PREVIEW: The Idle Parent

In The Idle Parent, Tom Hodgkinson shares his wise, funny, and wholly practical approach to childcare: leave the kids alone. Curious? Enjoy this excerpt from the book, coming out May 13. (Tarcher / Penguin paperback,  $15.95, 978-1-58542-800-7)

Why do children moan and whine? Why do they make those dreadful noises? We could start by asking which animals whine. Not many. Most animals simply accept their fate and get on with it. But this is not the case with the domesticated dog. Because pet dogs are so often pampered and accustomed to getting their own way, they whine when they do not get what they want or when they want something that they cannot get for themselves. This whining is an expression of powerlessness and dependence. When you cannot do anything for yourself, when you have come to rely on others to supply your needs and wants, then whining is the impotent response when things go badly. We know this too from our own experience as adults in the workplace. When we don’t get what we want we whine and whine to each other. Sometimes the whining gets results: a bigger office, a promotion. But we are still completely dependent on our bosses. So it is with children. Because they have no freedom and are accustomed to everything being done for them by their slave-parents, they have to whine and wear us down with those unbearable noises to get what they want. So we need to replace the whining with a calm request for help, or better still, train them to resolve their own problems and satisfy their own needs. I am currently trying this out with my own kids. Formerly my approach to their whining would be a shouted comment along the lines of: “I can’t stand your whining!” or “STOP WHINING! It’s driving me crazy!” Of course, such reactions only tend to increase their feelings of self-pity: “Everything was already going wrong,” they will be thinking, “and now, to make things worse, Daddy is shouting at me.”

In order to prevent whining, do not give them everything they ask for. Says Rousseau:

“I have known children brought up like this who expected you to knock the house down, to give them the weather-cock on the steeple, to stop a regiment on the march so that they might listen to the band; when they could not get their way they screamed and cried and would pay no attention to anyone. In vain everybody strove to please them; as their desires were stimulated by the ease with which they got their own way, they set their hearts on impossibilities, and found themselves face to face with opposition and difficulty, pain and grief. Scolding, sulking, or in a rage, they wept and cried all day.”

We need to get out of our heads the idea that saying “no” is an act of unkindness. We need to accustom our children to what is and isn’t possible from an early age. Perhaps as a result of guilt for over-working, we indulge and spoil our kids, thus creating a whole lot of unnecessary work. The idle parent is motivated by the goals of pleasure and lazing about, and “no” can be an effective tool to serve these ends. Remember that the more idle the parent, the happier the child, because the idle parent is spontaneous: joyful, free of resentment and therefore better company.

Just saying “no,” firmly and quietly, and being backed up by the other parent (if there is one) should be a trick that every idle parent masters. It is not the same as cruelty; in fact, it is the very opposite. Saying “no” to the child can also be seen as saying “no” to the forces of branding, toys, money and the whole commodity culture. Rousseau: “let your “No,” once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it.”

When you say “no” to things, you help your child to become useful and self-sufficient, because saying “no” to things is saying “yes’ to humanity and “yes’ to life. Your child must not grow used to the idea that its needs can be met simply by an injection of cash. Then it will come to want more and more cash, become dependent on money, and have to do all sorts of unpleasant things as an adult in order to get it. Toys break, fade and die, but love lives on. Be strict. We can see the results of the surfeit of consumer products all around us: adults have become spoiled children. We believe we can have whatever we want and, thanks to credit cards, we can have it now. I want, I want, I want. Postpone the pain till later. But this satisfaction of wants leads only to more wants and therefore we remain perpetually unsatisfied. Children teach us the joys of a cardboard box or a pebble or a twig. The other day we took Delilah and a friend to a pebbly beach, and they played for hours harmoniously, making stone circles. Then we went to the shop, outside of which was one of those mechanical rides designed to steal pound coins from our pockets. Cue whining and shouting and arguing over who was to sit in the driver’s seat. Commerce leads to inequality and whining. And we must resist the temptation to teach them that a remote- controlled Dalek is better than a twig. African children rarely cry. I guess that this is for two reasons: one, because they have more control over their lives, and secondly because there is less stuff to argue about.