Tom Hodgkinson 'The Idle Parent' at Young Minds 2012

I just wanted to give a brief background to why I wrote a book called the idle parent and really it goes back to when I was a very lazy even lazier than I am now twenty-five-year-old to wanna be freelance journalist living in London and every day I'd wake up and and think right I've got to get up work hard get out of bed get my ideas off to the commissioning editors and you know be dynamic and what happened to me every day with that I would lie in bed in this kind of pit of self-hatred unable to get out of bed but sort of telling myself at what a terrible person I was for not working harder and then also resolving every knee is e to wake up earlier next year I'm going to wake up every day at 8 o'clock and so I can get more done and I was in the middle of this sort of confusion if you like when I read a series of essays by dr. Johnson who is the great lexicographer and man of letters of the 18th century famous for wandering around 18th century London with James Boswell being witty in the taverns with people like Topham Bo Clark and the other young rakes of London town and he was also part of that really quite exciting period in English journalism where people were making money from their writing there's not the explosion of periodicals at the time with titles like the Rambler The Spectator The Observer she had this idea of a sort of journalist around town he wanders around the coffee houses taking notes reporting in the papers his columns and people enjoying reading these but in the middle of all this dr. Johnson wrote a series of essays called the idler and in this he celebrated or at least explored his own personality which was simultaneously creative and ambitious but also extremely constitutionally lazy and a register size and Diaries and he said every Year's Eve and every birthday I resolve henceforward to rise earlier if I resolved to rise at eight I might actually rise at ten and that's better than the twelve o'clock which is where I currently do rise and so on and he made his resolutions all through his life and it never really got the hang of it and when he worked he would work at great speed close to the deadline and so the printers boy would be at the door taking each sheet of manuscript from him as he finished it to run it round to thee to the printer round the corner he didn't even read over what had written he wrote in such a hurry but this paroxysm of diligence which is a phrase from Kees the paroxysm of diligence that produced this work is recourse preceded by a long period of apparent apparent idleness or laziness but actually what's going on during that time and this is what he explores is that the the idle person is actually thinking and I suddenly saw that this laziness that I was getting fed up with myself about could actually be the source of all my creativity because it's when you're lying there doing nothing when you're prone when you're in bed or out for walk let's have a free flow the actual work as a journalist later of putting those ideas down on paper is the sort of formality at the end of the whole process so I began to think that actually there could be something in this a positive side to idleness and and so it was like I had the idea of a new magazine called the idler I went across the road to my friend Gavin who had an Apple Mac and we got on with it we started our own magazine luckily soon after that I was sacked from my job but on a magazine so I was on the dole with really nothing to lose and plenty of time so we got on with it and we start the magazine and these books have written how to be idle and so on have come out of this exploration of creativity and work and laziness and idleness and all these things really looking at the positive sides of a vital nostalgie scenes and articles and so on talks it's an attack on the prostitute work ethic and the the great change that happened in Europe around the Reformation when we change from a more or less communal medieval society to a more individualistic society following the new ways of thinking people like Calvin and Luther later of course we had the Industrial Revolution and that's really when England turned from a sort of rural nation of kind of self-employed Weaver's and so on internet into a sort of factory based nation and where you were tied down to a full-time job in the factories and that's the kind of culture I'm trying to resist or at least look for alternatives to and it what's happened as I've researched this very fascinating subject of laziness and they've spent a long time researching it it's really wonderful to be able to devote your life to work to this I found out all sorts of things I mean you know it's everywhere every floor of her in poet has praised at least the contemplative life you know it goes right back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks were praising the contempt of life Epicurus praised the life of undisturbedly you were sort of retreat from the city living communes to grow your own vegetables and that kind of thing and even the Stoics and the cynics and these ancient schools of philosophy wanted to use their leisure time not just an ism which is what we tend to do today you know to escape the grind of the nine departments or get it but to use your later time in a kind of constructive way for debate for learning for reading for you know what you might call meditation prayer for religion and for self development and so these are all the things that are actually good about idleness so that's just a brief description of my defense of idleness because perhaps fairly easy to do when you're kind of slack 25 year old wannabe Bohemian man-about-town but sort of fast-forward 10 years later when you've got three small children and you're sort of trying to make ends meet and absolutely frazzled with the exhaustion of it all how can i reconcile this idea of being idle lazing around in the coffee shops and talking about philosophy with the demands of a young family and this is something I really struggled with for some time until one day when I was reclining on a sunny Bank opposite our house with a friend of mine he writes or did write a column he was sacked he used to write a column called slack dad when he was guest a sort of you know a weekly column about how completely useless he was as a parent so there you had slack dad and idle dad you know reclining on this sunny Bank and I was reading D H Lawrence a series of essays by D H Lawrence at one particular essay which is extremely relevant to actually to this conference and I would urge if you want to go back and take a look at it it's called education of the people and it was written in 1919 or there abouts and in it Lawrence talked about education that these issues have been around forever I mean they're not new issues really what we're discussing over these two days is the balance between freedom and Authority in children's lives I think I'm on the side of arguing that they made children's lives have become too rigidly controlled there's not enough space and time for them just to play I'm just to be and to develop their own self-reliance but at this point I wasn't really thinking about the children rather more selfishly I was thinking about myself and while I was so tired and exhausted and why couldn't I enjoy this more you know family life is supposed to be fun it certainly promoted to such by celebrities in hello magazine and but we were arguing fighting all the little dreams seem to have evaporated I remember when the first card was born I remember clearly thinking you know this child is going to be loved it's not going to it's never gettin good to need to have a tantrum because it's going to be so loved we won't make any of the same mistakes so they're so obvious that I've seen all my friends make you know it's pretty clear the mistakes they make they you know if you just provide a solid foundation and give their child lots of love so you've got that rather cut nauseating smugness of the of the parent of the naught to one-year-old a smugness which is soon evaporates over the two or three years that follow that and you find there is a reason why it's called the terrible twos and you know we're screaming at each other we're screaming at the child the child screaming at you you're looking at in a bedroom or if you'd lock yourself in your room to get away from it and and so and so it goes and I think this is probably the common story around the world you know and it's the same whether you're in Paraguay or Sydney Australia because a very lovely clean shiny city wasn't expecting everything to be so subtly shiny but it is lovely particular over tell where I'm staying is incredible levels of shininess that only would compare it to my own house which is so messy I mean but likely I think it's it to be - this is one little parenting point I'll come back to the main thrust in a moment but yes well I think of it I did think it's actually it's actually impolite frankly to be to be too tidy at home I have to have a clean house because it makes other mothers and fathers who come round to your house feel bad so the polite the polite thing to do within your community is to live in a pigsty because then when people come round the car well at least it's not as bad as this so that's how I sort of justify that kind of slummy household and although it does sort of - - over much mess can get you down but I do think it's you know it's a little rude of people to opt clean so going back to the the the the nature of this book and in this essay about about education pH laws you know he didn't just write there Decapolis Lobby he wrote a whole load of novels of famously but he was also a social critic and a poet and really involved with the issues of his day and this was an issue then he felt like the the the schools were over over controlled children and parents did too much for their children they were too fussy and he said and they hovered over them too much and he said there are three rules of child care or education first rule leave the child alone second rule leave the child alone third rule leave the child alone now he was seconds from the point of view this is better for the point of view of the child because from the child's point of view the more it's left alone the more it develops its own self-reliance now he was saying you know every child should be able to mend its own clothes and I was like mend its own clothes I mean our children can barely tie their own shoelaces or lob children can't even put their own clothes on let alone sit down with a needle and thread and mend them and I've seen that with you know quite children who really should they're better of six seven years old and their parents literally it's dressing them in the morning but who made socks on for them and stuff like that so and he was to be much better for the child to develop their own self-reliance and and and the way to do that actually is to completely neglect them because of course you have to teach them these things as well but you're also a bit of benign neglect is the phrase means they're more likely to look after themselves so I thought well this sounds good from my point of view it's gonna be a lot less work and from the children's point of view clearly you know the excellence is to be believed you're going to create this kind of super race of very capable young children who will actually start working for you and making your breakfast rather than you having to be their slave and so enthusiastically adopted these ideas have leave them alone and that's really what the book is about so that was a sort of basic philosophy that it sprang from he it's a lovely long essay and he goes into all sorts of areas he goes into education he's not quite as kind of lace a fair as that leave them alone might first make him appear at first sight when it comes to education he's actually into raised some old-fashioned strict education but goes for like three or four hours a day this would be the ideal and then the rest of time really would be just running around in the forest in the fields and in nature so I thought well this is such a contrast that probably he was talking to parents of that time who are over anxious and over worried and so I thought well these ideas could really really usefully be revisited now because um I know my own parents can't believe how fussy my generation of parents are they didn't have the verb parenting it was just a word been verb by at that point and although they took some interest in our education I mean we were sort of more or less left alone to sort of get on with it on our own because the baby boomer generation work is so selfish and my parents were incredibly selfish and they still are very selfish and went to help the child care and but the the the the the recent decline in the quality of grandparents is a different talk which I'll give that's been very sad you know get the grandparents involved but they don't want to the best too busy spending your inheritance on cruises and things so so this was the idea leave them alone and I'm just going to go through sort of five of the just sort of leave them alone type tips in the seven minutes and 51 seconds I got left one of the chapters says you know bring back child labor which I mentioned earlier and it's a shame that those laws went out in the late 19th century thanks to people like Dickens but I think it's important for the for the children to work for you and if you read some of these sort of anthropological accounts of family life in you know other cultures like the continuum concept which is actually lovely book and books like that the anthropologists say that a new child born into the family is not seen as an additional encumbrance and cost but a welcome addition to the labor force of the household so again I've enthusiastically adopted after me it's incredibly difficult and a real struggle because children resists this idea of them working so forcefully of it it's alright when they're small because they haven't quite discovered that hoovering is not play and they think it's quite fun and so you can you can take advantage of that tiller they're about three and I did have this idea that I would sort of like sing while I was hoovering or something to that cubing I could say to sort of fool the killer into thinking that this was fun and again that they would like to play and perhaps you could do the same thing with washing the dishes I tried that that worked for a little bit but now the only way I can really the method I now use is shouting and screaming at them to help and running upstairs and grabbing them and pulling them back down the stairs just off to be finished eating and forcing them to to help me to do the dishes but like if you do that a few times it starts to become a bit of a habit I mean obviously they'd rather I'd rather not lead rather go and watch The Simpsons next door or whatever just a couple of words on the screens we did actually get rid of the television for about five years which is great and but you know after sort of four years of intensive lobbying from all three of the children about why it was so awful they didn't have a television we did eventually give in and I went to the shopping centre with my eldest son Arthur who's 11 and we came back with a sort of new flat-screen television you know we try to be one of those kind of organic families who you know not outdoor play and so on bake your own bread and they killed him hated so they sort of actually give in and yeah when I when we bought this television back home Arthur said that's the best day of my life so far what about all that time we had natural played down by the beach and stuff you know it's like no I didn't really like that so we sort of gave in a bit and but when Arthur was smaller he was always you know we're always dragging him off the computer and he would say things like you know I'm bored I need some entertainment like really horrified me because I thought what happened tickets play you know when the children just be shoved outside and just play rejected they're quite good at what they leave these screens and is this this kind of this input all the time so I tried to resist that and I've got all sorts of you know lovely ideas about how you do that limit it to an hour a day two hours a day one and a half or whatever we never quite sort of managed to time it properly and and actually sometimes it's quite welcome because they're sort of you know because quietly playing in the corner and not disturbing you so you know what good I'll go and do some emailing or something but then what I do is it's all completely wrong a rather than sort of calmly having a family meeting and discussing how many hours or minutes they should be allowed on the screens what we do is because suddenly lose our temper run into a get off the screen you know what are you doing you're ruining your own childhoods I'm just like and Victor was actually thrown you know broken the screen in a fit of a kind of anger that's not a regular way of doing it I think but I supposed to get the point like it's got four more tips which I'll try and run through quickly one great thing I think is camping weekends because it means you can drink and smoke well while doing the Kalka cuz you're outdoors and and also they could have fall asleep round the round the fire and the other thing that's true is if you get you know the more of you the better really I mean we got through those early years by having lots of friends around late brought their families around so you've got adults to talk to you and they've got children to play with if you get the gang of children that they do tend to play and get off the screen it's when they're on their own there's sort of isolation that the modern world encourages were all on our own on our you know tweeting or whatever we've get a big gang of people around for parents and children it's great and camping weekend definitely fantastic you know sort of three or four families really everybody's happy because the parents talk to each other and the kilted will leave you alone because you know I sort of expect if I'm going to leave them alone like expect them to leave me alone rather than sort of hassling me daddy can we have this and that you know can we have a hamster or whatever it is the other thing is lots of sleep for the parents is really important I mean that it's it's it's kind of undervalued but I'm you just got to have a nap and when every day or you know when when Victoria had we sort of finally got the hang of it on the third baby because with two cranky people under slept it's just an absolute hell so finally with number three I slept in the other room doing the pregnancy and when he was born but then we also arranged for Victoria we got someone to come and help for a month and I was also at home just thought she'd had the baby and we did this old-fashioned thing where you know you're excused domestic duties for a month the mother is you can really just lie in bed with the baby and eat chocolate well the others do that I thought that was it that was quite a good system we didn't really mind you know as long as she gets right back into it when that months over then we also have days at home you know sort of resists the temptation to go and spend a lot of money on a theme park I mean I know the children always want that can we go to water mouth castle but you know if you just sit around at home and literally do nothing and with no expectations things do happen of their own accord you can sort of play board games and wrestling games with them and these kinds of things that don't cost anything because the other problem is the high cost of all this stuff that you got to buy and the days out and the driving and the traveling to do nothing at home it's a sort of eco-friendly option and and and it's great low cost as well so I've just got forty nine eight seven six seconds left a final thought for the parents because it's really to have a really good book always on the go so you can always retreat and go and read it and ignore the children and sort of be happy in your edible world and just hope that they ignore you thank you very much

Channel: Happy & Well

Views: 12,306

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: The Idle Parent, Tom Hodgkinson, happiness, The Idler, Young Minds

Id: r4I5XIW5_Qs

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2012