Book Review By Jane Ewins
Penguin 2009 http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780241143735,00.html
The genre of parenting books provides plenty of opportunities to browse the spectrum of different parenting styles and perspectives. Authors with a regimental approach offer counterpoints to the bubbly chaos that embeds itself in most households with children. Tom Hodgkinson’s “The Idle Parent” offers a refreshing look at parenting that makes an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. The benefits of the “less is more’ approach to family life is nicely explored and his enthusiasm for teaching self-sufficiency to children is an inspirational reminder to exhausted parents that caring for their children need not take as much time, energy or resources as is often given as a way of expressing devotion. Equally enjoyable is his advocacy of play, pleasure and freedom. Much of this philosophy follows from the themes of his previous two books, “How to be Idle” and “How to be Free”, and the theme of freedom for both parents and children is followed throughout this book. The Idle Parent isn’t a manual of short-cuts and quick-fixes for time-strapped parents, rather it offers an holistic approach to running a house-hold where simplicity and frugality are used to relieve the burdens many parents face when balancing their resources.
For the idle mother, it is not a choice between ‘going back to work’ or ‘staying at home’. She explores the vast and rich territory between those two barren poles. She creates her own job, one that she can fit around her children or even stop doing for a few years. And having made the conscious decision to both work and look after the children, she enjoys both.
The book explores how the needs of children and parents can be balanced, including the needs for parents to work, and describes how his own experiences of commuting, choosing child-care and schools, and travelling with children, can all be negotiated without stress or anxiety by viewing circumstances with flexibility, and more significantly, avoiding creating situations where pleasure and freedom are compromised. The chapters on the benefits of playing with children, giving children freedom to be outdoors, saying ‘yes’, all remind the reader that children can thrive in relatively simple environments. Slightly less appealing is the notion that toys are surplus artefacts of childhood, and the chapter on reading is incongruously prescriptive in it’s categorising books as either good or bad. Overall, this is a thoroughly engaging book which has many passages to motivate any parent to let children be helpful and happy whilst they reap the benefits of their idleness.