The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (6 page)

Sensible stuff: just think how much whining time, cleaning-boot time and general fuss over wet feet that could be saved with Locke’s simple precaution. This apparent harshness concerning wet feet expresses another splendid philosophy. The idle parent is not in the business of making a dandified, civilized, pampered, whining little encumbrance. We are interested in the fleet of foot, the burning flame in the eye, the natural child, the tough, self-sufficient boy and girl. Firstly, because a stray child leads to less work for the parent, but also because children ought to be free. The sole of the shoe actually separates us from nature and from the earth. Wearing shoes is a step towards loneliness and isolation. So let the shoes come off wherever possible, and let the wellies leak.

Locke likewise would have the children running about outside: ‘Another thing that is of great advantage to everyone’s health, but especially children’s, is to be much in the open air and very little as may be by the fire, even in winter… Thus the body may be brought to bear almost anything.’

Other pieces of wisdom from Locke include the need for much sleep and the importance of restricting children’s intake of alcohol, which suggests that there were a lot of tipsy kids wandering around seventeenth-century England: ‘They ought never to drink any strong liquor but when they need it as a cordial and the doctor prescribes it.’ Drugs for the adults, drugs for the kids. I must say that I think it was a cruel blow to parents when the manufacturers of Calpol removed its
drowsy-making ingredient. If there’s one thing that modern medicine could do for us, it would be to give us a mild sleeping draught for babies. Maybe I will try beer.

Locke is wary of coddling: ‘[Parents] love their little ones, and ’tis their duty; but they often, with them, cherish their faults too. They must not be crossed, forsooth; they must be permitted to have their wills in all things.’ Like Rousseau, he warns that such spoiling is bad for the child. It is bad for the parent too: it is expensive and time-consuming to minister to their every whim. Locke argues that we are in danger of creating vain little tyrants: ‘when the little girl is tricked up in her new gown and commode, how can her mother do less than teach her to admire herself, by calling her
her little queen
and
her princess
?’ So it is, he argues, that we ourselves teach the vices, and we live to regret it. Certainly my six-year-old daughter often looks at me with a little simpering smile and says in a self-consciously girly voice: ‘Do I look pretty?’ But how can I complain, when it is we parents ourselves who have taught her these attitudes?

Locke is quick to point out, however, that he does not advocate severity. ‘I consider them as children, who must be tenderly used, who must play, and have playthings.’ Be strict when the children are small, he says, and give them more indulgence and liberty as they grow older. Too often, he says, people do it the other way round, but: ‘imperiousness and severity is but an ill way of treating men, who have reason of their own to guide them, unless you have a mind to make your children, when grown up, weary of you, and secretly to say within themselves,
When will you die, Father?
’

Spoilt children and restrained adolescents: it’s a problem we see everywhere. And being restrained, the adolescents pull yet more tightly on their leashes and build up a huge head of
steam, which will find an outlet somewhere, sooner or later, often in anti-social forms like mugging or joy-riding. But be strict with your children when they are small and gradually freer as they grow up, and you will end up with children who are your friends.

In my own case, my mother was strict about bedtimes and the like because she was more interested in her career than in my brother and me. In fact, round our way in 1972, she was known as ‘the woman who hates babies’. As we grew up, we were more or less left alone. But this gave us space to play and to look after ourselves. So my memories of childhood are mostly happy and I never resented my mother for being a career woman. Although I did crumble with embarrassment when she shrieked ‘Darling!’ at me from the other side of the playground, in her Biba skirt and outsize earrings.

Locke is of the view that ‘
slavish discipline
makes a
slavish temper
’. He also warns against bribing children with ‘apples or sugar-plums’, as that will begin to train them in the values of the consumer society and make little materialists of them:

As idle parents, we want unmaterialistic children, not least because all this stuff that they want demands a considerable amount of work. I keep hearing about mums who take unpleasant work in factories so that they can buy their sons
the expensive trainers that they have been sold by the ad men. Start early: do not value money. The less they want, the less you will have to work.

Another nice bit of mothering advice in Locke is to tell the kids off in private and praise them in public. He notices that parents tell their kids off in public in order that they are seen by others to be firm and strict. I do this myself: I tell them off in front of others so I can be seen as a ‘good’ parent. But this humiliates the child. Better to praise them in front of others.

Locke also wants to let them play.

Like the Taoists, Locke recommends keeping your rules to an absolute minimum: ‘let your rules to your son be as few as is possible…’

Recently V. left our youngest two children with me and the au pair while she took the eldest on a ten-day holiday. Her travelling companion had left her own one-year-old twins at home with a nanny, her mother and her husband. Far from being traumatized, those children, while their mother was away, stopped waking at night and became less prone to tantrums and grizzling. ‘I don’t know what I was doing, but I know it was my fault,’ said their mother. It was a similar story
with my kids: it’s true that the smallest cried out ‘Come back, Mummy! Come back, Mummy!’ when I put him to bed on the first night, but after that he adjusted and both children were less whiny than usual.

So if you have problems, mothers, with your child’s sleeping, then fight against our sentimental conditioning and take a break. Go away for a week. See friends. Drink. Get some sleep. The babies will be fine. In fact, they will benefit from the break. It will help them to break the apron strings. You are not as important as you think: the mothering role can be taken up by people who are not the real mother. Think of adoption and fostering. And all those babies whose mothers died in childbirth. My own mother was really brought up by her grandmother, as her own mother was busy running a flower shop. Ukrainian women today leave their two-year-olds with their mothers while they seek their fortunes in Western Europe. Chinese children are often brought up by their grandmothers. Are we to restrain these mothers’ freedom by forcing them to stay at home, imposing our own sickly sentimental morality on other people?

Give your kids a break. Give yourself a break. Do not suffocate them and do not allow yourself to be suffocated. In any case, you may well not feel endless undying devotion and maternal gooiness for your baby. Many women, conditioned by the lies of
Hello!
magazine, in which highly-paid actresses gush about the wonders of motherhood, expect that they are going to fall in love with their babies, and then become clinically depressed if they don’t.

Children can adapt to all sorts of mothering styles: there is no best way, and the idea of a ‘best way’ is generally promoted by the representatives of the oligarchy. For example, in the UK today, women are encouraged to take full-time jobs
while they put their babies in nurseries. Not so long ago, they were encouraged to stay at home while men went out to earn wages. In both cases there is no absolute morality involved, merely a piece of economic expediency dressed up as an ethical code. These decisions are up to the parents and as long as the child has plenty of love around it, then it can adapt to virtually anything. We should all stop beating ourselves up: there is no ideal mother and the very idea of a perfect mother is a tyrannical concept used as a method of control by the people in power. I’m an anti-idealist: the very notion of an ideal immediately invites failure because by definition we can never live up to it.

You don’t even need to go to the effort of telling them off about minor issues such as table manners. Says Locke: ‘Never trouble yourself about those faults in them which you know age will cure… Manners… I think are rather to be learned by example than rules; and then children, if kept out of ill company, will take a pride to behave themselves prettily…’ So let the children make up their own minds to behave well, rather than behaving well under fear of authority. ‘Fear not, the ornaments of conversation and the outside of fashionable manners will come in their due time.’ Locke warns against that habitual nagging that parents tend to oppress their children with. He says that to ‘rate them thus at every turn is not to teach them, but to vex and torment them to no purpose’. I think about my own mistakes with my eldest son. I feel that I have vexed and tormented the poor boy to no purpose many times, shouting at him to use the knife and fork properly or stop wriggling in his seat or slumping at mealtimes. Maybe I should ignore these minor misdemeanours. What am I doing by nagging him so? Locke is right. We waste an inordinate amount of time and energy in attempting to correct faults
that, given time, will correct themselves. And the idle parent is above all a conserver of energy. We do not exert ourselves when it is pointless or harmful to do so.

We hear that in Norway children do not start school until they are seven. Before that, they are simply taken by teachers into the woods, where they play. In the UK small children waste a lot of time learning about rainforests while sitting inside a classroom, not seeing the natural world which is on their own doorstep. By delegating ‘nature’ to something far away, we forget the wilderness outside our own front doors.

Nature is free, fun and a wonderful teacher. Indeed, one of the intentions of Rousseau in
Emile
was to create the ‘natural child’, uncivilized, free of urban prejudice, bright of eye and bold of countenance. Children bred ‘
à la Jean-Jacques
’ would run free in the woods. Rousseau’s Emile is brought up in the countryside, away from the degraded values of the town. Children should be running around outdoors, playing freely,
not tied to Gradgrindian desks. These days we not only confine our kids all day in schools, we confine them in cars on the way home from school, and then confine them to the computer and telly when they get home. Manacles and fetters everywhere. We turn childcare into a problem of containment. In the olden days children complained of being stuck in school when the sun was shining, and when the bell rang they ran out into the fields. At the age of eight, I walked a mile to school and back every day without parental supervision. Now when the bell rings an anxious, fearful parent is waiting at the gate, to take the cosseted kid either to some over-organized ‘activity’ or straight home, where he will plug himself into the digital straitjacket of the Internet. He might even ‘talk to his friends’ online. Wow. Now you have to buy a computer and pay for a broadband connection in order to talk to a friend. In the olden days talking to a friend was free.

Where the man-made world is very expensive, nature is free, physically, mentally, spiritually and financially. Where the man-made world is endlessly frustrating, nature is deeply satisfying. Nature is the great generous opposite of mean and greedy commercial culture. It costs nothing. It looks after itself, or at least needs little tending. And the relationship between nature and man can be a beautiful thing indeed, if we think in terms of working with it rather than conquering it and taming its wild ways. That is the Puritan idea: pull out the weeds, plant things in straight lines, wipe out pests with chemicals, plough, work, toil and isolate each plant. Conquer nature, subdue it, following what Aldous Huxley called an ‘unfortunate remark in Genesis’. But the child of idle parents is a wild child.