Just a quick post to let you know that signed copies of my new book, The Idle Parent, are available for pre-order from the Idler shop. You can also order from Amazon. It’s published by Hamish Hamilton on 5th March, and we’ll send them out a few days before this date. Oliver James has this to say:
“Wise, funny, practical and personal, The Idle Parent puts the fun back into parenting,” while Jay Griffiths commented: “The sort of book which any self-respecting child would wish their parents had read. Gently comedic on the surface, it is a book about serious freedom underneath. Profoundly sane, kind and endearing, it is written with a huge generosity of spirit as an act of family-liberation.”
TH
Now is the season to make resolutions and my advice is: Don’t! Of all the depressing and spirit-sapping inventions of the Puritan Revolution, this idea of making resolutions to behave better is one of the most futile and absurd. The usual one is “work harder”. Well, what nonsense! Where has all our hard work got us?
Resolutions are always broken and, therefore, they make you feel bad twice: once when you were making them in a spirit of strict self-criticism, and the second time when you break them, which makes you feel like an awful loser. The answer is to stop making any effort in anything and abandon yourself to Providence. It was an excess of effort and zeal that got us into this mess in the first place.
Now you need to be easy on yourself. It’s surely becoming clearer that hard work does not lead to happiness. Not hard work for other people, at any rate. All that hard work that people put into their job, only to be told that they are losing it due to a complicated set of financial shenanigans that was nothing to do with them. All that hard saving people put into their pensions, only to find out that it’s gone, all gone, thanks to the reckless greed of someone in London.
I would dearly love to send a message to the newly idle of this country: fear not! A new world of hanging around at home and enjoying everyday life is around the corner! Jobs are the most overrated creation of the Industrial Revolution. Even the sober Work Foundation admits that two thirds of us are miserable in them. So why be miserable if you lose it? This should be a time of great cheer! And think of the small fortune you will save in tax, morning lattes, bus fares, taxis, suits, ties, dry-cleaning bills and drinks after work with colleagues you don’t like?
Now job-free, you will be able to loaf around at home and start up a modest business or do some part-time work. Retrain as a carpenter and rediscover joy in work. Sit around doing nothing at home all day while your children get to know you again. Take naps after lunch, thank the kind Lord who has freed you from the mind-forg’d manacles of late capitalism and allowed you to enter the elite leisured class, who control their own hours of work and leave much time over for reading, meditating and contemplating. The ancient Romans had no taste for work. To them it was slavish to sell your time to an employer.
Sure there may be some losses. Holidays, cars, cleaners. But really, these are small sacrifices when you consider the beneficial effect on family life, all the time that you will be able to spend at home pottering about, making chutney and strange things out of wood.
I know this to be true, because we’ve been through our own self-inflicted financial crisis at home. It happened six years ago when I gave up high-earning work to live in a rented farmhouse and write a book. My income was reduced to a fifth of its former level. But we never starved, we were never cold, we always had plenty of beer, wine and meat. To a yeoman of 1450, we would have been seen as living at the height of luxury.
So there is nothing to worry about. With thrift comes a great sense of responsibility and satisfaction. To be thrifty is to be creative, to take control. Our real needs can be met cheaply.
It’s also true that when you fall out of that old system, you rediscover the power of community. People start to help each other.
We’ve been reading Little House on the Prairie in the evenings. It’s wonderful. Here is a family who built their own house out of nothing, who were thrilled beyond belief when Pa brought back eight panes of glass from town for their windows. And how little Laura and Mary help round the house! That is the spirit we need to bring back: children are for chores!
Yes, there are many reasons to be cheerful this year! This is the year of the truly idle parent!
I hate family holidays. This may sound odd coming from an embracer of idleness, but I find them extremely hard work. The nuclear family is difficult at the best of times, but the nuclear family on holiday seems to be pure agony. To travel across borders with three under-eights is hugely stressful, whether you go by train, plane or automobile.
When you arrive you all have to adjust to a completely different way of life. You have just adjusted when it is time to go home, where you return to the same old problems. Was the holiday just a dream? You show your photos to people to prove that it really happened. But did it? And do those smiling faces on the pictures tell the real story?
We are seduced into buying holidays by slick marketing. Nauseating advertising photos of smiling and beautiful young parents, sitting in the sun, watching their children play happily, are everywhere. We imagine lazy cocktails by the pool, two weeks of pure pleasure. But the reality is never like that and so you can really resent both the cost and the pure hassle of it all.
You may say I am just a grumpy dad. But I’m not the only one. “Why do women always want to go on holiday?” asks my friend Bill. “What’s wrong with grim, grinding reality?” I suppose women like holidays because they offer a much-deserved break from the domestic grind. But Dad on holiday is on call 24/7 for child care, driving, loading and unloading cars and washing-up.
The holiday comes as a huge disappointment because he finds himself in the slightly emasculating role of a full-time au pair. He foresaw a time of beer drinking, quiet reading and long naps; instead he’s shouting at children, being asked to do things by his wife and arguing about logistics. It’s exhausting.
The other thing I don’t like is the forced jollity, the planned schemes of merriment. “Are you having a good time?” the Redcoats would constantly ask at Butlins. No, I’m not and please leave me alone with my dark thoughts. They may be dark and gloomy, but at least they were mine. Organised fun to me is not much fun at all, because it is controlled by somebody else. I’d rather just see what happens than be herded into sightseeing coaches. Even as a child I resented being asked to “join in”.
A few preferable options come to mind. One is to holiday in the UK. This is surely a far better idea than transporting your dysfunction to a foreign shore. Keep it local.
Staying put in Blighty also means avoiding the hell of airports. This summer we drove to Norfolk and, while there were too many roundabouts, this was a small inconvenience when contrasted with flying from Heathrow.
Take your holidays with groups of friends. Rent a cottage or camp together. Adults will have adult company and kids will have kid company. Men will have male company and women will have female company. It is when we are starved of like minds that we become grumpy and this is why the nuclear family holiday is such a bad idea. So holiday in large groups – the more, I would say, the merrier.
We’ve had great camping trips with four or five other families. Ideally, the kids will vanish and play together all day, leaving the adults time to read, cook, chat, sleep and drink. Children should not need to be looked after or entertained. They are perfectly capable of creating their own games, and playing certainly comes more easily when they are in large groups of kids their own age.
Another idea is to reject the whole shebang and stay at home. Victoria often says that her idea of a holiday is to hire a cook and a cleaner at home for two weeks – a lot cheaper than a family holiday and a lot less work. Although I hated the very idea when I was a child, what about that American custom of summer camp? The children are packaged off for two weeks while the parents get a real break. A holiday without children. Ooh, can you imagine it?
Our children must be the only ones in the country who are still deprived of PlayStations and Nintendo DSs. Every single one of their friends has one or both of these devices.
The problem is that our children are excluded from discussions based around PlayStation games. They are even taunted. Poor Arthur has been asking for one for years and we have resisted. After all, I argue, he has the internet at home; he can play games on that. And he is free to play games at friends’ houses.
At Christmas I gave him a reproduction penny arcade machine, the sort of thing that would have amused Victorian holidaymakers on Brighton Pier. I thought this unusual toy might compensate for his deprivation in the digital arena. It didn’t.
We built a tree house, with the idea that the kids would go and daydream up there and invent their own games instead of running to the computer as soon as they got home from school. That didn’t work either.
Right now Arthur is into RuneScape. Before that it was Club Penguin; before that he had a stage when he loved that dreadful teach-kids-shopping game Habbo Hotel, where you spend real money on non-existent consumer gewgaws.
I loathe all this stuff with a passion. It disconnects children from nature.
On the other hand, am I imposing my ideals on my kids and becoming an idealistic tyrant? Keeping screen time to a minimum is appropriate to the idle parent because when you limit interaction with electronic worlds, you allow the child to develop its own faculty for play.
Kids don’t need much: two sticks tied together make a sword. Make a rasping noise with a blade of grass. The child who knows how to play is self-sufficient; he or she is happy anywhere. No electricity needed, or money, leading to less work for the adult.
I remember when I was about 13, playing with my ZX Spectrum in my bedroom. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I was trying to draw a little pixellated monster on the screen. Suddenly the screen went blank and a plume of smoke rose from the back of the computer.
I looked out of the window, blinked and walked outside to the park, where the leaves and trees were boundless and didn’t break down or crash. Thankfully Sir Clive Sinclair never got it together to send us a replacement, so I was freed.
The hunt for non-stop distractions crushes the independent spirit. Children can conjure whole worlds from their imagination. Sadly, that imagination will be killed by an overload of digital entertainment. A world where we just plug in and obey orders may suit the overlords of the capitalist system, but to the idle parent it looks like a bloodless substitute for real life.
Luckily a godparent has bought Arthur an iPod. Not everyone at his school has an iPod, so this may give him the playground status that he has lost by not owning PlayStations. I don’t really like iPods either, preferring the dramatic crackle of a 7in single on the Dansette, but I recognise that they are simply music delivery devices and a lot of fun. And Arthur can get to work organising our music on the computer, saving me a lot of bother.
In Plato’s Republic, written around 375BC, Socrates suggests that the women of the élite ruling class, called the Guardians, should not waste their time looking after small children, but rather work for the state. “We must pick suitable women to share the life and duties of Guardian with men,” says Socrates. In this way, the state will get the best value from its citizens.
The élite children will be looked after in state nurseries. State officers will take the better Guardian children to a nursery “and put them in charge of nurses living in a separate part of the city… [the mothers] will hand over all the sitting up at night and hard work to nurses and attendants.” Plato’s idea of a feminist republic is similar to the view put by a friend of mine, an intelligent mother-of-one, who works while her two-year-old is in nurseries.
She feels it is her moral duty not to waste her time looking after her own children, because as a university-educated woman, her energies are better spent serving the state or the economy. Child care should be entrusted to those who enjoy the company of toddlers.
From the view of employment figures, two will be employed where none was before: the mother in her Civil Service or business career, and the professional carer looking after her child. I guess this is what lies behind Gordon Brown’s promotion of the “hard-working family”.
One difference is that Plato was against the family and against private property. The Guardians live like monks and nuns, with no possessions and separated by gender. They are allowed to indulge occasionally in a weekend of non-stop procreation, to create the next generation of Guardians, but for the most part, they toil selflessly for the common good.
The other difference, though, shows the potential danger of the élitist programme. Plato’s Republic can look decidedly Nazi-like. It has a programme of eugenics. Says Socrates, chillingly: “The children of the inferior Guardians, and any defective offspring of the others, will be quietly and secretly disposed of.” The aim is to create a “real pedigree herd”, which is just what Himmler and Hitler were up to. In 1939, Operation T4 set up killing centres for babies and children with mental or physical defects.
Now, squaring up against the working mothers, we have the full-time mum brigade, many of whom are also highly educated. They say that babies need their mothers and also that nursery assistants are often stupid and badly-trained and are turning our kids into Vicky Pollards. They will take as their philosophical guide Rousseau, who in Emile argued that all mothers should look after their children when small.
I suppose I am slightly more on the side of the full-time mothers, but that’s because I would like to see both parents working less hard and spending more time sitting at home near their children. But the working-mother model has worrying ethical implications, too.
I believe that it doesn’t really matter what you do, whether you stay at home, go to work, work part-time, join the circus, live in a tepee with six other families or earn millions from hedge funds and employ round-the-clock nannies. What really matters, as the Fun Boy Three and Bananarama wisely put it back in the Eighties, is not what you do but the way that you do it. I would far rather be brought up by a non-resentful, fun-loving working mother than by a resentful stay-at-home one.
I think that the idle parent has to think beyond any ideology, and concentrate on creating their own system and enjoying their life.
If you are satisfied with the way you have organised your life, then your children will benefit. The point of idleness is not so much the simple indulgence of laziness, although there is nothing wrong with that, but rather the insistence on our freedom to arrange things as we please, without interference from busybodies.
While the spectacle of the American Empire falling is undoubtedly exciting, there seems to be a consensus that it is leading to general belt-tightening. Frugality, though, far from being feared is welcomed by the Idle Parent, who is trying to create anti-consumerist children because they are cheaper. The squeeze on money means that we Idle Parents can continue to be stingy while blaming the global economic situation.
Television shows, newspapers and magazines offer “money-saving tips” and advice on “how to beat the credit crunch”. None of them goes far enough. They merely offer cheaper alternatives to the rubbish that we already buy. Try going on a package holiday, one expert will suggest. What about supermarket own-brand products?
Such tips are feeble. The real answer is to go without all the dubious pleasures of the capitalist world. Do less. Disconnect. Stare at the stars. Here are some tips from a real money-saving expert (a rule of thumb is: never buy something that is advertised on television. Any product spending that much on selling itself has a very high profit margin):
1 Car: the average British family spends more than £5,000 a year on a car. What about walking, cycling, trains, buses or cabs? You could save cash by spending £4,000 a year on cabs. That’s more than £70 a week.
2 Breakfast cereals: over-priced and over-advertised, breakfast cereals are one of the biggest cons invented. Kellogg’s alone turns over £6.2billion a year. Buy a sack of porridge oats instead and mix it with raisins and seeds for muesli.
3 Holidays: don’t give money to a bunch of travel agents. Put up a tent in the garden and stay at home.
4 Central heating: take it all out; put in wood-burning stoves downstairs and wear jumpers upstairs. Wood is cheap and houses without central heating are good for the health. They keep you thin since your body uses up energy to keep warm.
5 Television: a waste of money and time. You could all be reading, talking or playing the piano instead. And television advertising stimulates desire.
6 Big house: expensive to buy, expensive to heat, time-consuming to clean and they make others feel inferior. Modest dwellings are easier and cheaper – and more polite.
7 Toys: either don’t buy them or buy second-hand. A three-year-old is just as happy with a 20p tractor from a car boot sale as with a new one for £9.99.
8 Juice: fruit juices, smoothies and healthy-seeming yogurts are unnecessary. Let them drink water and eat an apple.
9 Buy wholesale: profit is important to supermarkets. Their valued customers are not shoppers but shareholders. So form a co-op with neighbours and go to a wholesaler. You will get a 20 per cent discount – and they deliver.
10 Live in a field: buy a field and live in a caravan. Your worries will go and your garden can be used for playing, growing vegetables and keeping pigs.
Follow these tips, and you will stop worrying about money. You won’t even need a full-time job because your expenses will be so reduced. At last, you will have time to live.
When illness strikes, it can bring with it a welcome dose of idleness. A 24-hour tummy bug recently felled each of us in turn, and I found much to recommend in the experience. First of all, an ill child makes a refreshing change from a well child. Apart from the odd pile of vomit to clear up, one finds that the child is simply less work. The ill child sits on the sofa under a duvet quietly brooding and looking cutely Dickensian while you bustle about. It does not demand to be played with and it does not break things, scream, fight, butt siblings, torture animals or up-end the furniture. It eats little and its temper is gentle. Your heart goes out to it with a pity that is almost pleasurable.
After each child had expelled the bug, it was the turn of our four Easter holiday guests – a recently divorced dad and his three children – to succumb. Again, this was convenient as the ill guests required no meals and barely any attention, beyond the odd dose of Calpol. The dad even stopped drinking wine for a 36-hour period, producing a considerable financial saving.
Finally it was my turn and the sickness overtook me on the afternoon of my 40th birthday. I immediately went to bed and Victoria brought me fruit and hot drinks, an unusual but not unpleasant state of affairs: somehow the birthday combined with being ill produced in her a greater degree of solicitude. Clearly, the invalid was also spared any household duties. I picked up a copy of Pepys’s diary and read a few pages before letting it fall from my hand as I moved in and out of a colourful hypnagogic swoon.
The following morning, Victoria departed for a London trip and our guests also went home. I was left alone in the house, bed-ridden, with three children to take care of. I followed what seemed to me the sensible course, which was to do absolutely nothing. Rest was what I needed.
From time to time, the children wandered in to ask for something. I told them that I was ill and they would have to look after themselves. Arthur brought me a plate of fruit, proving once again that idle parenting produces useful children. Do nothing for long enough and they will start to fend not only for themselves but also for you.
After a few hours of this, I realised that I had nearly recovered. But it was 4pm. Had the children eaten anything all day? Arthur came in.
“Arthur,” I asked. “Have you kids had any lunch?” “Yes.” “Well, what did you eat?” “Henry had 13 Space Bars, I had seven and Delilah had five.” “I see.” In case you didn’t know, Space Bars – flat, sticky things made of pulped fruit – are what faddish parents like us substitute for crisps and suchlike. In everyday life, we severely limit intake of these treats. So it seemed that the children had taken the opportunity of my illness to indulge in a Space Bar binge.
They’d also had five hours of freedom to do what they chose without the admonishing presence of a parent. From their point of view, my being ill had been a great laugh. So: another great success for idle parenting.
The only downside was clearing up 25 Space Bar wrappers.
Being ill may be good these days but it was even better in the 18th century. The common prescription for any illness was laudanum and rest – a great combination, I imagine. This at any rate was supposed to be the secret of the success of Dr Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles Darwin’s eminent grandfather, according to the historian Roy Porter.
Where have all the laudanum-prescribing doctors gone? Now, we have to put up with cures that have had all the pleasure removed: Calpol and Benylin both proudly announce that they are non-drowsy, when surely drowsiness is just what is required?
I suppose that these medicines are designed to mask symptoms so we can carry on with “life” – ie go to the office or school -whereas I think the clever thing to do when ill is to take a well-earned break and give the children some self-sufficiency training into the bargain, all achieved by simply staying in bed.
They say that Coleridge was fond of fireside lurking and rarely joined in the rough games with the big boys. I was never really a team player either, preferring to hand out slices of orange to the opposing side rather than have my face pushed into the mud by them.
At primary school I would adopt the role of commentator instead of participant in football games at break-time. When I went to secondary school I shunned all team sports and took up fencing.
I still think there is something moronic and pointless about team sports, with the possible exception of cricket. No one seems to enjoy the process, it’s just the winning that counts. And if you lose, you allow all sorts of unpleasant emotions to disturb your psyche. Team sports give off an unpleasant whiff of aggressive competitiveness.
The playing fields of Eton turn into the race of life in the capitalist world, with the unpleasant Alan Sugar ethic that seems to motivate so much of human behaviour, mixed with a feeling that if you play badly, you will “let the side down”. At best, then, a waste of time; at worst, a morally questionable influence.
Partly for these reasons, I am pleased that my elder son seems to be following in my footsteps, showing little aptitude for team sports. Much to Victoria’s annoyance, I hardly ever kick a ball around with him, preferring to play draughts, listen to the Beatles or do Sudoku puzzles.
The younger boy shows more sporting aptitude. I am keeping an eye on this dangerous physicality and hope to turn it towards something useful, such as muck-shovelling, dog-walking or rabbit-breeding.
But perhaps the best reason for gently guiding your children away from team sports is that it is going to save you an awful lot of hassle: all that ferrying them around that parents do.
How many mothers and fathers have I met who complain about having to drive their children to sports fixtures on Saturdays and Sundays, when they would rather be in the pub or asleep? This oft-heard moan has been one of the main motivators for me in deftly steering my children in the opposite direction.
For this reason, if for no other, I would urge all idle parents to make every effort possible to discourage their offspring from being good at sport. This is simply good practical advice.
All this is not to say that I am against games. Tests of strength and endurance are as old as the hills. Arm-wrestling, good; leaping over stiles, good; trampolining, good. Horse-riding, stone-skimming, fishing: good. We’ve been practising shooting cans with an air rifle and that sort of thing I thoroughly approve of. One day we might come home with pheasants and rabbits for the pot.
Other sports I hold with are those that can be done while enjoying a drink. Idle sports, I call them, and they would include snooker, pool and darts. We used to play snooker for hours at school and we played table football for hours at university.
I would also support skateboarding for my children. I worked for a year in a skateboard shop. The boys who came in were the arty ones, the bohemians; they, too, had shunned what the Americans call “jock culture” in favour of skateboarding, which is a deeply creative pursuit. Most of them went on to art school, as I remember, and skate parks, unlike football pitches, are relatively parent-free zones.
What the sports on my approved list have in common is that they are self-organised, rather than organised from above.
But please, please, spare me heartiness, spare me cheering and the Olympic ideal, spare me vicarious competitiveness, whereby the children’s victories are seen as a reflection on the parents.
When I think about the Olympics, I feel a surge of anger welling up from deep inside, a rage at the criminal waste of money on this absurd piece of commercialised vanity. There is also something horrifically jingoistic about the whole thing.
Give me instead a child who can ponder and dream, sit under the oak tree and read, talk and think.
One of the very worst things that the Labour Government has done to this country is to encourage the rise of the two-job family. Labour (I suppose there’s a clue in the title) promoted an unpleasant Presbyterian work ethic and invented the chilling phrase “hard-working families”. We used to be slightly embarrassed at having been labelled a nation of shopkeepers, but that was surely a far superior state of affairs to the current set-up: a nation of slaves. At least the shopkeeper had his own shop and therefore some degree of autonomy. Now, thanks to the giant retailers, the independent shop is a dying institution.
For heaven’s sake, the one-job family was bad enough. It was hard work for the wife to run the household in the absence of the husband. But at least there was someone to do it. To impose two jobs on the family is nothing short of criminal. How can life be enjoyed when both parents are fully employed? Where is the time for fun and frolics and simply hanging around when weekends are taken up with shopping and bill-paying?
Instead, every idle parent should be heading towards the no-job family, by which I mean some kind of creative self-employment.
The two-slave family has led to a restriction on the free time of children. I heard some awful idiot on the radio the other day promoting the idea of shorter summer holidays. Apparently children forget what they have been taught over the long summer break. There is also talk of extending the school day. What kind of criminal lunacy is this?
The holidays are too short, not too long. Do we really want to condemn first ourselves and now our children to a lifetime of containment and toil? Does hard-working families mean hard-working children as well? What happened to play?
Now, I am in no way opposed to women working. Of course not. I was brought up by a feminist mother and, being a lazy father, I am delighted when women earn money because that should mean less work for the husband. But when does work become slavery rather than liberation? As GK Chesterton quipped: “I meet women who say they won’t be dictated to and then go and get a job as a stenographer.” I think one good solution is for both parents to work part-time. Three days a week each should add up to slightly more than one full-time salary, and leads to both parents being able to lie around at home with the kids for four days each week.
What I am opposed to is the situation where both parents are working long hours in stressful jobs for meagre compensation, particularly when the children are small. This means they have to pay for expensive child care so that someone else can play with their children while they are toiling in the slave mills. And it leads to absurdly costly and busy lives, filled with dropping off and picking up. “When does one live?” as the chronically lazy Oblomov asks of the busy life in that wonderful 19th century portrait of a slacker.
And even with all this full-time child care, the parents still have to “do” the nights and the bedtimes and the mornings. The full-time job also pretty much prevents the taking of a life-saving nap and both parents end up tired, angry and stretched. And probably in debt. Bring on the credit crunch and high oil prices, say I: less debt equals less work and less driving around equals more freedom.
Unfortunately, we are all so conditioned by the idea that we need a lot of money that no one can see their way through to quitting the job. The truth is, however, that the non-working life – using work in its conventional sense to mean full-time employment – is far cheaper than the working life. There are no costs. No coffees. No sandwiches. No work clothes. No drinks after work with colleagues you don’t even like. All that wasted money! The stay-at-home self-employed or part-time person, I calculate, can live better than the wage slave on half the former salary. And you can nap every day.
Bring back the cottage industry, bring back home-based work, for man and woman. And bring back the Sabbath. What a good idea that was. Sunday really should be a day of rest. No lawn-mowing, no reading of anxiety-inducing newspapers, no emailing, no shopping, no driving around.
Instead of spending £10 on petrol, buy a really good bottle of wine and stay at home. Feast and drink, play music and play games, and lie on the floor and let your children tumble over you.
We need to consider what children are for: Are they just burdens?
Last week I spoke at the AGM of the campaigning organisation Full Time Mothers (FTM). This is a group of educated, intellectual women who, since 1990, have supported women who have chosen to stay at home with their children rather than “go back to work”, as the current slang has it.
On the face of it, this would seem rather a conservative outfit. But in fact, FTM is a very radical organisation and surprisingly idler-friendly. It is certainly not anti-feminist. It is radical because it opposes government intervention in matters of child care. Member Jill Kirby, of the think tank Centre for Policy Studies, the other speaker at the AGM, points in her work to government’s stated intention to interfere. She quotes a report that, rather chillingly, announces how it means to develop “an overarching strategy for all children and young people from conception to age 19″.
FTM refuses to accept a government-led orthodoxy when it comes to arranging work and family life. It is highly critical, for example, of full-time day care for small children, arguing that, in the early years, the child needs its parents to be close by. It opposes the commercialisation and professionalisation of child care, and points to the unfair fact that the most generous Family Tax Credits are available only to families who use accredited child-care providers, a case surely of the one who pays the piper calling the tune.
FTM is also idler-friendly because it believes in spending time with children. It opposes the “hard-working family” model. In my talk, I discussed the benefits of both parents working as little as possible when children are small.
FTM wants to lobby government to create policies that are more friendly to the family with the stay-at-home mother. But I’m not convinced that effective change can be made through putting pressure on Parliament to alter legislation. Ever since the Tudors, when the state first started taking an interest in education and the rearing of children, government has been about imposing a uniform strategy on an unruly and varied populus. A different party in power would be no better: it is in the very nature of government itself to interfere and to plan overarching strategies.
The best thing surely would be to ignore government, as far as that is possible, and simply proceed as if it doesn’t exist. Then you can make up your own rules as far as work and family go.
On a deeper level, we perhaps need to consider what children are for. Are they just non-contributing burdens, which the state apparatus needs to mould, via pre-school, school and college, into hard-working, high-consuming adults?
The chairman of FTM later sent me an article by the Swedish writer Anna Wahlgren, who says the problem is that we do not see children as useful. Even from birth, they are accustomed to being viewed as an encumbrance. At best, they are encouraged to be little consumers, rather than producers. To give their lives meaning, we need to make them feel needed and get them involved in household chores: cooking, cleaning, baking bread, growing vegetables and feeding chickens.
“If we as parents needed our children and little by little, according to their will and capability, we put them to good use, then we could slowly change a social order that is already shaky.”
This is absolutely true: I find my children are never happier than when, for example, stuffing envelopes for Idler mail-outs. I get them in a little production line. They are doing something genuinely useful and they can feel it. Another example was when Arthur came to London with me for two days to clear out the office. He worked like a trouper. He later said it was the most fun thing he had done all year.
All of this is, of course, excellent news for the idle parent: children should be seen as a useful addition to the family labour force, rather than simply as cost and hassle. Bring back child labour.
My own fantasy Christmas is pretty much the opposite of the one that is pushed at us by the commercial world. It involves a very small outlay of cash and a lot of revelry. My idea of Christmas is a 12-day feasting session during which all work is suspended. It is a series of sumptuous candlelit banquets with much merriment and music. There is dancing and singing. There are rosy cheeks and lots of laughter. There is a roaring fire and outside it is cold.
The house is covered in holly and ivy, which we went out and foraged for. We play cards, dice, darts, chess, draughts, backgammon, shove ha’penny. We read books containing long ballads written by William Morris and we take postprandial naps. We give each other small tokens of esteem, something to eat or something to read. The few toys around are beautiful and made of wood.
We pass around the wassail bowl and drink spiced beer, cider and wine. There will be people everywhere. It is a time for sensual pleasures and merry company. The children play together in large groups and leave you alone.
In the modern nuclear family Christmas, by contrast, we are isolated. Each family member gives the other some kind of digital gewgaw and then does his or her best to remain stranded in his or her own little, lonely, screen-based world. All communal pleasures have vanished, to be replaced by a selfish chasing after one’s own instant gratification. I’ll be on the laptop, daughter is on her iPod, son is on his Nintendo DS, mum is watching telly and never the four shall meet.
Anxiety-inducing newspapers litter the ground. Magazines offering absurd abstract fantasies of celebrity life instil a faint sense of anxiety. Children whine and fight. Toys don’t work. The food is some off-the-shelf Tesco nightmare. All this can be avoided by disconnecting from the matrix and inviting many people to flow through your house.
In my fantasy Christmas, we would have no electricity so there would be no internet, email or television, and we’d play bagatelle and cards and put on plays instead. We would not delegate our entertainment to the BBC or Rupert Murdoch. We would amuse ourselves. There would be dozens of candles and endless card games. Have you ever reflected on the wonder of a pack of cards? Here is a portable games machine, offering an infinity of different games, that never dates, never breaks, needs no batteries, lasts forever and costs only a few quid.
Well, I have to say that our Christmas reality promises to feature some elements of my fantasy. None of the food will come from the evil usurious supermarkets, but all from neighbours, the garden or small businesses. Last year we served a gigantic home-cured ham from one of our illegally slaughtered pigs. A little bit of husbandry seems to me to be an excellent idea in these credit-strapped times. And cheap bits of game like rabbit, pheasant or woodcock could be a part of the feasting.
We are lucky enough to spend Christmas at the spacious house of generous relations, and they invite loads of family: sometimes there are 20 sitting down to dinner, of ages ranging from three to 85. “The more the merrier” is a simple fact.
I’d love a lie-in, though. If only we could get the children to wake at nine and not half past five.
Finally, I’d like to add that my indulgence and feasting lacks one dismal factor that ruins the modern Christmas for so many: and that is guilt. Do not be guilty! Sensual pleasure is at the centre of human life.
As the prophet says in Ecclesiastes, life is all vanity, tomorrow we may turn to dust, therefore we should eat and drink and be merry.
One of the many sad developments in education lately has been the death of Latin in state schools. Instead of being taught the classics, children today are educated in severely practical matters such as media studies, PowerPoint presentations and advertising. Employers no longer offer apprenticeships: they expect schools and universities to deliver their sales force, marketing people and phone handlers fully tooled up in the latest software.
I regret my own lack of Latin. I gave up at O-level, but wish I’d done A-level and then classics at university. I did English, but why do you need to go to university to read books? As the late Jeffrey Bernard once said to me: “Why can’t you read Pride and Prejudice in the ——- kitchen?”
I decided I would learn Latin and teach it to Arthur at the same time. In the kitchen. I had many reasons for this. First, if I am to continue to have my kids educated by the state – about which I have reservations, as I think the state is quite moronic – then they are never going to have Latin lessons, as they would at a private school. Under my expert tutelage, though, my children will become brilliant Latin scholars and therefore will have the pick of the universities. That means I save on school fees. Meaning less work. Meaning more time for loafing.
Latin, of course, is the basis of many languages, so a good foundation in it will help with French and Spanish. Another motivation was simply the pleasure in itself. Latin is something you learn almost for learning’s sake. It is perceived as useless. Teaching Arthur while learning myself would also be a way of finding out whether I was actually capable of doing a bit of home education.
I also want to be able to understand Latin quotations in books I am reading and maybe one day read Latin poetry and drama in the original. A further thought was to write Latin epigrams, have them carved in stone and leave them lying around in the vegetable patch.
How to start? As luck would have it, I had recently been invited by a Latin teacher at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford to talk to his students about the pleasures of idling. I asked him for some guidance and he recommended something called the Cambridge Latin Course. He also translated my first epigram for me: In Terra Libertatem Quaerimus, meaning, “We Seek Freedom in the Earth.”
I ordered Book One. It cost about a tenner. I sat down at the kitchen table with it. Here was a totally different world to the dry rote learning of Kennedy’s Latin Primer that I remember from school. The thing is absolute genius. I was speaking Latin after two pages. The language lessons are interspersed with fascinating stories about everyday life in Pompeii, chronicling the doings of beautiful slave girls, naughty dogs, avaricious merchants, skilful painters and drunken cooks.
Luckily Arthur, aged eight, agreed and thought it was great fun too. So now I read a few pages and then go through them with Arthur. I have also followed William Cobbett’s advice on teaching children. He writes that he simply left good books on the kitchen table for his son to find and read for himself, reasoning that one tends to learn much more quickly when the learning is undertaken voluntarily rather than being forced by authority.
Miraculously, this seemed to work and I actually had to drag Arthur away from the book because it was time for bed. “I just couldn’t leave it alone,” he said. The course also offers a host of back-up material online, which is another seduction for computer-friendly children. So may I convey to the creators of this marvellous work my deepest gratitude. Plato said that learning should be play and the Cambridge Latin Course really is fun. And if Latin is this much fun, imagine the larks we’ll have when we start learning Greek…
It is one of the principles of idle parenting that from as early an age as possible, say, three, the children will be forced to help around the house. Children are naturally busy creatures, and parents are naturally lazy, so to me it makes sense for the kids to do the work.
The problem is, they seem to like certain forms of work and dislike others. My children, for example, love nothing more than to help me stuff envelopes. Every six months or so, I send 500 copies of The Idler magazine to our subscribers. The children look forward to this moment for weeks in advance, and will sit patiently inserting magazines, sticking on stamps and making neat piles of jiffy bags in the sitting-room for more than an hour.
Our youngest child loves to go outside and do “jobs”, which generally means moving piles of matter from one place to another with his toy tractor. Sometimes I can enlist his help to do something genuinely useful, such as bring in the logs.
So far, so good. Child labour, Dickensian production lines, and it costs me nothing at all. But when it comes to the washing-up, it’s a different story. Shouting is required. They are disobedient. They run away.
Yes, we used to have a dishwasher. We still do have one, in fact, but it is broken. The day it broke was a day of rejoicing for me, for I had long waged a campaign against it. The problem with the dishwasher, it seems to me, is that it only does half the job. It does not put away. It does not empty itself. It does not clean the really difficult things – the porridge-encrusted pots and fatty frying pans. And worse, unless you expend a lot of effort in keeping up the levels of the various liquids it requires, it will one day deliver your dishes worse than when they went in: hot and with little bits of dirt stuck on like barnacles on a rock.
Then there is the undeniable fact that no one wants to empty it. The dishwasher is at best an expensive postponement of the washing-up and it certainly frees the children from any responsibility.
So this is why I rejoiced when the dishwasher broke down. Now we could return to a traditional means of washing dishes: together. I’ll do the washing, you do the drying, you do the putting away, and so on. My plan was that doing the washing-up ourselves rather than relying on an unreliable machine to do it for us, would achieve two desirable ends: one, it would mean that soon after the meal was finished, the job would be finished: no waiting for hours as the machine laboriously trundles through its cycles.
The other clearly was that we would get the children to help. But they resist, oh, how they resist! They tarry, they dawdle, they suddenly find the puppy hugely interesting. They stand staring when they should be working. They do go-slows, walking at snail’s pace towards the dresser, limply clinging to a single plate. They go deaf. “WILL – YOU – PLEASE – PUT – THIS – AWAY!” And then they will suddenly decide that there is a hierarchy to all this. Putting away is superior to drying up. Or sometimes the other way around. “I want to put away!” they will scream. On occasion, I have lost my temper and thrown them all out of the kitchen so I can quietly complete the job alone. That sometimes seems the easier option.
But no! Do not be tempted to give in. I firmly believe that by painfully accustoming them to helping in the kitchen, they will gradually see helping as a normal part of life. This will also help them to look after themselves as adults, to become capable human beings who don’t need mummies.
The real trick of course would be somehow to enjoy doing the washing-up yourself. And for the children to see it as a high-status job, on a par ideally with stuffing envelopes. As to how to achieve this, I am at a loss. I have tried singing jolly songs while doing it. I have tried to apply the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who said that you have chosen to do the washing-up and therefore it makes no sense to moan about it. I have tried to enjoy the sensation of the hot water and the satisfaction of leaving a clean and tidy kitchen. But still the nagging voice in my head says: I hate washing up.
It’s customary at this time of year for idle parents to moan about Hallowe’en. Most of us see it as a tacky American imposition, a commercialisation of an old pagan ritual. It’s also a lot of effort: all that carving out of pumpkins.
But we adults can learn to love it. It’s just a question of getting in touch with Merry England. For in fact Hallowe’en is not American or pagan in origin, but rather it is a medieval idea. The Eve of Hallowtide is the night before two consecutive medieval feast days, those of All Saints and All Souls.
On All Saints, or All Hallows, we used to remember all the Christian saints, hallow being an old English form for holy man, and All Souls was an affair where we remembered our own dead friends and relatives and prayed that their souls would get from Purgatory to Heaven. We also rang bells to hasten the upward progress of such lost souls.
These notions smacked of superstition to the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, and the feasts of Hallowtide, along with every other enjoyable feature of medieval Christianity, such as maypoles, bright colours, a belief in Purgatory, incense, bell-ringing, sex in the woods and polyphonic choirs, were banned in the Reformation.
Hallowe’en’s modern form, in which children wander from house to house dressed as ghosts or witches, extracting sweeties and biscuits from neighbours, seems to have begun in the Thirties in Britain and the US.
It is a conflation of the medieval custom of “souling” and the 19th-century invention of Mischief Night. Like wassailing, souling was the practice of groups of people, not just children, who would sing songs outside people’s houses and await small gifts of food or money in return. Mischief Night, which took place on different days according to local custom, was a night for pranks and japes.
The central element of Hallowe’en, though, and one I think we should support, is communion with the spirit world. Dressing up as ghosts and ghoulies surely recalls the original purpose of remembering the dead.
In Mexico, November 1 and 2 are for celebrating the Day of the Dead, when people decorate the gravestones of relatives and have little chats with them. The pumpkin makes an appearance: it is candied and the resulting confection is known as pan de muerto, or “bread of the dead”.
The dominant symbol of the festival is the skull. In a Hallowe’en-type touch, in some areas of the country, children approach strangers and ask for gifts. The festival is also marked by feasting and dancing.
I wonder if Hallowe’en popped up in America as a result of the Mexican influence there. If so, it has gone full circle, from medieval Spain to South America via Cortez, from South America to North America and then back to Europe again.
Well, clearly the children enjoy dressing up and being scary. For a night, they become lost souls, wailing and hoping to find their way from Purgatory to Heaven. Hallowe’en is our own Day of the Dead, or Eve of the Day of the Dead. So to celebrate Hallowe’en properly, November 1 and 2 should be declared public holidays.
Actually, don’t wait for an authority to give you the days off – take them off anyway. Surely if you declare yourself to be a pre-Reformation Christian, your workplace would, for PC reasons, be obliged to respect your faith?
Doesn’t pre-Reformation Christianity have as much right to declare itself as a recognised religion as Hindusim, Buddhism, Judaism or Islam? And for all its faults, one of the excellent features of European Christianity before 1535 was that it guaranteed us a hell of a lot of days off work.
Also, we need to dance and sing in the graveyards, feast heartily, eat candied pumpkin and put on skull masks, play tricks on our elders and do everything we can to shock the Protestant clergy.
What do Bertrand Russell, William Blake, John Ruskin, William Cobbett and John Stuart Mill have in common? The answer is that they never went to school. Yes, many of our greatest and most independent thinkers were educated by parents, tutors or by the best teachers: themselves.
Russell and Ruskin were educated at home by a series of tutors. Mill was taught by his father and by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Blake spent his youth wandering around Peckham Rye and seeing angels. Cobbett was largely self-taught.
That most un-Victorian of Victorians, William Morris, went to a chaotic early incarnation of Marlborough, where he learnt nothing, and resumed his education at home.
It is to this lack of formal education that the historian E.P Thompson attributes Morris’s revolutionary brilliance: somehow, he slipped through the brainwashing net and became a passionate enemy of Victorian competitive values.
Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were great skivers who never finished their Oxbridge degrees. Robert Louis Stevenson was of the view that “full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry” were a better education than sitting in a classroom having information drummed into your mind by Gradgrinds intent on producing obedient wage slaves.
I am certain that most of my education happened when I was on my own, reading, or staring out of the window, thinking. This is not to say I didn’t have a few brilliant teachers – I did.
And teachers can show the way, without doubt. But the way to get an education is to go out and experience life and read books. That’s it. And it is a process that should never end throughout one’s days.
It is true that two of the 20th century’s greatest novelists and free spirits, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, went to Eton, but then Eton is unusually unschool-like. The pupils are given a huge amount of choice, respect and freedom.
I offer these examples as proof of my point: as a method of delivering education, school is overrated. This was Bertrand Russell’s view. “Men are born ignorant, not stupid,” he wrote. “They are made stupid by education.”
Einstein wrote of “that divine curiosity which every healthy child possesses but which is so often weakened early”. In which case it makes sense for the idle parent to keep formal education to a minimum. Intellectual loafing centres such as Westminster or Eton are not an option for most of us.
In any case, who wants to slave all the hours that God gives to send our children to private school? And as the idle child is an anti-consumerist child, it doesn’t make sense to send him or her to school with the country’s richest families.
The problem is, I am also against the local comprehensive. This is because the comps are run by the state, which means their long-suffering teachers have to cope with a constantly changing educational ideology.
Right now the idea is targets and more targets, but doubtless the next Education Secretary will have a different set of brilliant ideas and the previous lot will be thrown out. If politicians could only leave the schools alone, teachers might be able to get on with teaching.
School terms are much too long; so are school days. The schools that produce the best results and the freest thinkers have the shortest terms and shortest days. They are not merely containment camps for pre-workers. (A thought: now that playschool has been renamed preschool by the fun-haters, why not go the whole hog and rename school prework?)
This is the spirit we need to bring to education: the less school, the better. We need to explore other options – home schooling, learning groups, home tutors.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of hard work or expense. This is where idleness comes in. It is precisely a love of learning and curiosity that schools tend to kill.
So it is the responsibility of the idle parent to implant a love of education. The way to do it is to lead by example and curl up with a good book.
An unhealthy dose of the work ethic is threatening to wreck childhood. Under a tyrannical work-obsessed government, years that should be devoted to play and joyful learning are being stifled by targets and tests. Leisure time is being invaded by the commercial and escapist virtual worlds of the computer.
Pushy parents don’t help by making childhood a stress-filled time of striving and competing.
Our children’s days are crammed full with activities: ballet, judo, tennis, piano, sport, art projects. At home they are entertained by giant screens and computers. In between, they are strapped into cars and made to listen to educational tapes. Ambitious mothers force hours of homework on bewildered 10-year-olds, hanging the abstract fear of “future employers” over their heads.
Then they buy them a Nintendo Wii, the absurd, costly gadget that’s supposed to bring some element of physicality to computer games. It’s only a matter of time before children have their own BlackBerrys.
I think of the New Yorker cartoon of two kids in a playground, each staring at a personal organiser and one saying: “I can fit you in for unscheduled play next Thursday at four.” All these activities impose a huge burden of cost and time on the already harried parent. They leave no room for simply mucking about. They have the other unwelcome side effect of making the children incapable of looking after themselves. When they are stimulated by outside agencies, whether that be course leader, computer or television, they lose the ability to create their own games. They forget how to play.
I recall when our eldest child, a victim of chronic over-stimulation by his anxious parents, screamed “I need some entertainment!” during a bored moment. A chilling comment, particularly from a five-year-old. What now? What next? These are the questions our hyper-stimulated kids will ask. What has happened to their own imagination?
There is a way out of this over-zealous parenting trap, a simple solution that will make your life easier and cheaper. It will make your kids’ lives more enjoyable and also will help to produce happy, self-sufficient children, who can create their own lives without depending on a Mummy substitute. I call it idle parenting and our mantra is: “Leave them alone.”
The welcome discovery that a lazy parent is a good parent took root when I read the following passage from a DH Lawrence essay, Education of the People, published in 1918: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”
To the busy modern parent, this idea seems counter-intuitive. Aren’t we always told to do more, not less? All parents have a nagging sense that somehow we are doing it all wrong and that more work needs to be done. But the problem is that we put too much work into parenting, not too little. By interfering a lot, we are not letting children grow up and learn themselves. The child who has been overprotected will not know how to look after himself. We are too much in children’s faces. We need to retreat. Let them live.
Welcome to the school of inactive parenting. It’s a win-win situation: less work for you and better for the child, both in terms of enjoying everyday life and also for self-reliance and independence. I am not advocating slobbish neglect. (Maybe I went too far with my idle parenting when I dozed off on the sofa in front of the woodburning stove, while “doing the childcare”, as the ugly modern phrase has it, to be woken by the screams of a toddler who had placed his hands squarely on the hot metal and burned his fingertips.) Clearly we don’t let our children jump out of windows or go about with unchanged nappies. There is carefree and there is careless, and there is a difference.
But to create a household free of care would be a wonderful thing. It has become obvious to me, watching our three children grow up, that the more they have been ignored, the better. The eldest had a surfeit of anxious parental supervision and is still the trickiest and most needy (although we’re working on it). The second had a little less attention and she is more self-sufficient. The third was born on the bathroom floor and has had to get on with his own life. And he is perhaps the best of all three at playing. Certainly he is the most comical.
The great thing about children is that they like being busy. Since parents like being lazy, it makes sense for the children to do the work. This idea was partly explored in the 19th century, when children as young as five were sent into the factories. The fact that meddlesome liberals have since introduced child labour laws does not need to prevent the idle parents exploiting their own offspring.
One morning, not so long ago, V and I refused to get up. I imagine we were hung over. At about nine o’clock, the bedroom door swung open and in walked Arthur, then six, with two cups of tea. A lot can be achieved by lying in bed. Simply by doing nothing, you can train children to do useful things. During the last holiday, we found we were lying in bed till 10 or 11. By abandoning our kids, they had taught themselves how to get up, make themselves breakfast and play.
Paradoxically, the idle parent is a responsible parent because at the heart of idle parenting is a respect for the child, a trust in another human being. It is the irresponsible parent who hands the child over to various authorities for its education and care, whether that is childminders, schools, CBeebies or the virtual world of Habbo Hotel. Or it is the parent who tries to impose his own vision on the children and does not simply let them be.
Another great advantage of being idle is that it avoids causing resentment in the parent. There is nothing so corrosive or pestilent as resentment stewing in the breast. Imagine making all those sacrifices, putting yourself out for your children, going without, and then they go junkie on you. No, there is no room for martyrs in the world of the idle parent. Our happiness comes first. And that is the right way round. As a cab driver said to me the other day: “My kids are happy because we’re happy.” Do not suffer. Enjoy your life.
The idle parent is a stay-at-home parent. Not for us costly leisure pursuits at the weekend. We reject the cheap thrills of expensive padded plastic fun palaces, zoos and days out in general. We find fun in our own backyards. We make aeroplanes out of cereal packets and it’s amazing how many catching and tickling games you can play with your kids while sitting on the sofa.
The idle parent is a thrifty parent. We don’t work too hard and therefore we can’t expect to be rolling in cash. With thrift comes creativity. “Waste is unpoetic, thrift is creative,” as GK Chesterton wrote. With no money, you start to discover your own inner resources. You make things and draw. Put a pile of A4 paper on the kitchen table, along with a stapler, scissors, crayons and glue, and you’ll be amazed at what your children come up with. Forget digital gewgaws. Go analogue. It’s more fun and a lot cheaper. Put a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. Fun does not need to be expensive.
We don’t care about status and career advancement and how we are perceived by others. We are free of all of that rubbish. We simply want to enjoy our lives and to give our children a happy childhood. What greater gift could there be from a parent? If our children tell their friends in later life that they enjoyed their childhood, I would count that as a great achievement. Better to have a happy childhood than a high-achieving one that brings a big psychiatrist’s bill in adult life.
Idle parents are sociable. We recognise the importance of friends. They lighten the burden. A myth of modern society is the idea that “you’re on your own in this world”. Instead of talking to friends and neighbours, anxious people seek advice in books, websites and internet forums. We resist asking for help or admitting weakness. Be weak! Give up! You can’t do everything. Lower your standards. Get friends to help you. Organise little nurseries at your house where parents can chat and kids can play while you ignore them.
I love DH Lawrence’s idea of childcare. He says babies should “be given to stupid fat old women who can’t be bothered with them… leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the streets or the playgrounds, and take no notice of them.” Do not view them as raw material to be moulded into an obedient slave for the workplace of the future. Let them play. And yes, get your friends around. Life is so much easier when the work is shared. Friends bring laughter and joy. There’s no sadder sight than the lone parent, pushing her child around the gloomy municipal park, trying to tell herself that she is having a good time.
My idea of childcare is a large field. At one side is a marquee serving local ales. This is where the parents gather. On the other side, somewhere in the distance, the children play. I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me. I give them as much freedom as possible.
But the life of an idle parent is not so easy. Children do not always adapt to the anti-consumerist model that the natural parent promotes. They want stuff. Children get in your face. They make a terrible mess. They scream and whine. And the mother and father seem to disagree on pretty much everything, from paint colours to mealtime manners, as a matter of marital policy.
There are more worries. Is it mean to deny a child an iPod Nano for his birthday and instead give him a ball of string and The Dangerous Book for Boys? Should I really put a broadband connection in the tree house? Should I work even harder so that they can go skiing and wear expensive trainers? Would I be less grumpy if I drank less alcohol?
Sometimes we doubt our own gospel. So over the coming weeks, I hope to outline an enjoyable parenting philosophy in Weekend, while acknowledging that it isn’t always easy.
I will confess my many parenting errors. I am a disaster-prone, chaotic layabout and so should warn you not to listen to my advice. Certainly my friends say the idea of me advising other parents on childcare is absurd.
With that caveat in mind, let us go forth, throw away the rule books, forget what other people think and enjoy family life and all its joys and woes.
Manifesto of the idle parent
* We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work
* We pledge to leave our children alone
* That should mean that they leave us alone, too
* We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children from the moment they are born
* We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals
* We drink alcohol without guilt
* We reject the inner Puritan
* We fill the house with music and laughter
* We don’t waste money on family days out and holidays
* We lie in bed for as long as possible
* We try not to interfere
* We push them into the garden and shut the door so that we can clean the house
* We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small
* Time is more important than money
* Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness
* Down with school
* We fill the house with music and merriment
One of the worst things about being a parent to small children is the poor quality of the stuff you have to read them. There seems to be a glut of over-priced and over-sized rubbish these days. How I wish someone had told me that to read, for example, Postman Pat, was to hurl yourself into a purgatorial parallel universe, where time has come to a stop and human beings are condemned to suffer for eternity in a pit of agonising boredom and despair.
I might say the same for the over-rated The Gruffalo: a specimen of worse poetry it would be hard to conceive. It was such a huge liberation when a literary critic friend confirmed this negative view of the book, which had been hovering unarticulated in my subconscious. And why are the pages so thick? To fork out £5.99 to inflict such torture on oneself seems the height of madness. The author of this non-scanning doggerel needs to go back to Lord Byron and Edward Lear to see how it’s really done.
The jury is out on Richard Scarry. I loved poring over the pictures as a child, but I have a suspicion that Scarry and his industrious world might have been commissioned by a sinister cabal of top government officials and business leaders to condition a love for work in small children, with the idea that they would grow into obedient employees.
For similar reasons I am disturbed by my three-year-old’s love for Tractor Ted, Tractor Tom and Bob the Builder, all of whom seem to me part of this programme to promote the work ethic in children. It’s only a matter of time before we get Call Centre Kevin. We idlers have to be on our guard: the Puritans used literacy and books to brainwash children in the hope that they would then convince their parents of the benefits of righteousness. One commentator in the late Stuart period claimed that through their newly literate children, “parents have been restored to the knowledge and practice of morality and religion”.
The safest bet is to rely on classics and avoid anything published since 1965. You should take story time as an opportunity to catch up on your own reading. Read them A Christmas Carol, The Water Babies, Treasure Island, Animal Farm, William Blake, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and the original, gory version of the fairy tales. To read the Narnia stories out loud is a great pleasure for the adult. Anything unreal and fantasy-like: nothing worse than kids’ stories that try to reflect reality.
I love the parent-free and screen-free world of the Famous Five. It is also easy to find old hardback editions of Enid Blyton books in charity shops. The idle parent is constantly thrifty: reject Waterstone’s and Amazon and embrace the second-hand.
Arthur also loves The Beano, but it is increasingly hard to get hold of. Our newsagent says that out of his 2,000-people catchment area, Arthur is the only one who buys The Beano. What are the other children doing? Playing computer games? Sniffing glue? Rather worryingly, DC Thomson has launched a trendy, high-energy version called Beano Max, which combines the Bash Street Kids with competitions that require the use of paying phone lines, video game features and items on celebrity footballers. When even The Beano is Americanised, what hope is there?
Reading a lot of books to the children and having a lot around the house is an easy and inexpensive way of making them clever. You must have come across those studies which say that bookish households produce brainier kids. And brains are very helpful. As my friend, Slack Dad, tells his kids, be clever and you could avoid having to get a job in the future. You’ll be living on your wits, meaning more idleness all round.
The way to thrive in 2009 is simply to join the Idler’s Do Less Campaign. It’s simple: you just do less. That means less shopping, less driving, less holidaying, less working, less spending. And more sitting around at home, more reading, chatting and drinking. Doing less is cheap and easy and it’s kind to the environment. The era which privileged the busy high achiever is coming to an end. That system has been found wanting, and there is a new world out there, a world of more fun, more freedom, more time for reflection and contemplation, community and cooking, making and mending. John Calvin – you have so much to answer for.
A Do Less t-shirt is on the way.
And watch this space for a new feature: The Idler’s Guide to Thrift: How To Escape From Capitalism and Live Like A King.
TH
"For Jerome, idleness had little in common with laziness. His notion of idleness in the world beyond his fiction was one of contemplative productivity with the minimum of fuss."