The Idler

Leave them alone!

From Idler 37, 2006

Tom Hodgkinson has some tips on childcare for idlers

First let me say that I am in no way writing from a position of smugosity. I have three children under the age of six, love them all but they also drive me completely insane at times. If anything, this article is a record of the mistakes I have made with a few ideas of how to make things easier, or at least more enjoyable, in the future. Or I should say, from now.

As an idler with three small children, people say to me: looking after children is not very idle. Well, no. In many senses it is not. You have to get up at seven or earlier. Nights are broken. Children make an unbelievable amount of mess so you are constantly cleaning up. They have to be bathed, fed, clothed, put on the school bus and collected from friends’ houses. They whine. However, we as a society in recent years have made things much worse for ourselves, and much worse than they need be, by applying a work ethic to childhood. Children these days seem to be endlessly busy. Where we have jobs, children are expected to have endless “activities”. Ballet, tennis lessons, music class. Every day they are being trained in something or other rather than just being left to play. A woman I met on holiday once said how much she hated this phrase “art project” that gets bandied around. Why can’t they just muck around? Why the rampant over-scheduling with all the extra work it involves for parents?

Now, before moving on to my tips for responsible parenting, which to me is synonymous with idle parenting, I would like to explain the intellectual philosophy that I’ve based the tips on. It comes from the following lines from an essay called “Education of the People”, written in 1918 by DH Lawrence, and published today in the anthology Phoenix.

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.

My friend the great Guardian columnist Slack Dad was much struck, as you might well believe, by these lines when I showed them to him last year. We were sitting on a grasy knoll, drinking and trying to ignore our children so you can see the appeal.

DH Lawrence is absolutely right. There is far too much inteference in the lives of children. This interefence is usually carried out under the excuse of “health and safety”. Oh Health and Safety! How many crimes to humanity have been committed in thy name? I understand, for example, that in nursery schools around the country, which are now known by the unappealing term “pre-schools”, running around is not allowed. Running around not allowed! For children of three and four? Surely they should be doing nothing but running around! But no. We have decided somewhere along the line that three-year olds should be prepared for the discipline of school in pre-schools, where their natural urges will begin to be tamed. Apparently pre-schools have an educational remit. Why? They should be free to run wild. The best pre-school would be a large room with garden attached, twenty kids and two adults at one end ignoring them.

Now Lawrence was not of course recommending slothful neglect. We don’t let our children eat nails. What he meant was that we should allow them space, physical and mental. “It is this in respect that we repeat, leave him alone. Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone.”

The “leave them alone” philosophy, or “benign neglect” as it is sometimes called, seems in direct oposition to everything that we have decided to believe. You are supposed to play with children, give them attention, give them “special time”, “mummy time”., “quality time”. You are asked to make “play dates”. Thus it is that childcare becomes a burdensome task rather than a pleasure. We are taught by TV supernannies how to look after our children. Now supernanny has lots of good tips, but she can end up making us feel like bad parents because we’re extremely unlikely to be able to live up to the high standards she exhibits. Well, if you don’t feel like it, don’t do it. It’s surely worse to play a game with your kid under suffrance, resenting every second, than to ignore them and read the paper while they find something to do. “Bill, play with Fred,” I heard a mother command her husband. “I thought play was supposed to be a spontaneous thing,” came the lugubrious reply. Now of course, we all do play with our kids, but to do it on command and at pre-appointed times defeats the object.

When we over-schedule and over-stimulate our kids, and conform them to the clock, we don’t leave enough to their own imaginations. They will come to rely on pre-organised “activities” without acting for themselves. I think of the great New Yorker cartoon which satirised this work-ethic trend in parenting. Two kids are standing next to each other, both staring at their electronic organisers. “Well,” says one to the other. “I can fit you in for unscheduled play next Thursday at four.” This we may call the Doctrine of Activities and it is to be avoided for both your sakes.

With our eldest son we definitely made the mistake of over-stimulating him, whether playing with him or letting him watch lots of TV. We were in his face. “I… need… some… entertainment!” he shouted the other day. Already he is in danger of becoming a passive consumer of entertainment, rather than a creator, a player. The younger two have been more left alone, simply because there wasn’t time to give them the same amount of attention as number one, and the result is that both are showing signs of being more self-sufficient.

It’s amazing how resourceful children are, once given the opportunity, once left alone. The other day, in a fit of pious rage, I stormed into the sitting room and turned the television off. To be sure, they objected at first. But soon they were playing their own games. Later I realised that I was washing up while all three of them played near me in the kitchen, without hassling me! How I achieved this miracle, I don’t know, but I suspect it was by leaving them alone. By leaving them alone, also, I have disocovred, it is even possible to do something enjoyable like read while you are looking after them. Carry a book around with you to take out at odd moments. Yesterday I even managed to have a short nap on the sofa while the baby played around me on the floor. Henry is now playing next door as I write this.

The “leave them alone” philosophy is better for the kids and less work for the grown-ups. If kids grow up being accustomed to look after themselves, then they will surely turn into independent adults who do not look for external agencies such as employers or governments or commercialised entertainment systems to sort their lives out for them. They will be like the Famous Five, the Narnia children or Wendy, John and Michael in Peter Pan: parentless and free.

We should perhaps even leave them alone when they fight, rather than rushing over to tell them off the moment one hits the other. For whatever reason, children do hit each other. They just do. It is something they will grow out of when they realise that there are less painful ways of settling disputes. Certainly however much we tell them not to hit each other, they continue. Hitting may even be seen as a sign of refusal to accept submission. Indeed, we should be in awe of the natural imperious spirit of children.

Leaving them alone also works in the case of bad behaviour. When you feel you are about to lose it, simply walk out of the room. Ignore the tantrums as far as you possibly can. This is one are where I would concur with supernanny: ignore the bad behaviour. Kid are little drama queens: their zest for life displays itself in tantrums as well as fun and laughter. And the hissy-fits are soon over, and the more we avoid feeding them the sooner they will be over.

In my ideal world I would also give the kids far fewer toys, particularly the plastic ones with five million bits that get lost or have to be cleared up. The best toy, I have often thought, would be a block of wood. Nothing to lose, nothing to break and not too offensive to the parents’ aesthetic sense, either. A simple block of wood can also be recreated into anything by the child’s imagination. In fact, one episode of The Simpsons featured a TV advert for a toy called “Log!” which was simply, a log. The joke, of course, was the ingenious way that marketing men have of packaging something without value and making it into a special toy with a price tag. But still, log. I thought that was a good idea.

When it comes to toys, our youngest seems to get more pleasure from a wooden spoon and a saucepan than from the brightly-coloured edcuational toys with batteries that run out that we give him.

Having said all that, we got a lot of pleasure from Arthur’s remote control Dalek. Although I notice that he hasn’t played with it since 30 December.

One approach that really does make life easier is to combine things that you like doing with the things that they like doing. An example of this is making things in the workshop. They seem to really enjoy getting nails and handing me hammers and playing amongst the mess and rubble. And I am doing something useful, liike making a bench. Painting cupboards was something we did together the other day. The other

Other tricks that work are combining drinking with childcare. Drinking makes you less grumpy (albeit temporarily) and less inclined to be addicted to Purtian modes of behaviour. It looens the hold of the internal Puritan and kids respond well to that.

Getting other children over to play makes your life easier because they play with each other and leave you alone and it gives the other parent a break. And the children are happiest when with friends. Indeed, one problem that we all face is the nuclear family and the lack of neighbourliness. Four people squashed together in a house and told to get on with it with only the TV for guidance is not a natural situtaion. It’s no wonder we find things tough. So you need to live in a quiet street of terraced houses, with lots of other familes in a similar situation. Then the other kids will pop round and play. I grew up in this sort of situtation and we would be out in the streets all day. Now I live in the country and I really wish we had one or two families with small children living in our tiny village, but there are none. So instead we invite friends to come and stay. That seems to ease the burden: the more adults there are, the better, as well as the more children. When I lived in the city we had a wonderful lodger, and his presence made us all behave a little better.

It’s also wise to live near granny and grandfather, simply for the childcare possiblities, especially as the kids grow older.

The other tip is always, always, always: get enough sleep. The terrible cruelty of young children is the sleep deprivation they impose on their parents. The answer is for both parents to do as little work as possible in the first two years, to enable lots of extra time for naps. If this is impossible, then make sure you go to bed early. That sounds like pious advice from the Idler, but it’s better to go to bed at nine and feel awake the next day than wander round in a mist of grumpiness because you haven’t had enough sleep.

One final bugbear I have is the Doctrine of Consistency. “As long as you’re consistent,” they say, “it doesn’t matter what your rules are.” Well, Hitler was consistent, wasn’t he? Consistency is evil and in any case, impossible. In the family, how can you possibly be consistent? Every day is different. Partners accuse each other of having “mood swings”. Well of course you have bloody mood swings, otherwise you’d be a bleedin’ robot. The drive towards consistency is only ever going to make us feel bad because we will inevitably be inconsistent. Soemtimes you are going to sit round the table together and eat dinner. At other times you might sit on the floor and have a picnic. If you only ever do one and never change the routine then things are going to get mighty boring.

So our new low-effort approach to childcare seems to have three definite advantages: one, it is easier than trying to keep them entertained all the time, two, it is cheaper, and three, it produces more confident children who are able to look after themselves and will not constantly seek a parent-substitute in later life, whether that be employer or spouse. The idling approach is cheap, easy and effective. Minimize authority and maximize freedom, that should be our plan. And “leave them alone” our mantra.