The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (15 page)

The ukulele encourages a rhythmic sort of playing style, which means you can get people dancing without the need for drums. At a wedding recently the PA briefly malfunctioned and the music stopped. To fill the gap I strummed a few chords on the uke, and everyone continued dancing.

Music can also happen spontaneously. Yesterday I was conducting an all-day leave-them-alone educational experiment, which consisted of me lying on the sofa, dozing and reading, while the children busied themselves around me. Henry played with a tractor and trailer; Delilah talked to herself in a delightful sing-song voice. Arthur, who is generally the TV- and computer-addicted one, played with the pots and pans all day. First he put a colander on his head and sat on a pile of pots, saying: ‘I am the pots and pans king.’ Later he arranged the pots in another heap and banged them in turn with a wooden spoon. ‘I’ve made a musical instrument.’ However, Arthur seems terribly inhibited when it comes to dancing. I don’t know why. Maybe he has already lost the wild and uninhibited nature of small children.

You could go even further, and remove them from any kind of formal music and give them more exposure to the music of nature. This is the line taken by Masanobu Fukuoka, that great Japanese natural farmer I mentioned earlier.

I think The Beatles are a very good musical education for children. All the family can love The Beatles. The younger ones love ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, ‘Octopus’s Garden’, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’, while us adults love ‘Something’ and ‘Across the Universe’. And make songs up with your kids. It’s surprisingly easy:

There’s an example for you of a little tune I made up with the kids.

So sing, parents, sing! Dance around the kitchen! Sing while you clean and cook and wash. Be joyful, be cheerful, cast resentment from your heart. Our singing confidence has been removed by the
X-Factor
judge in our heads. ‘Oh, I can’t sing!’ we say. Well, I can’t sing – I mean, I really can’t sing – but I sing anyway. I have even stood on a stage in an Antwerp nightclub and sung ‘Seventeen’ by the Sex Pistols to ukulele accompaniment in front of 300 young Belgians.

One idea is to start a family jug band. All sorts of household implements can be used as percussion instruments, and elastic bands can be stretched over boxes to make twangy instruments. Perhaps someone can make a buzzing noise with a blade of grass. I love dancing slowly round the kitchen table, children behind me, in the manner of that wonderful scene in Jim Jarmusch’s film
Down by Law
, where the three principle protagonists dance round their jail cell singing: ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!’

Music and dancing should be woven back into the fabric of everyday life. You don’t have to be good at it to do it: your skill level doesn’t matter. It is done for its own pleasure and who cares if you’re not the best? Music and dancing are the perfect ways to enjoy time with your kids: they are harmonizers, they bring you to the same level. They are not an adult imposition, nor does the adult resent doing it, which is certainly the case with some children’s activities (playing on the swings, for example).

Sing all day, play music, dance, like they do in Mexico. We have become too civilized, restrained, closed off. And go and listen to the music of nature. How do you do that? We’ll find out in the next chapter.

Activities are the scourge of modern childhood. ‘Give them something to do’: in that phrase you hear summed up our attitudes to childhood, and indeed life in general. Give them something to do, to keep them out of mischief. We have to give them something to do because we have made them incapable of finding things to do for themselves, the poor creatures. So we give them ‘something’: anything, thing undefined, just a thing to keep them out of our hair. And finally, that word ‘do’. It’s a sickness of our culture, that ‘doing’ is seen as superior to not doing, even if the ‘doing’ might even cause harm.

The modern parent fills the child’s day with enclosing activities. From the enclosure of school we enclose them in the car, and then we drive them to more adult-organized
activities: ballet class, football, extra French, drama club, all in the service of making them into competitive entities. I hear that some Manhattan parents are even hiring Mandarin nannies so that their children can learn to speak Chinese, the better to compete in the global markets when they are older! Everywhere kids go, adults are right there, shepherding them around, tapping their behinds with sticks to ensure that they walk through the prearranged gates, monitoring, checking, controlling, measuring, protecting. Play is commodified: we take them to costly fun palaces, danger-free fun zones made of plastic, when right under our very noses places to play are freely available. I remember that the best places to play were old rubbish tips, where we could find springs and fridges and old bits of car. The best places were the places we had discovered for ourselves. We played in the margins. We didn’t need adult-designed playparks. I remember even as a kid being keenly aware that there was something wrong with adult-organized fun. It was disabling.

In the house children resist the lovingly decorated playroom, the planned schemes. They play on the stairs, in the sitting room, in the hall. They move the furniture around and make dens. In the woods they build dens and little fantasy Robin Hood camps, away from the interfering gaze of adults. Let them play! Leave them alone! Let them take an old blanket and stretch it over two upturned chairs to make a roof. Let them build dams over streams. Let them make maps, burn matches and carry Swiss Army knives. The self-made places of play, the self-discovered zones: these are the best.

Remember the wise words of Hundertwasser, the Austrian artist and architect: ‘As art cannot be taught and there are no human teachers, there are only two teachers, if you want a
teacher at all: one is your own childhood, your own self; the other is nature.’

We contort our lives to fit in with modern industrial clock tempos. All parents know how assiduously children resist being forced into punctuality: ‘How many times do I have to ask you? PUT YOUR SOCKS ON! We’re going to be late.’ From an early age we train their spirits to be enclosed by time as if to prepare them for working nine-to-five shifts in a call centre. By constant insistence we train them in the ethical value of punctuality. But they, by nature, escape from clock-time and into the joy of simply being in the present moment whenever they have the chance.

Give them something to do! How many parents have ruined an afternoon with a well-intentioned drawing or painting or cooking session. All starts well. Mother and children – or father and children – spend twenty minutes or so happily creating together. It’s wonderful to see the little ones using their hands, mixing ingredients together and slopping stuff around! The parent’s vision of self-expressing tots is happily fulfilled. But then things start to go wrong. The kids mess around. They spill paint on their clothes, they paint their bodies. They throw things. The kids find this rupturing of the adult’s carefully laid plans terrifically amusing. The parent does not, before long losing his or her temper and screaming: ‘Get out! Out! All of you!’ and ending up icing the biscuits or clearing the paints away all alone. The moral: don’t bother! Children can play very well if left alone.

Sporting activities present a problem for the idle parent. I remember being aghast when Victoria booked tennis-coaching for Arthur, then aged five, every week at nine on Saturday mornings. What sort of madness was that? Saturday mornings are for lying around doing nothing. Now, following
five days of chaotic early mornings getting them ready for school, on Saturdays we finally have the chance to take tea to ourselves in bed and stay there as long as possible while the kids wreck the house. But instead we voluntarily organize a load of expensive hassle, all because of some half-formed middle-class parental dream about creating a star tennis-player. As luck would have it, after a term Arthur decided he didn’t want to continue with tennis lessons and so we knocked it on the head. Here’s a tip: don’t let them get anywhere near the football team or the rugby team. You will find that your weekends are completely ruined by having to drive them to matches all over the place. Organized sport is the enemy. Skateboarding, yes. That is free, you can do it anywhere and there are no parents involved, or very few. But team sports? No, no, no.

That’s not to mention early indoctrination into the pernicious creed of competition. There is something horribly Victorian about team sports. Somehow you are supposed to give up your individuality to a wider cause. And good team players are often unpleasant people: ‘Jock’ is the expressive word for the type in the States. Team sports are all about beating the other team. They prepare young men for vicious competition in the workplace. But games don’t have to be competitive, and any anthropologist will tell you that old-fashioned societies, which have more egalitarian systems of government, have their own games and sports but without the cut-throat Western competitive element.

Although I should add that I do not object in principle to learning how to swim – of course not, for as Locke wisely wrote:

It’s also fun. So swimming? Yes. But let’s keep the adult-organized part of their lives down to a minimum.

Try not to fill children’s days. Let them live. The idle parent tries to unite two things: the now and the future. We must try to enjoy our own daily lives while ensuring that our children are enjoying theirs. We want to give them a happy and free childhood. And we also want to ensure that they can look after themselves later, helping them to create their own lives, avoiding the stress, worry and ill health that so often result from operating in the conventional working world. Many over-mothered men cling to the petticoats of a large corporation in later life (to steal a phrase from the anthropologist and
Continuum Concept
author Jean Liedloff). I want my children to be free, and I’d be happiest if they never got a job but found another way to earn a living. And even if they do follow a more conventional path, I hope they will do so with a free spirit and a lightness of touch. Too much activity will tend to make them dependent on outside authorities for the structure of their daily lives. Time is free; they should be given as much free time as possible, in order to feed their own imaginations and create self-reliance.

Children have a wild nature, as the best children’s books acknowledge. For example, in
Where the Wild Things Are
Max sails off to a parent-free world of wildness. Children want to go to the wild places, where they are free from authority and at liberty to create their own worlds. Some of my most vivid
childhood memories are of playing games on hay bales or in the park or in trees. We need the smell of wood and leaves in our faces. However well-intentioned, the adult’s imposition of activity on the child may actually be a form of control: we have a preconceived idea of what we think the child should be doing and then we try to impose that vision (often with disastrous results because the children delight in disrupting our schemes).

If we over-regulate, control and confine our children, we also run the risk of their wild spirit breaking free in some horrible, antisocial and destructive way. Think of joy-riding, glue-sniffing, window-smashing, car-scratching, mugging. The free spirit emerges somehow, sooner or later, like a bottled jinnee.

And what is the principle reason why we enclose our children? Fear. Fear of abduction, fear of paedophiles: ‘You can’t be too careful these days,’ is the phrase I hear at the school gates. Yes, you can be too careful! We are all too careful! We have allowed stories of very rare abductions in the papers to make us think that this sort of thing happens all the time. It doesn’t! There are something like ten abductions by strangers a year in the UK. The chance of it happening is one in millions. The fear of the bogeyman is out of all proportion to the reality. It is newspapers and TV news shows that create this fear. Because that is the very nature of the medium. Newspapers are penny dreadfuls, cheap gossip sheets, purveyors of tittle-tattle in order to sell advertising: ‘Latest on The Ripper’. They are vendors of salacious crime stories. When an abduction story appears in the papers, how the manufacturers of child restraint equipment must cheer. Sales up! Share price up! Happy investors! Rich board members, growing fat on fear!