On a small, rather scruffy island in the middle of a lake in Wiltshire, a lowland gorilla named Nico sits in silverback solitude watching satellite telly while hoards of tourists cruise past him as part of the Longleat ‘adventure park’ experience. It is a thoroughly depressing scene but he’s probably on Prozac too, so maybe he’s untouched by the smallness of his own adventure.
“The thing is,” I say to my boys who are transfixed by the fortieth repeat of the Top Gear Vietnam Special, “if somebody switched that gorilla’s telly off, he’d probably learn how to swim or take up rudimentary raft building and he’d get off that bloody island and…”
“And what, Mum?”
“And… go to the theatre, hook up with the guys, play a bit of footy. I don’t know. Gorilla stuff? The point is, he could go out and find some life!”
“Are you saying I’m a lonely, stupid gorilla?” asks my thirteen year old.
“You can’t be,” says his younger brother. “That gorilla’s got Sky for a start.”
My kids watch TV. They play computer games. And sometimes they do these things during the hours of daylight, or worse, sunlight, when they could be charging around the large garden we’ve overextended ourselves to buy. It makes me feel uneasy.
When I was growing up, the viewing of television was strictly controlled; at least, it was strictly controlled when there was an adult present to strictly control it. When the household adults were at work and we were left home alone (‘childcare’ wasn’t fashionable in the seventies and eighties) we would wait ‘til the car was safely out on the Ongar Road and then we would switch on the box, to enjoy a full day in front of such treats as ‘Pebble Mill’, ‘Crown Court’ and ‘The Sullivans’.
Upon his return from work, my father would stride purposefully into the sitting room and place his hand on the top of the TV set to feel if it was warm. My brother and I would pretend to read from highbrow books with our hearts in our mouths, hoping we’d timed the ‘cooldown’right. Time cooldown wrong and Dad went into meltdown, explaining that passive viewing would rot our brains, deprive us of any motivation or imagination and lead to underachievement in later life.
The trouble was, we lived out of town and there weren’t any structured holiday activities for youngsters. There was a chip shop where you could buy a potato-based lunch and kick empty Pepsi cans around, fields behind our houses where you could smoke fags stolen from James’ Dad’s shed, and a bit of shoplifting if you could be bothered to walk the three miles into town.
Given my extra-curricular activity programme, underachievement was a positive aspiration.
So now I’m parenting myself and I’m working a few things out. I have decided that there is definitely an ok place for telly, especially if it includes ‘The Simpsons’. The stuff that is referenced in that programme makes up for systemic failures in the state education system as far as I’m concerned. But whereas, back in my day, out-of-school activities were minimal and only for the truly aware and dedicated, these days, you can’t move for gymnastics sessions, music lessons, sports clubs, language classes and part-time theatre schools (my own included). The pressure is on to enrol your child into something ‘improving’. Not putting yourself out to get your kid into extra-mural education is seen by some as damaging to his/her life chances.
Thank God then, for Dr Bryan Caplan, a U.S. academic, who has launched a new book, ‘Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun than You Think’, hitting back at the current trend for over-hyper-super-uber-helicopter-tiger parenting so many have gone in for.
His aim is to nullify the guilt parents might feel when they fail to leap out of bed at 5am each morning to take their children to early morning swimming/ice skating/running/diving/dance/tennis (complete this sentence with whichever discipline you failed at yourself) . He seeks to reassure those of us who are sick of fighting resistance to the practice of musical instruments and who would rather spend the money they dish out to teachers of Japanese maths methods on a good bottle of wine or (when they do the Japanese maths themselves) a holiday in a five star resort on Barbados.
Very little of this stuff, he concludes, will actually affect the success or otherwise of the mature product. I must say, I largely agree. For nine years from ages 7 - 16 I was forced through an education in the violin. My father would do everything he could to pay for the lessons and keep his pink Capri on the road so he could take me to Saturday morning music academy. He had heard an interview in which Itzhak Perlman spoke of how he had hated being made to practise the violin by his parents, but how, as an adult, he appreciated the lengths to which they had gone in order to help him achieve his potential in the instrument. Where Mr and Mrs Perlman led, my father would follow.
For nine years I detested the violin. I forged my parents’ signatures in my practice book and I was accused of miming in the orchestra. I had no aptitude or enthusiasm for it and barely scraped through the grades, and yet neither of my parents would countenance my giving it up.
They meant well. They wanted me to be happy and successful. And all these years later, I’ve ended up successfully being happy and I don’t put that down to my barely adequate vibrato. I do however, put it down to good genes and all the stuff we did that was fun – the holidays abroad, the games of Scrabble, Monopoly and Cluedo, the cricket in the garden, the trips to the theatre, picnics in Kew Gardens, free concerts on the Southbank, the Sunday lunches listening to Jazz Record Requests, days out to the Tower of London, museums and art galleries, the talking round the dinner table that meant we were always late to meet our friends when we were old enough to go out to the pub.
I might have been the world’s least impressive violinist, but I knew where you could buy the best salt beef sandwich in London
Some children have personalities that make them compliant and ‘pushable’; they need no coaxing and cajoling to do their homework or practise their violin or audition for a play, but try pushing a different personality and you run the risk of alienating them and compromising your relationship. Dr Caplan's advice is to do the stuff you all enjoy and accept that your children's lives will be shaped not by the choices that you make on their behalf, but the choices they make for themselves. This I agree with, but I would add that, to avoid life looking anything like Gorilla Island, your duty as a parent is to let them in on the choices that are out there...
My children do learn musical instruments and they’re fortunate to attend a school that gives them daily opportunities to play sport with all the discipline and team skills that sport instils. We live in a beautiful part of the world, in the middle of the countryside but in striking distance of the beach. Our summer evenings are spent playing quik-cricket on Sandbanks and barbequeing with friends. We take walks to examine the glow worms on Hambledon Hill; my father takes the boys to Bath
They know that life is a privilege; that, unlike Top Gear, it’s brief and unrepeatable. They owe it to Nico to switch the telly off and get to it.
Brilliant - loved it! Keep writing...... x
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