Free The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids by Tom Hodgkinson

such as school and the full-time job, and bring back some good, old-fashioned conviviality and providential thinking, in childhood as well as adulthood. And this is why friends are so important: put simply, they make life easier.
    In Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel
Island
, the hero finds himself stranded on an island called Pala, where the inhabitants have created a society that harmonizes the best of Western science with the best of Eastern mysticism. Now, their solution to the problem of the confining nuclear family is precisely to spread the burden, and they do this by means of Mutual Adoption Clubs. The idea is that each family connects itself to a network of twenty or so other families. At any time a child from one can go and stay with the family of another. This system provides an escape valve from the confinement of the nuclear family. As Sulina, a Palanese mother, explains:
    Escape is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged – and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement – to migrate to one of its other homes. We all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy babies and toddlers and teenagers.
    It’s an idea we could take up immediately. By extending the family, creating a network of mutually supporting friends and neighbours, in short, by helping each other, family life could be made very much easier.
    But we are fearful today. When I was growing up in the 1970s we would leave the house in the morning, get on ourbicycles and play all day in the streets. Or go into the woods. When I was four I took my two-year-old brother two blocks up the road, on our own, to find the ice-cream lady. Children should be running around in packs, but instead they are shut in their bedroom with only a big TV and computer games for company. ‘I know he’s safe in there,’ a mother chillingly told the cameras on a recent TV show about modern childhood. Clearly this isolation also suits the consumer culture: alone and staring at a screen, the child is easy prey for advertisers. Playing in a field with friends, he is not playing his part in the economy.
    Arthur comes home from school and goes straight on to a website called Club Penguin, where, he says, he can ‘talk’ to his friend Sam. Call me a Luddite – and I love the Luddites, by the way – but surely it would be cheaper, easier and healthier to have Sam round in person?
    The simple antidote to isolation is more friends, more fun, more festivity. I have noticed that the larger the group of kids, the easier life becomes for the parents. They don’t bother you. One child alone will say, ‘I’m bored.’ ‘Go outside.’ ‘But there’s nothing to do outside.’ ‘Play in the treehouse. Or how about some drawing?’ ‘Awwwww, I DON’T WANT TO.’ At this point the parent may well lose their temper – justifiably so. A whining, dependent child is annoying. The only thing that will satisfy this bored child is a one-on-one game of Monopoly. But I don’t want to play Monopoly with a seven-year-old. I want to go and read in the garden and smoke a roll-up. However, if there are two kids playing together, things improve. A little bit of bothering, but not so much. And as soon as there are three or more they practically vanish into thin air, and that’s precisely what we’re after. You leave them alone, and even better, they leave you alone. Hodgkinson’sLaw: the more, the merrier. Many hands make light work and many kids make the parent’s work lighter. Added to this is the real pleasure of seeing them play happily. In the distance.
    We recently achieved a Bruegel-type situation at our annual village medieval banquet. While the adults ate and drank, a huge gang of children played games of their own making in the field next to the tent. That, I repeat, is my idea of childcare: a beer tent next to a playing field or