The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (21 page)

Liedloff suggests that ‘children ought to accompany adults wherever they go’. This, of course, is not easy with our modern working lives.
So change the situation
. Are full-time jobs for both parents and high-cost nurseries the only way we can imagine to organize our lives? It seems crazy to me. I used to love doing adult things with my parents when small (and also used to hate organized kids’ activities, even birthday parties). I remember going into my parents’ offices and finding them wondrous places. The highlight of Arthur’s year when he was five was accompanying me to London where we spent two days clearing out the old office and loading up my van. He worked very well, he was a useful chap and good company. Far better for me than if I had been doing the work alone. There was no whining over those two days. Crucially, Arthur did not see the job as
work
. Like the Yequana, the idea of work as a ‘regrettable necessity’, in Liedloff’s words, did not exist for him. Our labour was simply a part of our life, and one to be enjoyed.

The Yequana, says Liedloff, laugh at discomfort. On one occasion she was helping them to move a large canoe through the forest. They kept dropping the thing and hurting their feet. Liedloff cursed the whole situation, but the Yequana, she writes:

And this was simply a question of mental attitude: the physical reality of the situation was unchanged. When we split the world into good things and bad things – work and leisure, right behaviour and wrong behaviour, intrinsically enjoyable activities and intrinsically unenjoyable activities – we sow the seeds of our own unhappiness and that of our children. Life will then become a never-fulfilled flight away from the ‘bad’ and towards the ‘good’. It may be best to say simply: ‘I like that’ rather than ‘What a good boy’. It’s not too late! We can still help our children to enjoy their lives by starting to enjoy our own.

The dialectic of work=bad and life=good is one of Western society’s most pernicious and controlling myths and must be smashed without delay. Incorporate your children into your life. Do what you want to do and let them follow. I have never found for a moment that having children stopped me doing what I wanted to do – bar going out to the odd dinner party, and who cares about that? All adults have seen children’s innate creativity at work in the offerings they bring back from pre-school and in their doings at home. Later that natural free-flowing urge to make things gradually gives way, at school, to supposedly more important tasks like passing exams.

Making things – things of beauty and use, and nearly everything homemade is beautiful – should be at the centre of every child’s experience. This activity should be thought of not as work but as play. Let them muck about. Do not confine. ‘Fear of the child’s future leads adults to deprive children of their right to play,’ says A. S. Neill. John Locke shares the desire to make learning enjoyable for children:

Yes. Just this morning I was cursing Victoria for forcing me to help make the beds when I wanted to get on with writing this book. If I’d chosen to make the beds, though, I wouldn’t have minded doing it. Locke continues: ‘I have always had a fancy that
learning
might be made a play and recreation to children.’

Make work a ‘play’, too. And making stuff from wood and old junk is where work and play combine. By encouraging woodwork, we are also taking the first step to ensuring that as well as being good readers our children will have an introduction into the practical arts, what they used to call a ‘trade’. Again, both Locke and Rousseau recommend working in wood as an essential part of their ideal education. Says Locke:

Locke also recommends ‘husbandry in general’ and points out that a varied life is a good life: ‘The great men among the
ancients understood very well how to reconcile manual labour with affairs of state.’

Rousseau, after unfairly castigating Locke for making an ‘effete’ embroiderer of his young gentleman (I can find no such reference and conclude that Rousseau is just being mischievous), also praises woodwork:

Yes, I would far rather my kids were doing something creative and useful for exercise than something brutish and useless, like team sport. Team sports mercifully didn’t seem to exist in Locke’s or Rousseau’s time. Clearly they are a bastard child of industrialization. Much better, then, for parent and child to take carpentry lessons together. Good for the idle parent, good for the kids, fun and useful for everyone.

One problem here is that the anxious parent, conditioned into living in fear by health and safety inspectors and worry-inducing media, is afraid of hammers and nails and drills and knives. But this is to underestimate children’s inbuilt capacity for self-protection. When friends bring their kids round they look at our treehouse with horror: I’ve even had to put up a safety rail on the verandah – as if the kids are going to hurl themselves off the edge! They simply wouldn’t. Our obsession with safety removes independent judgement from the individual. It is disabling. My friend Mark, on a trip down the Zaire, remembers seeing small children playing on the deck of the huge boat with no railings. ‘Aren’t you worried
they’ll fall off?’ he asked one mother. ‘They’re not stupid,’ came the laughing reply. Liedloff says the same of the Yequana: from a young age they play with knives and near the edge of deep pits. In primitive cultures the good sense of the child is respected. We civilized parents actually remove their confidence by shrieking ‘Careful!’ at them the whole time. Henry could scamper up and down the ladder, unsupervised, to the treehouse when he was two. But at three he had caught on to being frightened, and last week, for the first time ever, he called me to help him climb down. We must have taught him that fear – which is a terrible thought.

I would heartily recommend treehouses – the rougher the better. My friend Oli came to build ours, mostly out of junk. And the great thing is that it is unfinished. Arthur and Delilah are always adding new bits and painting it. Victoria has just suggested that we use pieces of an old child’s bed to add to it (although her advice was to use them to make another safety rail!).

Another great advantage of working with wood is that it means avoiding the evil plastic, enemy of idleness. Wooden blocks are a particular joy: they last for ever and look good too. And if you get fed up with them, you can burn them. No landfill! How eco-friendly is that? In every way things made of wood are superior. Wood can be found for nothing. It can be mended and painted. It can be recycled, reused or burned in the fire. It grows on trees – no oil required. I understand that Steiner schools only have wooden toys, and that sounds to me like a thoroughly good idea.

In helping your kids to enjoy wood,
you
will enjoy wood again too. It reconnects us to the natural world, in a pleasurable revolt against the arid, clinical nature of plastic. My objection to the virtual computer worlds invented by California is
that they separate us from the natural world, and indeed, that is part of the plan. One of the directors of the gigantic social networking site Facebook, Peter Thiel, has expressed a philosophy, based on Thomas Hobbes, which is essentially the idea that nature is hostile, a restrictive force to be overcome by man’s boundless ingenuity. In cyberspace you can send virtual ‘gifts’ though the ether, things that don’t exist, that have none of the awkward reality of physical hand-made objects and can be enjoyed only through the medium of the screen. While this sort of thing can be enjoyable in the short term, it simply is not real life and has none of the creativity and passion that making things out of wood offers. Making things out of wood makes us, each and every one, into an artist – not a ‘successful’ artist who sells on the art market, but an artist nonetheless. The virtual world of the Californian futurist makes us into mere consumers of the visions of others.

Playing with wood connects us with the Robin Hood spirit, the greenwood, the Green Man, man and nature intertwined. Robin Hood and the outlaws lived in the forest and made their own dwellings (you can’t get the planning permission to do this today). They allowed themselves to be absorbed by nature rather than building ramparts against it. That is why kids love to make dens in the woods: it is a primal instinct, handed down through generations. And at the very least, a wood-filled childhood will give a child a confidence in practical matters which will serve him or her well from the point of view of everyday pleasure in life.

I will probably be scoffed at for arguing that a child’s life and an adult’s life should include a goodly portion of manual labour or craft. Surely, the scoffers will say, that sort of thing is now done in factories, generally in another country, leaving us free to waste time in virtual space? I think of a friend’s story
about a friend of his who had gone into business selling herbal highs and had made a lot of money. Previously he’d been a humble carpenter. Why the change? ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I got sick of rich people coming to my workshop and telling me how satisfying it must be to work with my hands.’

Yet what is wrong with doing both? As Rousseau says, be a craftsman
and
a philosopher. Or an artist and a businessman. Rembrandt was a big-time property dealer, remember. You can read, write, make money in the morning and make things in the afternoon. Nothing so enjoyable as banging nails into wood. So let us fill our children’s lives with variety, creativity and autonomy. And just as importantly, fill our own lives with variety, creativity and autonomy, and watch the lives of our children improve as a result. We are all artists.

Oh, how we whinge, we pampered parents of the West, attacked by choices, condemned to strive always to do the right thing, to get it right. We complain about money, we complain about lack of sleep, we complain about our partners, our co-workers, the buses, the newspapers, social networking sites, the government, telecom providers; we stamp our feet and shout at the usurers in the banking corporations and the swindlers and avaricious cheats in the City; but most of all we complain about our own children. The first few months after the birth of the first baby are fairly blissful. Then the competing elements of the artificial constructions that we grandly call our ‘lives’ become locked in mortal combat. We try to ‘get
the balance right’ between unenjoyable and enjoyable activities. We read newspaper columnists who whinge and we believe, wrongly, that because they whinge as well our own whingeing is justified (we forget that their whingeing is a profitable business – they make money from moaning whereas our suffering is strictly non-profit). But we are moaning about the very lives that
we
have created for ourselves. We took that job, we bought that flat, we chose that boyfriend or girlfriend, we had that baby, we bought that car, we chose that broadband provider, we gave our money to that bank, we live in this city, we live in this country. We were free to go and retire alone in Goa and live on the beach for the rest of our lives, childless and free. But we chose not to do that. And then we complained!

But are we hungry? Are we cold? Are we homeless? Are we in jail? No. Are we free to change our lives, to quit our jobs, walk out on our homes, leave our wives or husbands? Yes. The point is, if you are not happy with your situation, then you should change it. And do not believe that you are powerless, because you yourself created the situation that you now find yourself in. You also created the mental attitude that you have towards that situation, and similarly, if you so chose, you could recreate that mental attitude. This is not to say that pain is not real. Bereavements, domestic conflict, financial disasters… as Blake, the bard of Albion, wrote: