It may seem odd for an idle parent to recommend banning telly. “Free baby-sitting” is how the TV is often described by harried parents. You can sit the little ones in front of the screen and let them gape for an hour or two while you get on with those important jobs, such as cleaning the kitchen, or reading your Evelyn Waugh novel, or leafing through the seed catalogue.
Another defence of the television is that it offers a kind of family bonding opportunity. And I suppose it’s true that we’ve enjoyed watching Doctor Who or Robin Hood together.
Despite these undoubted advantages, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is best to unplug. Yes, disconnect from the state-funded image stream (the BBC) and from the commercial ad-filled pap providers (Sky TV). In the first case, we spend £150 a year or thereabouts in order to get EastEnders and CBeebies, neither of which are as remotely fulfilling as being read an Edward Lear poem, or a tale from The Arabian Nights, as far as the child goes. Television is an electric story-teller and we should be telling the stories ourselves.
In the case of Sky TV, why pay upwards of £30 a month just to get more rubbish interspersed with ads from usurious money-lenders and the manufacturers of plastic toys? Add to this the cost of the set itself – and I understand that people are now spending in the region of £2,000 for giant telescreens – and it all starts to add up.
By its technique of constant repetition, TV will also condition in your children a love of the wonders of the consumer economy. This can be costly, too. It makes them want stuff. The whole point of advertising is to create wants and small children are easily persuaded. I remember one child coming into the kitchen and asking for some awful plastic thing he’d seen advertised. When we said no, he retorted, tragically: “It’s only £19.99!” Ban the telly and you will also be happily in accord with lofty ethical principles. “The selling of lifestyles to children,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury this week, “creates a culture of material competitiveness and promotes acquisitive individualism at the expense of the principles of community and co-operation.” I am constantly trying to create an anti-consumerist child: they are so much cheaper. They may even become community minded and coperative, ie, do more housework around the home.
And anyway, your child need not be deprived of the wonders of modern life. Instead of the telly, watch videos or DVDs. This means you can still dump the children in front of the screen while you read Vile Bodies, but you know they won’t receive the commercial propaganda.
We have an old, very small set for watching videos and a computer for watching DVDs. The tapes and DVDs themselves can be picked up for almost nothing in charity shops or rented from the local library – a fantastic resource, by the way.
Then it is in with quality art such as Tom and Jerry, The Simpsons, Shrek and Zoolander, and out with the forced jollity of Balamory and the annoying squeaky American voices of Dora the Explorer and the ridiculous Boots. Ah, bliss!
I admit we have had to suffer the deprivation of not being able to watch Doctor Who on Saturday nights. So I have bought the Doctor Who DVDs, which we can watch when we like.
We were also a bit sad, as adults, to have missed Lark Rise To Candleford. So, instead, we did something far more enriching and enjoyable in the evenings: we read the books.
Add to that the possibilities of YouTube, which even a neo-Luddite such as myself concedes can be quite wonderful (we watched The Clangers on it the other day) and there really is no excuse for telly at all.
The only problem you face is the enormous wrath of the TV Licensing Authority, whose employees seem to find it impossible to believe that you might voluntarily decide to refuse telly and assume instead that you must be out to defraud the State. Hence their letters become increasingly heavy and threatening in tone.
Sky TV also finds it hard to believe that you want to disconnect from its service. After unplugging, we were pestered for at least two years with calls wondering why on earth we had disconnected and did we know that we could sign up for half price. “We don’t want it!” I was screaming by the end.
Yes, the unplugger must face trials. But it’s worth it.
There’s a simple remedy for the exhausting hardships that life can throw at the idle parent.
It’s not advertised on the television or in the papers, because it costs nothing and therefore no one makes money out of it. But indulging in it will without doubt improve your quality of life. I’m talking, of course, about that glorious care-charmer, the nap.
The destruction of the nap has been a victory of Calvinist culture. Perhaps this is because the nap is so deeply pleasurable, and as we know, pleasure was frowned upon by the puritanical tendencies of the post-Medieval age.
In our pell-mell Western economies, napping is seen as a waste of potentially productive time. Instead of taking 40 winks, we tend instead to power ourselves up with that ubiquitous, costly and dangerous stimulant, coffee.
As the Protestant work ethic spreads its joyless gospel around the world, societies that used to nod off after lunch are dropping the habit. In Italy, for example, shops now stay open during the siesta hour to compete with the guy across the road. And in China, workers are giving up their afternoon doze, fearful that Western visitors will consider them lazy.
Thankfully, idler-friendly countries remain, such as Mexico or Laos, where naps can be taken at any time of day without any sense of guilt.
The nap is enjoyable for its own sake, particularly to sleep-starved parents. “I used to think booze and sex would bring me joy,” wrote P.J O’Rourke after becoming a father. “Now it’s a nap.”
A nap is useful, too. American research suggests that nappers are healthier. Napping reduces stress and lowers the risk of heart attacks and strokes. A study of pilots found that a 26-minute nap in the cockpit (while the co-pilot flies) increased alertness by 54 per cent.
One report says that simply knowing that you are going to be able to nap later in the day reduces blood pressure.
I know from experience that I am far more likely to be grumpy on days when I have not managed to nap. Sleep deprivation damages mood and, conversely, the nap is a great promoter of domestic harmony. The morning is improved by its anticipation, and the afternoon and evening are improved because you are not exhausted. There is also that immensely healing sense that you are being kind to yourself.
For this reason, the idle parent should make napping an absolute priority. If you are at home with the children during the day, napping should be easy. The kids need a nap, too, so – while they sleep – resist the urge to get things done, unplug everything and go to sleep as well.
At weekends, take turns with your partner to nap. One idle dad friend of mine offers to give his wife a break by taking the children to a matinee. Having installed them in the cinema, he creeps back to the car and dozes off.
If you are stuck in the dark satanic mills of the modern workplace during the day, then more ingenuity may be required. On fine days, the park bench may afford a 20-minute kip in your lunch break. Deck chairs are very comfortable and are offered by many municipal parks.
If it is raining, then creep into a church and find a quiet pew for some dozy contemplation. Or if you drive to work, then use the car for a bit of shut-eye. I have heard of dedicated nappers managing to take a snooze in public lavatories, or even at their desk.
And if you are worried that your brain may not be able to switch off, then simply drink a pint of real ale or a glass of wine at lunchtime, and remember – no coffee! God gave us alcohol to help us relax: we were not made to toil for nine hours or more without respite.
I’ve often thought that the life of an idle parent would be immeasurably improved if socks didn’t exist. Socks sow discord and spread consternation. Every family has sock problems. “Where are my socks? How come I never have any socks?” asks Dad. The harried parent will look at its child’s feet for the fifth time that morning and see that they are still sockless. “How many times have I told you? Put your socks on!” he or she will scream.
Sometimes I give up and let them wander to the car sockless, or just jam wellies on their feet and hope that no other parent notices. I’d like to send them to school without socks but I think the child really would look too heart-breakingly neglected, with nothing in between its cherished feet and its Clark’s Mutronix. (Whatever happened to shoelaces, by the way? But that’s another story.)
Now, these sock problems are not, as we tell ourselves, our fault, for being disorganised, chaotic and generally useless, but are actually the fault of the sock. The sock is simply a bad idea. Wherever it goes it brings sorrow and bad vibes.
The medieval solution was not to have socks at all but tights, which were a cross between socks and trousers. The bottom area was covered by a tunic and on the feet you could wear long pointy shoes. This seems an excellent scheme because there would be no socks to get lost. It would be difficult to lose the tights because of their large size. It is the small size of sock that causes the problems.
The other great problem with socks is that they separate so easily. Finding the twin causes the idle parent a huge amount of unncessary work, prompting many of us to give up completely on the idea of pairs as one step too many towards perfection. Odd socks surely are not a great evil in the overall scheme of things. I more or less gave up on pairs years ago.
I’ve never seen a sign of a sock in depictions of Roman life. They seemed to wear sandals with bare feet. They were hardy. The more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that socks are the sign of a sissy culture. They are rather pathetic and unmanly, not to mention, as is well known, extremely ugly: nothing more ridiculous than a man naked apart from his socks. Did the Chinese sages wear socks? No. Did the Egyptians wear socks? No.
I looked up the sock historians. They tell us that the modern sock had its birth in the Elizabethan period, when the whole idea of knitted woollen socks was promoted as an employment scheme for the poor and indolent, something to keep them away from being too idle. Yes, I knew it! The sock by its nature is anti-idle. It’s just a way of keeping people busy, whether in its manufacture or in its everyday management. The Elizabethans were notoriously anti-idle, always starting up Houses of Correction and forcing people to work against their will.
But just imagine the time savings that would be made in a world without socks, and all the carousing, fencing, dancing and singing that could more enjoyably fill those hours that are currently lost to the evil sock.
I think it would also be sensible for the idle parent to let the children wander around sockless. This would toughen up their feet and accustom them to extremes of temperature. The barefoot child is a happy child. To be seen barefoot in the street would no longer be a sign of neglect. It would be a sign of the parent’s most assiduous care for the welfare of the child.
John Locke, writing about children’s feet in 1693, advises parents to give their children leaky shoes in order to toughen them up, so that like poor people, they “come to be so reconciled by custom to wet in their feet that they take no more cold or harm by it than if they are wet in the hands.” Locke reminds us that Seneca the Stoic used to bathe in cold spring water in the depths of winter.
Yes, the idle parent is a harsh parent. Socks make toil. Socks are for wimps. Save money. Save time. Save marriages. Make your children strong. Ban the sock!
‘Why have you got all these animals?” asks my mother when she visits our farm. For some inexplicable reason, she is not a fan of chickens wandering in the kitchen, dogs jumping up at her or cats on the sofa. “You can’t cope with your children,” she says. “Why add extra burdens?”
We have 16 dependent animals in our household: 12 chickens, two cats, one dog and one pony. We used to have a white fluffy bunny, but she escaped and was last seen lounging at the gate with a wild rabbit. And next week the animal count will dramatically rise to 10,016, when our first nucleus of bees arrives.
Animals are a great friend to the idle parent, because they harmonise work and play. In the main, they are very useful: the cats keep the mice and rats away; the chickens produce eggs and more chickens; the pony produces valuable manure and could be used as a form of transport when the world collapses; and bees make honey. Last year we killed two pigs and are still eating their meat. The food is unquestionably of a higher quality than anything from a supermarket and the animals live a free and uncontained life.
Animals are also enjoyable. Yes, they need feeding, but is it work or play to feed the hens and collect their eggs? Or to throw scraps into the pig pen and watch them snuffling and grunting? Such tasks are great fun and can be carried out by very small children (at three, Henry is perfectly capable of feeding the hens). In this way, the children can make a genuine contribution to the running of the household, which is surely better than using leisure time to watch television?
To learn where food comes from will help prevent the children from becoming ignorant slaves of supermarkets. Plastic wrappings, pre-sliced food, over-designed labels and an excess of packaging all tend to separate us from nature and make us forget that food comes from real animals.
There’s an issue of self-reliance here, too. The chickens produce a surplus of eggs and so the kids can learn the fundamentals of local barter and trade. Last week, Arthur swapped six eggs for a jar of marmalade with Trevor, the school bus driver. I think some entrepreneurial ability is useful in an idle child because it may help to avoid the necessity of getting a boring job for money in later life.
Animals will also do child care for you. Delilah plays with the cats for hours and the dog is always a great playmate. The boys run around the yard with their friends trying to catch chickens. Riding is a great pleasure and girls particularly enjoy looking after horses.
Clearly, too, to learn kindness and respect towards animals is an important skill. “For a man to be trustworthy,” writes William Cobbett in Cottage Economy, “the boy must have been in the habit of being kind and considerate towards animals; and nothing is so likely to give him that excellent habit as his seeing from his very birth, animals taken great care of, and treated with great kindness by his parents, and now-and-then having a little thing to call his own.” The biggest animal I was allowed when small was a hamster. Toby was a source of great pleasure, although one couldn’t say he was useful. I suppose hamsters could lead to cash: a 12-year-old local girl has a tidy little business breeding and selling hamsters to the pet shop.
Now I can do what I want, I am seriously tempted by the idea of a cow. Before the Industrial Revolution, most households would have had a cow, in the same way as most households had a pig or two in the backyard. Until the 1970s, the house where I live kept a cow and the farmer’s wife made all her own butter, milk, cheese and cream. She would never dream of buying any of them. Cow keeping may involve some extra work, such as milking, churning, leading out to pasture and so forth, but surely toiling for their parents is precisely what kids are for?
I hope you’ll forgive me a moment of idle parent smugness. But I think this story helps to prove that a life of pleasure can continue alongside child-rearing.
I recently found myself at Castle Cary station in Somerset with three children in tow and an hour to wait for the train to Paddington. How would I cope? By nature lacking foresight, I had forgotten to bring any toys or amusements. I sat down in the waiting-room among the other passengers and gave the eldest child some of those tourist pamphlets to leaf through, while the smallest one sat on my lap.
The kids seemed to be quite happy, so I gingerly pulled a book from my pocket. It was The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, the 1953 classic that describes Huxley’s experiences on mescaline.
It begins with a quote from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” I read on. Huxley discussed the history of mescaline research. I stopped to answer a question about how long the train was going to take to arrive, and then carried on reading. Huxley swallowed four-tenths of a gramme of mesacaline and awaited the results. The children sat on the floor and played. I read on for eight pages.
As if this wasn’t good enough, the lady opposite me, a grandmother, said: “I just wanted to say that I think it’s absolutely wonderful that you are managing to read a book while looking after three children.”
Inside I rejoiced. You see, world! Idle parenting works! You can feed your mind while the little ones learn essential skills of self-management.
Huxley has some thrillingly relevant ideas around idle parenting in Island. This 1962 philosophical novel tells of an oil company man’s visit to the island community of Pala, which has developed a mode of living that combines the best of Western science with the best of Eastern mysticism: modern physics meets the Buddha.
Island is full of fantastic ideas for living, including what the Palanese call Mutual Adoption Clubs, or MACs. The idea is that each family connects itself to a network of 20 or so other families. At any time, a child from one can go and stay with the family of another for a while. This system provides an escape valve from the confinement of the nuclear family. As Sulina, a Palanese mother, explains: “Escape is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged – and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement – to migrate to one of its other homes.”
The benefits to the child of taking a break from its parents are enormous. Have you noticed how your child seems more responsible and polite in other people’s homes? And how life is made easier when your children have friends over?
The MAC idea is also a boon to the overworked adult: both parents are now expected to work full time and be “good parents”; to clean, cook, shop, earn money and pay bills and try to squeeze in some pleasure somewhere along the line. And the source of many of our problems is the nature of the nuclear family. It’s simply too small. 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. Let’s give each other a break and open our doors.
Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson is speaking at the following events in March:
Tom Hodgkinson and Ed Mayo
Tom discusses consumerism and children with Ed Mayo, author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children For Profit.
At the Glasgow Aye Write Book Festival, Mitchell Library and Theatre, 201 North Street, Glasgow, G3 7DN
www.ayewrite.com
Wednesday 11 March, 6pm, £6/7
Idle Parenting and Ukuleles
Tom discusses the new book and leads a singalong with his uke.
The Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1, Brampton Park Road, Wood Green, London N22 6BG
Tuesday 17 March, 7pm, admission free
Anarchy in the Middle Ages
Tom discusses the amoral “free spirit” movements that popped up all over Europe in the medieval era. With early music from Princes in the Tower. Part of the Think In Kingston festival.
At the Studio Rose Theatre, 24 Kingston High Street, Kingston
Think in Kingston website
Box Office Telephone: 0871 230 1552
Wednesday 18 March, 8pm, £6
Here’s a bit of US research which suggests that there’s not enough play in kids’ lives.
It seems that schools there have been cutting back on breaks and free time, since a 2001 Act which took time away from creativity and play and towards maths and reading.
Problems with Wood
OVER THE LAST two months, we have been mainly concerned with keeping warm. Now that we have two wood-burning stoves, writes Tom Hodgkinson, the amount of work for me in wood-chopping and preparation has nearly doubled.
The major problem has been the wood supply. The wood I bought this time last year had all run out. We had in the wood barn the load we’d bought in the summer, and another load I bought in December. Neither really burned well. I have spent hours kneeling in front of the fires and blowing on them to keep them stoked up. The wood is simply not seasoned enough. I am learning that hard woods like oak need at least a year and preferably two to dry out properly. Chop a log open and you can see the damp wood inside.
(more…)
Alain De Botton has called The Idle Parent the “most helpful and consoling child-raising manual I’ve yet read”, and the Sunday Times called it a “godsend to parents”. In the book, Tom Hodgkinson argues that kids and adults alike need to play more and work less. We put far too much effort into parenting. If we leave our kids alone, they will become more self-reliant and we’ll be able to lie in bed for longer.
Oliver James said: “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.”
On this website we hope to gather together useful information and brain food for idle parents everywhere, all intended to help on the journey to liberation. Down the left hand side, you’ll find an archive of Tom’s Idle Parent columns written for the Daily Telegraph. Each has a comments section: please keep any comments brief and practical and refrain from criticising other people. Idle Parents are always courteous.
There’s a discussion forum covering the various issues that interest idle parents, from anti-consumerism, to what books to read, to tips on thrift. Again, when contributing to the forum, please avoid jokes and criticism of others, and try to keep the posts short and to the point. Longer letters can be sent by snail mail to The Idler, PO Box 280, BARNSTAPLE EX31 4QT UK, and we’ll select the best for publication.
We have also started a gallery where we’ll show images of idle parents, from George Orwell to Homer Simpson.
Plus there’s a links section which will connect the idle parent to relevant organisations.
THE MANIFESTO OF THE IDLE PARENT
We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work
We pledge to leave our children alone
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 don’t waste money on family days out and holidays
An idle parent is a thrifty parent
An idle parent is a creative parent
We lie in bed for as long as possible
We try not to interfere
We play in the fields and forests
We push them into the garden and shut the door so 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
We reject health and safety guidelines
We embrace responsibility
There are many paths
More play, less work
Idle Parenting Discussion
Games We Invented
Idle Parent Gallery
Things to do without leaving the house
Favourite kids’ books
Favourite books about parenting
Miscellaneous tips
Money saving tips
"All pubs are terrible places now. I mean you wouldnt have known a decent pub at your age, I shouldnt think. They didnt have fucking music. They didnt have cigarette machines. They didnt sell the chemical beer. They were for proper drinkers, not for fucking yobs, hooligans. I want to go into a pub and meet interesting people, not to look at a lot of people sitting on the floor drinking out of tins. I cant stand it. Mostly people in your age group. Ruin pubs."