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

wood. Parents in one, kids in the other. There’s nothing worse at festivals than ‘kids’ zones’. Go into a kids’ zone (the kids are not allowed in them unsupervised, which wrecks the purpose of them, as far as I can tell) and you will see bored parents weakly smiling as their children try and fail to juggle neon balls. It’s hell on earth. Almost as bad as the playground. Swings! Kill me, quickly, before I die of boredom.
    All you need is a field. Just one field. No swings or climbing frames. Parents and beer at one end, kids playing all over it.
    At a festival last year Arthur made friends with the boys from the family camping next door. Every morning he would disappear off with them and play all day. We discovered from their lovely mother that they lived in a community, a commune. Arthur discovered this too, but put it in slightly different terms: ‘Billy lives with his friends!’ he told me, as if this was one of the most fantastic things he could think of – to live with your friends!
    Sadness in adults can be caused by a sense of isolation, and is to be cured not by Prozac but by conviviality. It is worth asking whether the same is true of children. Perhaps we just need to get them singing and dancing.
    One key difference between medieval notions of childhood and modern approaches is in the nature/nurture debate. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was believed that if aboy of noble birth was brought up by peasants then, sooner or later, his noble nature would emerge. Nature was all. I like that idea. It lets the parents off the hook. You don’t really matter. You submit to God’s will. That actually relieves the burden on parents. However, by the time of Locke, man’s input has become the crucial factor: ‘of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.’ This view persists today: the psychologist Oliver James, for example, is firmly of the view that parenting is everything, that the atmosphere in the home, particularly in your early years, is the key element in determining your character. In Locke we see the new importance of education. And parents. If kids can be nine-tenths moulded, then it would be irresponsible of the parents to let go of the responsibility for the moulding. Therefore since we are unlikely ever to reach a scientific conclusion in the debate – because we will never, ever, know the answer – I propose that each of us simply invent a nature/nurture theory which suits us and then go out and find evidence for that theory, which, after all, is the common method among historians and scientists, whatever they may try to tell you about objectivity.
    The idle parent, I think, would probably like to settle on a split of one-third nature, two-thirds nurture. That would mean that we are not entirely without importance in a child’s life, but that most of it is up to them. I think that would give them due respect, too, and in general we don’t give our kids enough respect. Sorry to repeat, but it’s worth repeating: we are always interfering, whether by organizing ceaseless activities, or telling them off, or sitting down with them for – and this may be worse – a ‘serious chat’ (horror of all horrors), an attempt to feel their pain and really care, to become alldewy-eyed and sympathetic. This attempt at empathy is itself a kind of intrusion or interference, a presumption. How can we possibly get inside somebody else’s head, least of all a child’s? I remember the pain and agony when my dad would sit down with me for a heart-to-heart. My dad was doing his best, being good, in fact, but maybe it’s not required. Certainly I can see this with Arthur if I try to give him a stern-but-fair-and-loving chat – he writhes and squirms and says anything to bring the experience to a swift conclusion.
    So if you want to make life easy for yourself and fun for your kids, you must organize things so that they are in