Modern life is wrecking childhood. Why can’t we just leave our kids alone? says author Tom Hodgkinson and founder of The Idler (which publishes aa bi-monthly magazine, produces online courses and run live events). If you’ve ever wondered why so many of today’s children are unhappy, spoilt, stressed and selfish, then the answers and the remedy are (likely) to be found (and taken with a pinch of salt) in The Idle Parent.
Here Hodgkinson wants us to leave our kids be, to give them the space and time to grow into self-reliant, confident, inquisitive, happy and free people. And, offers practical parenting tips of what to do and (more importantly) what not to do ensuring your kids will be happier, but also help you, their parents, live happier and more fulfilled lives.
Will it make you a much better parent?
Maybe – maybe, not. But this inspiring guide encourages us to put away this ‘silly adult things’, embrace childhood in all its messy glory and getting you to rethink the blind consumerist approach to life with children. Hodgkinson doesn’t pretend to be the perfect parent and talks openly of his faults and even suggests you pick and choose from his idle ideas. Think of it as essentially a manifesto for lazy parenting!
Five golden rules of Idle Parenting
by The Idle Parent
If you are accustomed to leaping out of bed in the morning in order to get your children dressed and make them breakfast, then you must stop immediately. By doing these things for your children, you are making them dependent on you. You are also in danger of becoming exhausted. The answer is to lie in bed a little longer in the morning.
At first, this may not come naturally, so start with something easy, say five minutes. In week two, you can try ten or even 15 minutes. As the time span lengthens, you will find that your children start to learn how to get their own breakfast, find their clothes and dress themselves, thereby decreasing your workload.
Too much infantile company can drive you crazy. You will long for some adult input and crave some intellectual stimulation. The simple solution is to keep a good book on you at all times.
You will find that there are lots of little spaces in the day when you can grab a few minutes on that wonderful invention, the park bench, where you can feed your mind with a few lines of choice prose or poetry rather than tales of Thomas The Tank Engine.
Rather than the parent serving the child, it should be the other way round. As soon as possible, say from two years up, your child should be encouraged to help you around the house. Children can easily hoover, dust, put toys away, lay the table and dry up.
It is depressing that the adults of today cannot do half of these things, addicted as we are to the wasteful culture of throwing away and buying new, let alone children. So deprive them of new clothes and new toys and train them to fix the old ones.
Sometimes a discreet and fortifying sip of brandy is needed to keep up your spirits, particularly during those dull trips to soul-destroying children’s playgrounds.
Once a week, most probably on a Sunday, follow the custom of the olden days and do as little as possible all day long. Just sit at home. Resist the urge to fill the day with long trips in the car to the zoo, or to visit relatives or some dreaded theme park. Just sit at the kitchen table and see what happens.
Preferably, you should switch off the computer and television, too. You will see your children’s resourcefulness start to emerge. They will make things, they will chatter. You will play cards, make models out of cereal boxes, sow seeds in trays.
