© Andrew CrowleyThe kids are all right: Tom Hodgkinson and wife Victoria with their children Arthur, Delilah and Henry at their family home in North Devon.
Tom Hodgkinson: The Idle Parent is really a mixture of two things. One was my own experience in having small children and finding it very hard work - stressful, sleep-depriving - and wondering why. And the other was a bit of DH Lawrence where he says, "Leave the child alone." That hit me as a real revelation. I thought, well, that sounds like a lot less work! And if the child is left alone more, it will develop its own inner resources and self sufficiency. So to leave them alone is good for the parent and good for the child.
Oliver James: I think that it all depends what is meant by "leave them alone". For quite a lot of parents, that is exactly what they do: they just leave them in front of the television. I imagine that what DH Lawrence meant was something like the ideas of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He wrote on the theory of play. In a book called Playing and Reality, he is very much about not trying to fill the child up with all of you and your stuff, but letting the child discover for itself about its own body and mind, and the relationship of those things to the "not-me", to the external world. To learn that play and art and creativity happen in the place between me and not-me, the transitional space...
TH: Shouldn't it be easy? All you have to do to create that transitional space is to go into the next room and supervise them a bit less.
OJ: Supervising them doesn't help but, on the other hand, playing with them definitely does. I went with my son Louis to Fundays yesterday; he is just four and has a very considerable fantasy life. It's a fantastic space: they go down huge slides and jump in ball pools. Our game is to take three teddies with us and torment them. He throws them down the big slide and I put on the voice of the teddies, who say: "Oh no, it's terrifying, I don't want to go," and he says, "You've got to go." And he takes great pleasure in throwing them into the pools. It would be much harder for him to get that kind of action going on his own. I suppose the argument of The Idle Parent is that the natural, most healthy state for a child is to be in a state of fantasy play. That is utterly correct. Doing the fantasy play with them, led by them, and going where their fantasy takes them, and at the same time using your own imagination and childlike characteristics, that is good. Leave them alone, no.
TH: But some parents just can't stand to play like that. I think about my mother. There was nothing she liked less than playing with small children and taking them to the swings.
OJ: I have the distinct impression that mothers rarely engage in fantasy play with their children because they're so busy with the logistics. I look around me at Fundays and it's full of fathers. I think around my friends and notice that's very true: the men are more engaged with the fantasy play side of things than the women.
TH: So we are agreed on the importance of play. But the whole weight of the culture is against it. What used to be called playschool, for example, is now called preschool. In other words, it's the first step to taming and enclosing the children. They're preparing them for school. Primary school is a preparation for secondary school, secondary school is a preparation for university, university is a preparation for work. The state, ever since probably the Tudors, seems to be keen on a hard-working populace. The phrase "hard-working families" keeps popping up, used by both the Tories and the Government. Both parents are encouraged to be in full-time jobs; the child should be dropped off at nursery. Where is the time for play, for the children or for the parents?
OJ: Well quite. What's been disastrous since the Second World War has been the hijacking of education by what used to be known as personnel departments but are now known as human resources. The invention of the IQ test, I believe, occurred during the First World War because they didn't have a way of classifying people and deciding what do with them, so they developed psychological testing.
Then you have the collapse of the class system, or at least the illusion of a meritocracy is created, after the Second World War. The key point is that once you've said, "Anyone can be prime minister, anyone can be a chief executive", there then arose the problem: but how the hell do we decide who? And this is the point at which education became essentially a method of trying to work out who gets the top jobs and the money. The whole premise has been that it's vital to educate the population in order to have economic growth. This is a notion that Professor Alison Wolf (in her book, Does Education Matter?) has disproved. She says that spending more money on education beyond a certain basic level does not improve productivity in any way, shape or form. But nonetheless, the system tells you that you have to work very hard at school in order to do well. And I think that play gets lost in that context.
TH: And play shouldn't really be something that we have to pay for. But it's become commodified. There are these costly fun machines on sale, like the Nintendo Wii, which remind me of the ridiculous distracting sports in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: centrifugal bumble-puppy and electromagnetic golf. You have to buy lots of toys.
But kids really can play with anything: everyone knows the endless possibilities offered by a cardboard box. There is a nice essay on child's play by Robert Louis Stevenson in which he reminds us how fantastically imaginative children are. He remembers how he and his brother played with their porridge, making it into desert islands. Literally anything lying around can be played with - twigs, dishcloths. Do we really need to be spending so much money on children? How do we escape from working too hard and spending too much money?
OJ: The vicious circle is well-described in your book. Both parents work flat out in order to afford the things with which to distract the children who they're too tired to play with when they get home. I think that at the heart of it is the disinvestment of the domestic household economy, and which hopefully the credit crunch will reverse. But for the time being, women in particular now see the home as a kind of fueling station for work.
TH: And often a conflict-filled place. Parents get a job to get away from the dysfunctional family.
OJ: The guiding light that The Idle Parent shines on this thing is the idea that, at heart, we're far too invested in our work life. Is this not absolutely the right moment to be publishing such a book? People can just wake up and smell the coffee.
TH: Orwell said England is in a deep sleep. Maybe we are now waking up. If you can't afford all this consumer stuff, or if the lines of credit are being closed down, house prices are no longer rising, then you have to fall back on your own resources and imagination, look at other ways of living. I talk about the pleasures of thrift. If you can reduce your outgoings, you reduce your dependence on your wages, you don't need to work so hard. And you start to become creative. It happened in my own life - we had our own economic collapse at home a few years ago, and it was actually quite joyful and fun. We spent more time at home and less time working.
OJ: To me, the obvious solution to the credit-crunch problem is simply for people to work a shorter week. And to have lower income. That is happening naturally. But with workaholics like Brown, Mandelson and James Purnell in charge, it's hard to see that sort of solution being promoted. There's a golden opportunity for the Tories to say, "Look, we've got a better answer here." I think also another key issue for the idle parent is what gender they are. In some regards, more men spend time with their children than used to be the case. That is a real change and desirable. Whereas it's gone in the opposite direction for women. Women have been brought up to be Bridget Jones.
TH: Yes, and then to go from party girl about town with witty companions and intellectual stimulation to sitting at home like a drudge must be very hard. But there are all sorts of avenues to be explored. One couple I know, both parents went down to a three-day week. So they had slightly more than one full-time salary, but they had four days each when they were at home with the kids.
OJ: That's the way to go. Hopefully in 50 years' time, that's what everybody will be doing.
Psychologist Oliver James is the author of the best-selling Affluenza. He has also made many television and radio programmes on childhood. Tom Hodgkinson is the editor of The Idler magazine and a Weekend Parenting columnist.
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