The Idle Parent

It is difficult to hate your childhood without hating yourself, so most people tend to embrace it. Only when you have children yourself, do you start thinking about how you would have liked to have been brought up.

I am not a parent, but how it seems to work is this: you take the best of who you are now, subtract all the things from your childhood you didn’t like, and then multiply by how aspirational you are.

For instance, I might want my future child to question the world around them but without spending months of their life playing football management simulations. As I am not particularly aspirational, I would likely be pretty lax in enforcing these precepts.

The problem with my formula is that it is usually the things you didn’t like about your childhood that helped form your most endearing characteristics.

If you were neglected, it gave you an opportunity to develop your imagination. If you were forced to do sport by an over-competitive parent, it gave you a sense of detachment from the hurly-burly. If you weren’t given any direction in life, it forced you to find your own path.

I have been thinking along such lines after reading all of Tom Hodgkinson’s Idle Parent columns in the Telegraph. According to Tom, whose goal appears to be to mould his children into freethinking dreamers like William Blake, John Ruskin, William Morris, and J.S. Mill (at least half of whom had massive nervous breakdowns), you should:
- not go on family holidays, they are too stressful for Dads.
- not allow computer games, they deprive you of your imagination.
- avoid television, it stimulates desires.
- avoid team sports, they are moronic and pointless.
- keep lots of animals, they save on childcare.
- train the kids to do all your household chores, so you can read Evelyn Waugh.
- avoid school, it makes you conventional.
- only read kids the classics, they are safer than modern trash.

No man can look on his own formative years without a certain affection and loyalty, so I feel impelled to offer a rejoinder to each of the above:

Family Holidays — they did always seem very tense occasions when I was growing up, but I used to love being able to explore a new place and meet new people. For me, holidays are a time when children can experiment; those two weeks have no bearing on your day-to-day life so you can be cooler than you actually were.

Computer games — oh, the hours that I have spent on computer games. However, far from depriving me of imagination, they used to enhance the imagination. I would embody the character that I was playing and even do interviews with that persona. Even purely functional games like Tetris were great for mental agility.

Television — even more than computer games, I really like watching television as a child. Desires were stimulated, of course, but so were the manifold possibilities of the adult world.

Team Sports — Since taking up hockey again last August, I can’t believe how much I missed it. Team sports are full of camaraderie and the magical sense that you are part of something bigger than yourself.

Keep Animals — I had one pet, a goldfish won at a fair, that my sister and I overfed within a couple of days. That was it for me and pets, except for the numerous slugs, snails and worms that I kept in shoe boxes. Even as a child I thought them dirty smelly things.

Train kids to do chores — There’s a good line in John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips about letting his son enjoy his sleep because he’ll have to wake up early when he gets old. That would be my attitude as well, I think, giving them a sense of work-free paradise. Certainly I don’t remember doing any work as a child.

Avoid School — The examples Tom gives of people who didn’t go to school, like JS Mill and John Ruskin are pretty bad, given the major neuroses they suffered in their adult lives. I thought school quite amusing, a place to make Dennis the Menace style mischief.

Only Read Classics — Ugh. I remember hating children’s books as a child and only began to enjoy reading when I discovered cheap science fiction and schlocky political thrillers.

I should emphasize that I think these Idle Parent columns contain some of the most insightful things that Tom has written. We need people like him who are prepared to question mindless habits. He may have been banging the same drum for over 15 years but with each year the rhythm gets more insistent and engaging. Now, with the collapse of global capitalism, the simplicity and self-reliance of Idling are more necessary than ever.

The Idle Parent book is out in March.

11 Jan 2009