harder here,’ Hartman said to me, at a conference on laziness. ‘In Mexico there are lots of people to help, aunts, uncles, friends. In Germany you are on your own.’ Ehrenreich, now a grandmother, contrasted her grandchildren’s style of life with that of her own kids:

So this is the flaw in Locke and Rousseau: the isolation. Having isolated our adult selves, we now isolate children. I hear that in New York sleepovers are virtually unknown, so rampant has fear of the paedophile become. Sleepovers have always seemed to me to be an excellent idea for the idle parent, either way round: if your kid is off staying with a friend, that’s a blessed break for you. If they have a friend to stay, then they will amuse themselves, meaning that you can get on with the important things, like weeding, drinking beer, practising the ukulele or staring out of the window.

The whole purpose of this book is to encourage you to resist the work-hard-in-isolation Puritan culture and its inventions, such as school and the full-time job, and bring back some good, old-fashioned conviviality and providential thinking, in childhood as well as adulthood. And this is why friends are so important: put simply, they make life easier.

In Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel
Island
, the hero finds himself stranded on an island called Pala, where the inhabitants have created a society that harmonizes the best of Western science with the best of Eastern mysticism. Now, their solution to the problem of the confining nuclear family is precisely to spread the burden, and they do this by means of Mutual Adoption Clubs. The idea is that each family connects itself to a network of twenty or so other families. At any time a child from one can go and stay with the family of another. This system provides an escape valve from the confinement of the nuclear family. As Sulina, a Palanese mother, explains:

It’s an idea we could take up immediately. By extending the family, creating a network of mutually supporting friends and neighbours, in short, by helping each other, family life could be made very much easier.

But we are fearful today. When I was growing up in the 1970s we would leave the house in the morning, get on our
bicycles and play all day in the streets. Or go into the woods. When I was four I took my two-year-old brother two blocks up the road, on our own, to find the ice-cream lady. Children should be running around in packs, but instead they are shut in their bedroom with only a big TV and computer games for company. ‘I know he’s safe in there,’ a mother chillingly told the cameras on a recent TV show about modern childhood. Clearly this isolation also suits the consumer culture: alone and staring at a screen, the child is easy prey for advertisers. Playing in a field with friends, he is not playing his part in the economy.

Arthur comes home from school and goes straight on to a website called Club Penguin, where, he says, he can ‘talk’ to his friend Sam. Call me a Luddite – and I love the Luddites, by the way – but surely it would be cheaper, easier and healthier to have Sam round in person?

The simple antidote to isolation is more friends, more fun, more festivity. I have noticed that the larger the group of kids, the easier life becomes for the parents. They don’t bother you. One child alone will say, ‘I’m bored.’ ‘Go outside.’ ‘But there’s nothing to do outside.’ ‘Play in the treehouse. Or how about some drawing?’ ‘Awwwww, I DON’T WANT TO.’ At this point the parent may well lose their temper – justifiably so. A whining, dependent child is annoying. The only thing that will satisfy this bored child is a one-on-one game of Monopoly. But I don’t want to play Monopoly with a seven-year-old. I want to go and read in the garden and smoke a roll-up. However, if there are two kids playing together, things improve. A little bit of bothering, but not so much. And as soon as there are three or more they practically vanish into thin air, and that’s precisely what we’re after. You leave them alone, and even better, they leave you alone. Hodgkinson’s
Law: the more, the merrier. Many hands make light work and many kids make the parent’s work lighter. Added to this is the real pleasure of seeing them play happily. In the distance.

We recently achieved a Bruegel-type situation at our annual village medieval banquet. While the adults ate and drank, a huge gang of children played games of their own making in the field next to the tent. That, I repeat, is my idea of childcare: a beer tent next to a playing field or wood. Parents in one, kids in the other. There’s nothing worse at festivals than ‘kids’ zones’. Go into a kids’ zone (the kids are not allowed in them unsupervised, which wrecks the purpose of them, as far as I can tell) and you will see bored parents weakly smiling as their children try and fail to juggle neon balls. It’s hell on earth. Almost as bad as the playground. Swings! Kill me, quickly, before I die of boredom.

All you need is a field. Just one field. No swings or climbing frames. Parents and beer at one end, kids playing all over it.

At a festival last year Arthur made friends with the boys from the family camping next door. Every morning he would disappear off with them and play all day. We discovered from their lovely mother that they lived in a community, a commune. Arthur discovered this too, but put it in slightly different terms: ‘Billy lives with his friends!’ he told me, as if this was one of the most fantastic things he could think of – to live with your friends!

Sadness in adults can be caused by a sense of isolation, and is to be cured not by Prozac but by conviviality. It is worth asking whether the same is true of children. Perhaps we just need to get them singing and dancing.

One key difference between medieval notions of childhood and modern approaches is in the nature/nurture debate. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was believed that if a
boy of noble birth was brought up by peasants then, sooner or later, his noble nature would emerge. Nature was all. I like that idea. It lets the parents off the hook. You don’t really matter. You submit to God’s will. That actually relieves the burden on parents. However, by the time of Locke, man’s input has become the crucial factor: ‘of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.’ This view persists today: the psychologist Oliver James, for example, is firmly of the view that parenting is everything, that the atmosphere in the home, particularly in your early years, is the key element in determining your character. In Locke we see the new importance of education. And parents. If kids can be nine-tenths moulded, then it would be irresponsible of the parents to let go of the responsibility for the moulding. Therefore since we are unlikely ever to reach a scientific conclusion in the debate – because we will never, ever, know the answer – I propose that each of us simply invent a nature/nurture theory which suits us and then go out and find evidence for that theory, which, after all, is the common method among historians and scientists, whatever they may try to tell you about objectivity.

The idle parent, I think, would probably like to settle on a split of one-third nature, two-thirds nurture. That would mean that we are not entirely without importance in a child’s life, but that most of it is up to them. I think that would give them due respect, too, and in general we don’t give our kids enough respect. Sorry to repeat, but it’s worth repeating: we are always interfering, whether by organizing ceaseless activities, or telling them off, or sitting down with them for – and this may be worse – a ‘serious chat’ (horror of all horrors), an attempt to feel their pain and really care, to become all
dewy-eyed and sympathetic. This attempt at empathy is itself a kind of intrusion or interference, a presumption. How can we possibly get inside somebody else’s head, least of all a child’s? I remember the pain and agony when my dad would sit down with me for a heart-to-heart. My dad was doing his best, being good, in fact, but maybe it’s not required. Certainly I can see this with Arthur if I try to give him a stern-but-fair-and-loving chat – he writhes and squirms and says anything to bring the experience to a swift conclusion.