The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (17 page)

Then the real hell begins.

We start to drive to the theme park. They fight. ‘Lila hit me!’ ‘Henry bit me! On purpose.’ ‘Arthur head-butted me!’ The three children, tightly bound in the back of the car, start lashing out at each other. Each child has perfected their own uniquely irritating crying noise. Delilah’s is a sort of constant mosquito whine mixed with helpless sobbing that apparently prevents her from being able to articulate the nature of her complaint. Arthur wails as if the world is about to end and it’s all so unfair and unjust. And Henry makes the sort of noises that the makers of
The Exorcist
would have been proud to feature in the movie. Both mother and father now start shouting. Mother wheels round and screams: ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Leave him alone!’ Dad bellows: ‘Right, Arthur, one more time and there’s no ice cream. I mean it.’

Dad anxiously glances in the rear-view mirror to see what’s going on. For a while I congratulate myself for not losing my temper. Then I suddenly break. I have been known to go berserk, to swear and bang the windscreen in my rage. Then, if I lose my temper, Victoria takes this as her cue to seize the moral high ground and say something like: ‘We’re fed up with you,’ thus driving me into a deeper rage, which cannot really be expressed well since we’re all trapped in this blessed motor car. Every second we are burning up oil, and the price of petrol seems to shoot up every day. (The average cost of keeping a car is supposed to be £5,000 a year and rapidly rising: imagine how many taxis you could get for that? Do we really need our cars? Certainly it would make sense to use them a lot less. Staying at home instead of going on a family day out is the green answer too: no resources used up and no expense! Create a good life on a low income and you will be in a very powerful position: at no other man’s beck and call, able to laugh at big business and government.)

Soon you arrive at the theme park, and a sense of being conned overwhelms you. You are being ripped off, commodified, victimized, your weakness profited from. This is the slaves’ day off. But should fun really have to be paid for? Idle parenting is low-cost parenting. We need to avoid the spending of money at all times.

Next comes the ferocious boredom of queueing up for rides, while idly speculating about the other families around you. Are they happy? Do they also go home to door-slammings, screamings and grumpiness? The theme park is a strangely lonely place. Hundreds mill past each other but rarely speak, like mute Zombie families. Lunch is an over-priced, prepackaged nightmare. Time drags on: it’s only two o’clock. How much longer before I can get out of this
hellhole? The children constantly demand more rides. At the end of the day you go to the gift shop, cunningly placed at the exit, and you say ‘no’ a thousand times. Here we see the paradox of plenty: shopping actually means not shopping, because for every one thing you buy you have said ‘no’ to a thousand others. Far from being an exercise in indulgence, shopping is all about limiting yourself: I can only afford so much. So however generous you allow yourself to be, in actual fact you use all your energy preventing the children from buying more. So shopping has disappointment built into it. The child is full of frustration because he has glimpsed forbidden delights: imagine what his parents could have bought him if they weren’t so mean or poor.

The same goes for museums as for theme parks. I took Arthur to the Natural History Museum recently, and found the experience to be, in the word much favoured by William Morris to describe the low-quality output of industrial society, ‘shoddy’. Shoddy exhibits, shoddy design and decoration, silly little walkways that diminish the splendour of the rooms. And there is the same suffocating feeling of containment as at the theme park: the same stifling restriction on movement, with gates and turnstiles and preprepared routes to be shuffled along obediently. I feel lost in those places.

Also, why is it that only my children seem to be so naughty on days out? Everyone else’s seem the picture of restraint. But rest assured, every parent is going through the same agonies. If only we’d just taken them to a field! Life could be so much simpler.

Then the hell of the drive home. Now the children and the parents are cross and fidgety. The children always want to stay longer than the parents – ‘We’re going now.’ ‘Owwwww! Why? Why? Why?’ Most likely the children are
coming down off a junk-food sugar rush. In the back of the car, they kick, pull each other’s hair and snatch each other’s new toys. The threat to abandon them in a lay-by does not seem to help matters. Even after I stop the car they continue fighting. We’ve noticed that the best policy, although very difficult to carry out, is simply to ignore them. I remember one journey when V. and I were simply too tired to tell them off. We couldn’t be bothered. They had a fight in the back, and then, miraculously, stopped arguing, without any intervention from the authorities. Probably we intervene far too much. In any case, I always find it impossible to work out who started it, who was in the right, who was in the wrong. I try to act as impartial judge and always fail. Their individual cases always sound so convincing. At last, at home, I say: ‘OK, I’m leaving the room. I’ll be back in three minutes. You can sort it out amongst yourselves.’ Amazingly, this works.

After tea, during which the children will probably have behaved appallingly, they have to be bathed and put to bed. The evening promises a couple of hours of exhausted drinking before you collapse into bed at half past ten, poor and disappointed.

This is not the idle way.

The truly idle delight instead in staying at home. At home you are free. You can create your own fun, at no cost whatsoever. You can let the children run around while you read a book. There is a world of adventure and learning under your own roof and on your own doorstep. We often now stay at home all day on Saturday and all day on Sunday. We play in the kitchen. We make food together. One happy day I sat in the armchair reading my William Morris biography while Henry played on the floor with his toy tractors, Delilah cut up bits of paper and Arthur read
The Beano
. Later I found myself
making a pair of sunglasses out of a cereal packet with Delilah. Children love making things, playing, being busy. They love creating their own fun. People are scared to stay at home all day because they think the kids will get bored. We seek external stimulus and we don’t understand that each one of us has a huge, untapped store of creativity. But
things happen of their own accord
. You don’t need to leave the house. We think we are enjoying ourselves at the theme park, but really it’s a disabling sort of fun because it’s passive. It actually follows the familiar pattern of twenty-first-century life: long periods of boredom interspersed with the occasional thrill. And we don’t have to make any effort beyond getting out our wallets. The rides, in return for cash, hurl us around in a parody of real pleasure. At home you can play Scrabble, you can eat on the floor, the kids can make dens. You can learn how to play together, or you can get on with your own jobs and pleasures and let the children exist around you. And you don’t even have to bother to play with them. My friend James doesn’t play with his son. I asked him to explain himself:

Now when it comes to museums, I should add that the country is full of eccentric little museums which have more charm and interest than the big ones, should you want to relax your no-days-out policy and search out the small rather than the obvious. For example, the other day I discovered, simply by aimlessly wandering, a wonderful museum of curios in Gower Street in London called the Grant Museum. It has 55,000 specimens crowded into a basement room. There you have elephant skulls and frogs in jars. It is completely empty of people, and everything is arranged in a charming higgledy-piggledy fashion, like a Victorian gentleman explorer’s private collection. And no gift shop at the end!

Or you could make your own museum of artefacts. One idea I had was for a Chamber of Horrors. I placed a few awful Christmas presents on the wall, like the tie decorated with Day-Glo mushrooms that my dad once gave me, held up a candle to each in turn and screamed with horror. Put some things on a shelf. Buy a butterfly net. There is natural history everywhere, not just in a London museum. Remember the words of Nabokov: ‘My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.’ Instead of driving to a fun park, build a treehouse. We built ours, largely from stuff lying around, for fifty quid. Explore your own street, your own garden, your own house. There is a wonderful fund of pleasure and enjoyment there for the taking and you need look no further than between your own two ears. Your own home can be full of adventure, and to ensure that your adult sensibilities remain stimulated and to guard against the ever present danger of becoming a resentment-filled slave to your children, also keep a good book on the go – poetry, essays, a novel. Short novels are good; short stories are very good.

You can also use time with the children to learn things
yourself. Now is the time to teach yourself to draw. Draw with them. Learn to draw animals by copying from books. I taught myself how to draw a simple crab and simple lobster while on holiday in Cornwall. Once you have reduced animal-drawing to a few basics you can then teach the kids and they’ll be mighty pleased with their own results. We give too much responsibility for learning and being creative to the schools. We must learn and teach at home. This need not be a trial but can be a great joy for parent and child. But you must always make sure that you are genuinely enjoying yourself. Doing things for other people’s sake will lead to feelings of corrosive resentment that will then find expression in some unhealthy fashion, like cancer. Your first responsibility is to your own happiness. If you are unhappy and you do things merely out of a sense of duty rather than genuine love and generosity, then others will sense that and ugliness will result. When the children get home from school be ready sitting at the kitchen table – not fussing about with washing-up. Set a good idling example.

My other important piece of advice when it comes to family days out is:
split up
. Any combination of family members – any – is easier, we find, than the five of us squeezed together in the metal box. In fact, any other combination tends to be a joy. I would far rather take the three of them on my own somewhere than go with all five of us. On my own, things can be easier: I do what I want. There is no one to argue with and no one to shuffle responsibility on to: the responsibility is all yours. This also has the added bonus of giving Victoria a break. For this reason, I am happy to look after the kids alone for three days, if V. needs a rest or wants to go to visit friends. In some ways it’s easier, because you give yourself up to the task fully, without half-hoping that the other person is going to
do the work. Then I can have three days alone at some other point. Constant breaks from each other are essential.

Or split into two parties. I find that once removed from the structure of the familiar nuclear family my children behave beautifully. Things have their own natures, and the nature of the nuclear family is to be conflict-filled. Perhaps the kids behave better when removed from this institution because outside it they are individuals who are accorded respect rather than simply being family members expected to play out their customary dysfunctional roles.

I took Arthur on his own to see his granny, and we had a wonderful day out. You will accuse me of betraying my principles, but we even went to that fun zone Brighton Pier.

Once I recovered from my very deep disappointment at the fact that there is no longer a single pinball machine on Brighton Pier, only those cascade machines where 2p coins pile up tantalizingly close to you, always about to tumble down, we ate ice cream and went on the funfair rides at the end of the pier, and later we found the Penny Arcade with all the old-fashioned 1920s slot machines. Old technology is so much more charming than the new, and the Penny Arcade was clearly a labour of love for its owner, in contrast to the well-organized banditry of the pier. Arthur said later that this was his favourite part of the whole day. No whining or arguing! Bliss to spend time with him in that way, bliss. And it’s the same with the others: now that we have three children, to be with only one or two of them seems like an absolute breeze. So I implore you, split up! Life will become so much easier. Split them up, stay at home, explore your own backyard, send your partner away for the weekend. Hang out, in that wonderful American phrase. Don’t do things. Let things happen. Just sit one day round the table, start talking and see
what happens. You will be amazed at all the wonderful ideas that come out of the children’s minds, and amazed at the creativity that you will find in yourself if you simply stop and listen. The idea of the happy family, those (always young, beautiful and smiling manically) families in ads for holidays: it’s pure myth.

But happiness is not impossible. It would be nice if, when grown up, your kids said to their friends: ‘I had a happy childhood.’ That is worth more than all the expensive family days out, holidays, toys, high grades at school or sporting achievements. Try to ensure that your children are enjoying their everyday life – and the best way to do that is to find that positive negligence, a sort of yay-saying respect, to leave them alone but also to be there when you’re needed. Don’t worry about the future. Enjoy your life with them now. Set them free.

I should also warn against perfectionism when it comes to home interiors, particularly when there are small children about. You can put a lot of work and thought and money into some interior development, only to have it all ruined by the pesky kids. We have decided not to bother making the house smart while they are growing up (it’s a convenient philosophy for the idle parent, because it also excuses us a lot of work). About three years ago we decorated, and two days later the children drew big swirly patterns and crosses on the walls and doors with Biros. I was furious, livid. But now there is writing all over their bedroom walls. And I think: good. That’s one more room we don’t have to worry about. Give up. There will be plenty of time to create your beautiful house as you grow older. Give up on creating the ideal home and instead embrace the idle home. No more poring through interiors
magazines and feeling inferior (‘World of Inferiors’ was my friend Gavin Hills’ gag). No more expense and no more worry. We have learned to love the woodchip. This isn’t to say you must give up on style all together, but whitewashed walls, hung with pictures, and a geranium will go a long way. Keep the furniture to a minimum. We recently removed the broken old chairs from the kitchen and installed two benches that I found lying around in the village hall storeroom. The bench instantly declutters the kitchen, and it also has a pleasingly medieval vibe. I like the medieval interior, a few pieces of simple wooden furniture. A chest. Plain walls but with fabrics draped around the place.