The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (11 page)

Our community school could be a wonderful place. Employ a bright young man fresh out of university to teach your kids in the morning. Imagine being Wordsworth and Dorothy and Southey in the Lake District, with the young Mr De Quincey teaching English in their little self-administered school. In the days of Locke (himself educated at Westminster) and Rousseau, it was taken as understood that the middle-class family would have a tutor. Locke argues that it is better to give up purposeless luxuries and spend money on education: ‘Spare it in toys and play-games, in silk and ribbons, laces and other useless expenses, as much as you please; but be not sparing in so necessary a part as this. ’Tis not good husbandry to make his fortune rich and his mind poor.’

Locke devotes several pages to advice on how a tutor should be selected. Let’s imagine that you have found a tutor. And you are going to help with your little school yourself. As are other parents. You have three eleven-week terms, each with a week’s holiday in the middle. That’s 150 days of school each year. If the tutor is to teach four hours a day, then you will have to pay him or her for 600 hours. Let’s pay him well and give him £20 an hour. So that adds up to £12,000 a year. Between, say, four families with two kids, that’s £3,000 per year, or just £1,500 per child. When you consider that some families spend £10,000 a year or more on nurseries and childcare, and when you consider the enormous expense of private schools (which can now only be afforded by the most avaricious of hedge-fund managers) then £1,500 seems a relatively trifling expense, to have your own community school with your own teachers of your own selection.

Imagine how quickly your children would learn and how much time they would have for mucking about. The teaching itself would be more intense, leaving more time for fooling, more fun. More trips, more gardening, more physical work. More time to learn crafts and useful skills like cooking. This is indeed the experience of parents who have taken this step: when learning is undertaken voluntarily by the child, and when it is done in small groups, then learning progresses quickly. This leaves more idling time, time to run free, unsupervised. It also helps the child to develop the qualities of fearlessness, self-reliance, courage and confidence, which are marks of the child schooled in idleness.

The principle here is to free your mind. There are many alternatives to full-time state education. And the freedom-seeker must start with a big question: do most secondary schools educate, or do they bore kids into submission and
prepare them for a powerless life of jobs and money worries? We idlers want to be free of all that. Liberals will argue that state education is good, and certainly there are people from working-class backgrounds who are grateful for their education. But perhaps these are people who would have educated themselves anyway? The bright ones, like Dr Johnson. And there are likely to be more examples of people who went to state schools who have been reduced to a state of slavery.

Every child should be encouraged to follow their own path through life. Indeed, when we look at some of our best thinkers, it is striking how many didn’t go to school but were self-taught or taught by tutors: Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley (left Eton at sixteen when his eyesight failed), William Blake, William Cobbett and John Stuart Mill all fall into this category. In Tudor times schools tended to spring up around a particular teacher who had moved to the area and might last only a few years. The system was immensely flexible. This is the sort of system I look forward to, one of total flexibility and freedom. We must create our own new schools. We must take education into our own hands, whether that means changing existing schools or creating new ones. And we don’t have to wait to be given permission by anyone. We can do what we want.

I hate toys. Toys are toil! In the idle parent’s utopia all toys would be banned. No Polly Pockets, no Hungry Hippos, no Buckaroos, no Operation, no Lego, no Mega Bloks, no Fuzzy Felt, no Bob the Builder jigsaws, no Tweenies or Fimbles, no Mousetrap. (Especially not the new, much worse Mousetrap. What was wrong with the old one?) In other words, no tiny plastic pieces scattered to the four corners of the sitting room. No tiny pieces that you have to clear up at the end of the day because children, in their joy (and rightly), don’t care about mess. Little tiny plastic pieces that pierce your feet when you stumble around the house with a hangover, that you trip over on the stairs, that you sit on. Once I waited till the kids were all at school and their mother was also out.
With great pleasure, I filled three black bags with old toys and left them by the bins. And the amazing thing was no one ever noticed. Not one single toy from that pile was ever missed. This indicates that perhaps we are more materialistic than our children. They say they want such and such a toy, but their desire is temporary. Perhaps they are more interested in the realization of a wish than the ownership of the object. Parents are more aware of the sweat and the toil that has been expended in order to purchase a particular toy. Toys are money, toys are work, toys are mess, toys merely console the child for the awful tragedy of having being born into a world that tortures itself with hard work only to relieve the boredom with costly leisure.

How my heart soared when my friend Murphy told how she’d been scanning the aisles for Christmas presents for her daughter. She considered buying a Lego set and then decided against it, because she had looked into the future and seen herself on her hands and knees tidying up hundreds of Lego pieces. Wise, very wise.

There is something dreadful, too, about the way plastic ages. Why is a second-hand plastic toy at a car boot sale such a sad sight? Perhaps because in that one bit of scarred and dusty oil-based product is encapsulated the failure of the plastic dream, the abandonment of pleasure and beauty in favour of quantity and cheapness and perhaps a few moments of quiet. In that toy is expressed criminal waste.

So throw them away. Better still, don’t buy them in the first place. NO PLASTIC: the cry must go up. The thing is, though, it is so very difficult. Everything is made of plastic. Those toys look so enticing, so cheap, so cheerful when they’re on the supermarket shelf. ‘Hours of fun,’ they promise, and suggest that this toy is so well thought out, so ingenious,
so costly in research and development, so utterly absorbing and delightful that it will practically do the childcare for you. But in actual fact, most of these toys demand an enormous amount of input from the parents. Like so many other products of the military-industrial complex, they promise to deliver us from toil, in this case the supposed toil of being with children, but in reality they create more work, both because of the money needed to buy them and the time needed to tidy them up.

And do children actually need toys? In
The Jungle Book
we see Mowgli happily playing with pebbles. The best games are those children play in groups without toys: that’s when you hear the laughter. And everyone knows that small children, not yet corrupted by advertising and the whole consumer culture, are happy with a wooden spoon and a saucepan. Children get more fun from a cardboard box than from a pile of toxic toys, beeping their machine-like versions of nursery rhymes (maybe because the child’s carer is too busy to sing them herself). With the cardboard box, the child’s imagination is released. Yesterday my kids made a cardboard box into a space rocket for their cuddly toys. And cardboard boxes can make excellent little play pens: before Arthur could walk we used to put him in a cardboard box and give him a wooden spoon. This left us free to get on with jobs around the kitchen. (By the way, here’s a tip: don’t buy any baby machinery. Nothing. We wasted hundreds on absurd devices, like the thing that they sit in and use to walk around the room, like Davros, creator of the Daleks. No: they learn how to walk on their own.)

Left alone, children will find and make their own toys, and in the process will develop their creativity rather than relying on entertainment from costly gadgets made by greedy toy
manufacturers. You – the parents: you can make your own toys too. Yes, you can. This is a noble calling for the dad of the family. Buy a saw and a chisel (we’ll return to the joys of wood later). Cut out aeroplane shapes from that fantastic modelling material, cardboard. Get some gaffer tape. (Arthur has just made his own catapult out of cardboard, gaffer tape and an elastic band. He has called it the Slinger 3000.) Make puppets out of socks and buttons. Monster masks from paper bags. It’s amazing what you can do with little or no skill in this department. Get them used to making things from an early age. Our non-plastic homemade toys, unlike bought plastic ones, can be mended, improved, painted, taken apart and remade. And burned, if necessary.

Rousseau was also against toys, though the toys in his day were not plastic:

The message is clear: don’t waste time and money on toys when you can simply pluck a branch from a tree and give it to the child. He will use his imagination to play with it, to slay monsters with it, eat it or make it into a pig. Clearly this route is also the ecologically friendly option: no planet-wasting plastic, just a piece of nature, free, easy and very green. Yes, idle parenting will save the planet.

Toys mean play commodified. They are part of the consumer society, and the sensible person rejects the consumer society because, very simply, it entails too much effort. The
idle parent can’t be bothered. Not buying and not working – in other words, making and living – is in actual fact easier and cheaper. Yes, make your own. A hobby horse is a bit of cloth tied to the top of a stick, and really can provide hours of fun.

All of this is not to reject play. A child’s life is, or should be, about play, and in fact they can teach the adults how to play. It is wonderful to watch them play. The Elizabethan philosopher John Dee writes the following charming entry in his diary: ‘Arthur Dee and May Herbert, they being but three yere old the eldest, did make as it were a shew of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife.’

Games and play do not require toys. Money does not equal fun, as A. S. Neill remarks in an anecdote about his daughter Zoë:

Neill, too, thinks we spend far too much money on toys. We’re hoodwinked by the toy companies, who encourage us to buy things as an expression of love.

TV and computers are partly to blame. When Arthur used to watch telly he would come into the kitchen having been seduced by an advert for some gewgaw and ask if he could have it. ‘It’s only £19.99!’ he argued. There are some campaigners, I understand, who argue that kids’ TV should be ad-free, because children are so susceptible to the hidden persuaders. Good luck to them. While they are fighting that battle we just unplug.

Shopping trips into town are hellish. The harried parent wastes vitality by saying ‘no’ constantly, and is also made to feel mean and stingy. The answer is to limit your kids’ exposure to advertising and also to avoid, if at all possible, trips to town. I find that sweets are better than toys as gifts. They are just as delighted with sweets as with toys – if not more so – and the sweets have the inestimable advantage of being self-destroying. They leave no trace, particularly if you are lucky enough to have access to a shop which sells them loose, so the kids can fill a little paper bag with their own selection.

Be mean. Locke, too, was concerned that a surfeit of stuff would only serve to spoil children and make them want more:

So we see the seeds of the consumer society being sown back in 1693. Locke recommends that ‘they should have none bought for them… they should make them themselves.’ So it seems that Locke was as anti-consumerist as any modern day environmentalist: