© 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.
Will the credit crunch mean that parents spend more time with their families? And have children forgotten how to use their imagination? Author Tom Hodgkinson discusses his new book, The Idle Parent,
with psychologist Oliver James.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...