The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (5 page)

There are many different styles of parenting. In Papua New Guinea, kids have many mothers. People look after each others’ children. Seven-year-olds move hut and go to live with another family. In Sparta, weak babies were left to die on the hillsides. In Plato’s
Republic
, where women and men are equal, women are not required to raise their own children, who are instead sent to state nurseries. In the old Norse world, well-off widows often had their children fostered. The practice of wet-nursing was common in Europe until modern times. Today in India or Mexico or rural Africa, families are
extended and everyone helps with the childcare. The sculptor Barbara Hepworth famously gave up her twins for adoption because she wanted to make art undisturbed. Following the Second World War, two million mothers brought up their kids without a dad. Today, fathers are taking a more active role in helping with the domestic tasks.

I offer these reflections in order to prove the point that historically, philosophically and socially there are many different conceptions of what being a parent is all about, and probably one of the least common is the lonely, stay-at-home mother of the Western imagination. Things do not have to be like this. You can choose your own way.

Motherhood is not a role. It should not actually be a full-time job. The children don’t need so much mothering. It has become a full-time job in the West – more than full-time – since we have become so very isolated. Today, we commonly see family life where the husband leaves at 8 am and returns at 7 pm and all the company the mother has during the day is a washing machine and daytime television. The boredom of the young mother is life-wrecking, mad-making. I remember Victoria calling me at my office in tears of desperation when our eldest child was small. I now wish I had spent a lot more time at home during those first two years.

The boredom of the full-time mother is compounded by her guilt: she feels guilty because she is not enjoying the company of her own baby, her own children. She feels a failure for not enjoying motherhood. How far short she falls of the ideal of motherhood presented in magazines and TV ads. Why can she not enjoy herself, like the celebrities who constantly crow on magazine covers about the joys of parenting? Because – I say again – motherhood is a myth and woman was not made to shop, clean and burble at baby all day on her
own. She needs to combine motherhood with other creative activities and sociability. The non-working mother is another myth, or at least the invention of the Victorian imagination: it was then a sort of status symbol to have a swooning, trussed-up, inactive wife. But this is an anomaly. Everywhere else in the world, and in history, women have worked. They have worked alongside their husbands in the fields: medieval woman was equal to man in this respect. Women were beer-brewers, bread-bakers, gardeners, businesswomen:

So says ‘The Perfect Housewife’, the charming poem that concludes the Proverbs in the Old Testament.

So the idle mother does not actually avoid work. On the contrary, like the idle father, she embraces it. Work of her own choosing, that is, independent work, autonomous work, creative work. What she avoids is that terrible, fearful, spirit-sapping invention of the industrial age: the full-time job. What she avoids is the terrible slavery of the corporation. For the idle mother, it is not a choice between ‘going back to work’ or ‘staying at home’. She explores that vast and rich
territory between those two barren poles. She creates her own job, one that she can fit around her children or even stop doing for a few years. And having made the conscious decision to both work and look after the children, she enjoys both. It is our habit of seeing life as a series of burdens imposed on us by outside forces that creates misery. Once we recognize that we are free and responsible creatures the burden is lifted. We must smash artificial dualisms.

V., for example, has made the existential decision to enjoy playing with her children. She doesn’t play with them in those life-draining, spirit-sapping hellholes called playgrounds, she plays with them on the floor at home. When we employ others to look after our kids we tend to make ‘childcare’ into a burden. I know this from experience. For three years we employed a full-time nanny. (How did we afford it? Re-mortgaging. We went into debt, and that gives you an idea of how desperate for help we had become.) And in a sense, it did work: because, isolated as we were, having a nanny was a way of creating an extended family. (By the way, have you noticed how today’s globe-trotting grandparents are too busy to babysit? I have been sorely disappointed by my own parents’ reluctance to help out in our household.) V. did a little paid work, but mostly she was at home with kids and nanny. But after three years we realized that we had started to depend on Claire. She was wonderful, very special, a fantastic person. And she seemed to be so much better with the children than we were. That could make us feel inadequate by comparison. ‘Your kids are naughty with you and good with her,’ a friend pointed out. ‘That’s not good for you as a family.’ We realized that he was right: we had come to dread weekends when Claire was not working and to long for Monday mornings when she would return. So that arrangement came to an end
and we did everything on our own for a year. The house was less tidy but the year on our own was effective in creating a sense of responsibility, confidence and indeed pleasure in ourselves as parents.

Many mothers in the West behave oddly. They talk about their disapproval of women who ‘go back to work’ while complaining about ‘having to’ look after children and constantly shuffling them off to nurseries or childminders or nannies. I’m not so worried about the effect of this on the children, who are after all extremely adaptable and resourceful until we train them in the dark arts of dependence, but on the mothers who have this attitude. For this version of motherhood is a socially constructed concept, a myth. And acknowledging the fact that motherhood is a myth is a liberating realization, since it means that we are all free to do it how we like. All paths are valid. Therefore it is every mother’s responsibility to create her own unique version of motherhood. And if that means she works hard, fine. If that means that she lies in bed all day eating chocolate, then also fine. Nancy Mitford may not have been the ideal nurturing mother, but I’d rather have her as a mother than Tabitha Twitchet any day (although I do support the way Tabitha Twitchet turns the kittens out into the garden while she prepares for her tea party). Make your own myth and be confident about it. Find right mindfulness. The babies will be fine.

The same, of course, is true for fatherhood. Some dads like playing, some do not. There are no rules. The quest for perfection must be abandoned. You have to make your own decisions and be a dad without resentment.

In
Emile
, Rousseau attacks those well-to-do eighteenth-century mothers who sent their babies out to wet-nurses. But
in some cases, they may not have had the choice, for example, mothers who could not produce milk, or when the mother died in labour. Or perhaps just when she might want to continue some sort of social life. So what? Over-mothering is too much work and in any case can lead to a simpering dependence on the part of the child. The best quality a mother can offer her own children is her own happiness, contentment, felicity, independence. That comes first; that is the priority. I don’t mean that she should be a vain and selfish pleasure-seeker. I am talking about the importance of what Rousseau calls
amour propre
, self-love of a dignified nature, not
amour de soi même
, which is a selfishness.

Invent your own versions of motherhood and fatherhood. There are no rights or wrongs. It’s up to you. But I would certainly advise against that cloying, sickly, sentimental, self-conscious mothering which is so often in the West combined with neglect. Children can get on with it on their own. D. H. Lawrence has some stern words to say on the creed of sentimental mothering:

Let them play. Let them run in gangs. Plant the seedlings in good compost and let nature do the rest!

And mothers and fathers need to invent ways to avoid loneliness. Open your house to others. Put the kids in the front room and leave them alone to play together, while the adults chat and drink wine in the kitchen. A sort of vague idealism has invaded our idea of childhood. We have in our minds the idea of the perfect parent, but perfection can never be attained, partly because we don’t know what perfection is. Do not be told what to do. Become responsible. And it’s your own mental attitude that must come first. Says Rousseau:

Keep a light touch on the tiller. Stay in the background, like the ideal ruler in the
Tao Te Ching
, whose people barely realize that they are being governed. Once the children are past the age of one, dads are just as capable of looking after them as mums. And because they seem to be more naturally idle than women, according to our philosophy, men will make good mothers. Men tend to leave the kids alone more readily than the anxious mother, burdened as she is by the commercially produced ideal images of magazines and adverts.

The cause of the idle mother is not helped either by those
whingeing female newspaper columnists. They are simply careerist self-promoters who have discovered that whingeing pays. So they whinge and create whingeing in others who follow their example. But the others who follow their example do not get paid for their whingeing. They do it for free. So we need columnists who write about how much they enjoy their lives, family and all: not in a saintly, self-sacrificing, mimsy fashion but in a lazy-and-loving-it style. Ban newspapers and magazines from the house: they are enemies of the idle mother with their over-priced and deceitful fantasies.

Bad parents make good parents. The worse the better. Drink more alcohol. Work less. Do less. Give up. I was once interviewed by an American women’s magazine, and they were particularly tickled by my line: ‘Kids love a tipsy mom.’ Drink a glass of wine at bathtime.

I’m not saying for a moment that you stop loving, hugging, kissing and praising your children and calling them beautiful and wonderful. But all this will come naturally if you enjoy your life and stop resenting their intrusion. Put the baby in a papoose and go up to the allotment. Hold on to your pleasures.

Similarly, do not cosset baby. Both John Locke and Rousseau recommend cold baths. And yes, Locke provides further inspiration for idle parents. He came from a thrusting Puritan family and was educated at Westminster School, where he was a friend of Dryden. Despite his occasional attacks on idleness, Locke is a good read: comforting and inspiring. It seems that we had the same problems back in 1693 as we do now: Locke, for example, remarks on ‘the great dissoluteness of manners [among children], which the world complains of’.
Some Thoughts
was one of the inspirations for Rousseau’s
Emile
(though Rousseau attacks Locke in various
particulars) and like
Emile
it is the source of much good food for thought as we search for a definition of the idle – or fully responsible – parent.

While the medieval age produced many manuals containing advice on the care of babies and small children, I’m not sure whether anyone bothered, like Locke and Rousseau, to set down the principles of an ideal education. Indeed, idealism itself was a sort of by-product of the Protestant revolution, because innate in Protestantism is the idea that you can mould your own destiny and particularly the destiny of your children. With this new idea of man’s power to self-define comes the idea that children themselves can be moulded likes pieces of clay. Nurture, in other words, becomes more important than nature. Locke writes: ‘the difference to be found in the manners and abilities of men is owing more to their education than to anything else…’ Certainly the Puritans took a close interest in bending children to their will.

Locke appears to agree with Rousseau on many practical matters. Both recommend a good helping of liberty. Both oppose excessive civilizing. Clothing should be loose, Locke says. We must avoid ‘strait-jacketing’. Similarly, Rousseau can’t stand the custom of swaddling. Food should be simple: Locke is in favour of a vegetarian diet for the first three or four years of a child’s life. ‘Abstain from flesh’ was the phrase he used. Like Rousseau also, he recommends that children from a young age should grow accustomed to extremes of temperature. Yes, the idle parent is not indulgent. Locke even suggests that parents give their children special leaky shoes: