Bare Minimum Parenting E-Book

James Breakwell

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 247

Beschreibung

The slacker's guide to parenting from the Twitter's most popular dad! Overachieving parents want you to believe the harder you work, the better your children your will turn out. That lie ends now. The truth is most kids end up remarkably unremarkable no matter what you do, so you might as well achieve mediocrity by the easiest possible route. In Bare Minimum Parenting, amateur parenting sort-of expert James Breakwell will teach you to stop worrying and embrace your child's destiny as devastatingly average. To get there, you'll have to overcome your kid, other parents, unnecessary sporting activity, broccoli, and yourself. Everyone will try to make your life more difficult than necessary. Honestly, by reading this far, you're already trying too hard. But don't stop now. You're exactly the kind of person who needs this book. Reviews for James Breakwell Hilarious! - The Sun VERY funny Twitter feed - The Daily Mail The most hilarious man on Twitter - The Telegraph The funniest dad on Twitter - BuzzFeed

Leseprobe

To my wife and kids,for always giving me something to write about.Even when you shouldn’t.

To my parents, for making me the person I amtoday. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment oran insult.

Contents

CHAPTER 1:

A Call to Inaction

CHAPTER 2:

Your Child Is Uniquely Unoriginal

CHAPTER 3:

You Won’t Make a Difference

CHAPTER 4:

Fending Off the Mob

CHAPTER 5:

The Wrong Time to Have a Kid

CHAPTER 6:

Subtraction by Multiplication

CHAPTER 7:

Space Not to Kill Each Other

CHAPTER 8:

Take a Picture—It’ll Last Longer

CHAPTER 9:

Their Eyes Only

CHAPTER 10:

Schooled

CHAPTER 11:

Benched

CHAPTER 12:

Imperfect Attendance

CHAPTER 13:

Screened Out

CHAPTER 14:

Rules Are Rules (Unless They’re Hard to Enforce)

CHAPTER 15:

Food Fight

CHAPTER 16:

Dressing Your Child for Survival

CHAPTER 17:

Early Endings

CHAPTER 18:

Making Up History

CHAPTER 19:

The Point of No Return

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Chapter 1

A Call to Inaction

Facts. Figures. Hard evidence. Peer-reviewed studies. None of those things are in this book. This is a book about kids. Science is as powerless to explain them as it is to make you friends or get you laid. After studying children for generations, all that scientists know for sure is that scientists won’t know anything for sure unless they get more grant money. And maybe tenure.

This lack of empirical data hasn’t stopped countless “experts” from writing libraries of books on the right and wrong ways to raise a child. Their aim is to make you a better parent so you can make better kids who in turn make the world a better place.

Pass.

Why work harder to be a great parent when your kid will turn out just as well if you’re a mediocre one? As for making the world a better place, the sun will swallow the earth in a mere five billion years. It’s a waste of time to fix up temporary housing.

The world doesn’t need another guide for raising children. In fact, it doesn’t need another book of any kind. Reading can lead to eyestrain, headaches, and even war. Guess who made the best-seller list before he invaded Poland.

Clearly there’s nothing more unethical than writing a parenting book. But people pay money for them, so I wrote one anyway. Trust me, no one is more disappointed in me than me. Except maybe my parents.

In my defense, this isn’t really a book. Despite all the evidence to the contrary—it looks like a book, it smells like a book, and I called it a book literally four sentences ago—it’s actually an unbook. It exists solely to counteract the countless parenting books already in print. If those authors stopped publishing bad advice, I’d gladly abandon my unbook as well. But I made some phone calls, and none of the other writers agreed to give up their careers just because I asked them to. I guess I’ll have to write this unbook after all. There goes my weekend.

Here’s the tricky part: I’ve never actually read any of those other parenting books. All I know is that people who buy them go online and blame “underachieving” parents like me for ruining kids today. That’s pretty much the only thing the internet is good for. Well, the only thing it’s good for that doesn’t lead to you clearing your browser history.

I get where those other parents are coming from. If I were them, I’d hate me, too. I’m doing everything wrong, yet the universe hasn’t struck me down. My kids are on track to be self-sufficient adults all the same. Maybe my parenting approach works just as well as the overachieving one, but with less effort on my part. That sounds like the kind of thing other people might want to know about. I should write it down—and sell it for a modest but fair profit. Operators are standing by.

How the Children of Different Kinds of Parents Turn Out

You made the smartest decision of your life just by picking up this book (and, yes, I’m calling it a book again; typing two extra letters was exhausting). You see, this isn’t a book about overachieving as a parent. This isn’t even a book about achieving exactly the right amount. This is a book about doing as little as possible without quite ruining your child. The goal of bare minimum parenting is to turn your kid into a functional adult using only a fraction of the effort spent by over-achieving parents. Your kid will be just as good as their kids—if not better. Often, the easiest approach for you is also the best approach for your child. But if it’s not, be lazy anyway. It’s good to be consistent.

Overparenting is killing kids today. Well, not literally—although I wouldn’t put anything past health-food nuts. No one knows the long-term effects of kale. Many overachieving mums and dads assume the harder they work, the better their kids will turn out, but the evidence doesn’t bear that out. In fact, most parents who do too much raise a child who amounts to too little. Those are the cases I’ll focus on, not because they’re statistically relevant, but because they prove my point. Just don’t accuse me of cherry-picking my data. Like my kids, I’ll die before I touch fruit.

And, yes, you really do need this book to tell you how to do as little as possible. To avoid overparenting, you can’t simply underparent. You must be strategically lazy. Many times, the course that takes the least effort today will create huge amounts of work down the road. This book is meant to save you time and energy overall. Parenting is all about the long game. It has to be. Kids grow up too damn slow.

Guilt by Association

If you’re a parent, your guilt response is already kicking in. You feel terrible just for reading this far. What self-respecting parent would admit they DON’T want to work hard for their kid?

A wise one, that’s who. There’s no reason to feel bad about making something as easy as possible. Do you feel guilty when you solve a maths problem with a calculator instead of an abacus? Do you consider yourself a failure if you use a shopping trolley instead of holding thirty-five different items in your bare hands? Are you tormented by inner turmoil when you fly across the country rather than walking the whole way?

Of course not.

The only thing using a calculator or a shopping trolley or an aeroplane makes you guilty of is being human. We’re not the fastest or strongest creatures on earth, but we are the smartest. Our survival as a species depends on thinking up ways to make life easier. The prize for doing things the hard way isn’t self-satisfaction. It’s extinction.

Bare minimum parenting is just another tool. Sure, there are other, more effort-intensive ways to bring up a kid, but those are just more difficult means of arriving at the same end. Raising your child the hard way doesn’t make you a better parent, just a less evolved one. Why start a fire by rubbing two sticks together when you could use a flamethrower? Time for toasted marshmallows.

Citation Needed

Why am I qualified to give you this advice?

The short answer is I’m not. The longer, more nuanced answer is I’m really, really not. That’s why you should trust me completely.

I don’t have a degree in primary education, child psychology, or early childhood development. My degree is in English, which only makes me an expert at making bad choices. No wonder I’m a parent.

I do have four kids age eight and under, although that doesn’t make me a childcare expert, either. I might have some credibility if I’d already raised successful children, but all of mine are still too young for me to tell how they’ll turn out. For all I know, they could become astronauts or bank robbers. Maybe they’ll be both. Now I hope that happens. Thieves in High Orbit sounds like a better book than Bare Minimum Parenting.

Unfortunately, I can’t wait around for the world’s first space heist. If I raised my kids first and wrote a book afterward, I’d be an expert on children but a fraud on slacking off. You couldn’t believe a word I said. Instead, you should believe me unconditionally because I’m not believable at all.

How Much You Should Trust a Parenting “Expert”

All Downhill from Here

The time to stop trying is now. The fact that you’re reading this book at all suggests you’re already working too hard. Don’t put it down, though. You’re exactly the kind of person who needs it.

Over the course of this book, I’ll teach you to get by while doing less. If you do it right, you’ll out-parent overachieving mums and dads without putting in much effort at all. Some might call that laziness; I call it efficiency. Don’t worry, the lesson will stick. I’ll beat that dead horse until it’s glue. Clear your schedule. We have a lot of nothing to do.

Chapter 2

Your Child Is Uniquely Unoriginal

Your child is a special, one-of-a-kind human being the likes of which the world has never seen. And chances are they’ll lead an ordinary life not that different from your own. Right now, there are literally billions of amazing, creative, and brilliant people who will never do anything particularly amazing, creative, or brilliant. Never believe anything you read in a letter of recommendation. Or an obituary.

That’s okay. Your kid doesn’t have to be a once-in-a-generation talent to lead a good life. Being a genius at something doesn’t come with a high job-satisfaction rate. Tortured artists seldom die of old age surrounded by loved ones. It’s almost impossible in a world of drugs, guns, and sandwiches on toilets.

That’s not a message overachieving parents want to hear. They expect their kid to set the world on fire and earn the rewards that come with it: wealth, prestige, and—if there’s time—happiness. But your child will turn out better if you don’t try for any of those goals—not even the last one. The best things in life happen by accident.

To succeed as a parent—and outperform most overachieving parents in the process—you simply need to raise a kid who hits these three benchmarks:

1. They can support themselves.

2. They aren’t a social deviant.

3. They don’t blame you for everything that’s wrong with their life.

Your goal as a bare minimum parent is to achieve all three in the easiest way possible. The result will be a functional adult you can be proud of, or at least one you can make move out of your house. Don’t be intimidated by overachieving parents who aim higher. The only thing they’ll hit is their kid. When you shoot for the stars, the bullets fall back to earth.

Boiling down child-rearing to those terms makes raising a kid seem easy, and in the parenting world, easy means wrong. But not in my book. Here’s a closer look at all three benchmarks to show you why successful parenting is so simple even I can do it. It’s hard to set the bar any lower than that.

And Stay Out

The fastest way to tell if your child turned out okay is if you can get rid of them. Gently shoving a kid out the door is the crowning achievement of any parent’s life. But your kid isn’t going anywhere unless they have a job. That’s why raising your child to support themselves is the first benchmark of successful parenting. Without gainful employment, your kid will live with you forever—unless you’re okay with them being homeless. After the tenth time they put an empty milk carton back in the fridge, you just might be.

As a bare minimum parent, you mainly want your kid to pay their own bills and not hit you up for money every month. At some point, the freeloading has to stop. It’s just a shame it doesn’t end earlier. Good luck getting grocery money from a toddler.

When it comes to your child’s future job, the money matters, because if they don’t make any, that money will come from you. Interpretive pottery-making might be a fulfilling career, but unless your child can find someone to pay for existential angst as expressed through clay dishes, you’ll have to support them financially until you die. Or until they die. Kilns are more dangerous than they look.

Never encourage your kid down a path that could lead to them living in your basement. You don’t have to actively discourage them from choosing a fun but impoverishing career. Just sit back and watch as the invisible hand of the free market slaps them in the face. The best lessons are the ones that leave a mark.

The Price of Luxury

Successful children need enough money to make it on their own, but not much more than that. Contrary to what over-achieving parents might tell you, your kid doesn’t need to be a millionaire for you to be proud of them. Far from it. Rich people are some of the biggest failures I know. Well, that I know of. You’ve read enough of this book to guess I don’t have any rich friends. Or any friends at all.

Once your child is no longer living paycheck to paycheck, wage increases don’t make life much easier. Sure, extra money can speed up retirement or help put the next generation through university, but in terms of day-to-day living, there’s only so much that money can do. The truth is the average person in Western civilization today is better off than the richest kings in Europe centuries ago. If you want pepper, you get it by going to the supermarket, not by sending a fleet of galleons around the world. Although you’ll still complain if you forgot your coupon.

The biggest benefit of wealth is not what it lets people do, but what it lets them get out of doing. The upper class can pay someone to do all their grunt work for them. Unpleasant tasks like cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing can be foisted upon the hired help. Anything worth doing is worth paying someone else to do for minimum wage or less.

But rich people who rise above life’s trivial hassles find a new level of even more trivial hassles to complain about. We all do it to some degree. History is just a sliding scale of grievances where people get equally angry over increasingly minor setbacks. Someone who lost their entire family to the plague in the 1300s complained just as much as someone today who suffers from slow Wi-Fi. Don’t count on them to gain perspective, either. It would take too long to Google it.

Rich people’s complaints are on the same sliding scale of grievances as everybody else. They’re just further along, which puts them at grave risk from the rest of us. It’s hard to hear a CEO complain about their heated toilet seat being too warm without wanting to punch someone in the face. Revolutions have started for less.

If your kid grows up to have a fridge full of food, a drinks cabinet full of booze, and a TV full of channels, there’s not much more they need. There’s no reason to push them to be rich. In fact, keeping your kid middle class could save their life. No one wants to be caught on the wrong side of the toilet seat rebellions.

One of Us

Life is not a popularity contest. With that being said, if everybody hates your kid, you lose. There are times when it pays not to be the least-liked person in a group. Elections come to mind. So do overladen boats where you have to decide who to throw overboard.

That’s why, as a parent, you must stop your kid from being a social deviant. Your child doesn’t have to be the most beloved person in the neighborhood. Just keep them from being singled out as an enemy of the state. Obvious marks of failure include exile, jail sentences, and viral articles that make everyone despise your kid. Next time, don’t let your child write a post titled “Why I Hate Kittens.” Or at least disown them first.

This is another benchmark where overachieving parents fall short. They want their kid to be loved by all, not from a desire to spread peace and harmony, but because of their own egos. If an overachieving parent is the best, then their child must also be the best. And if you refuse to acknowledge their kid’s greatness, well, just be glad pistol duels are illegal.

It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to love your child, regardless of your kid’s merits. People hate each other for good reasons and bad reasons and no reason at all. At best, we grudgingly tolerate other humans—and the annoyances that come with them—to stop civilization from collapsing. If people expressed how they really felt when they heard someone chewing cereal, every family breakfast would turn into carnage. Keep those napkins handy.

You’ll never truly know how much other people like your kid, but chances are it’s less than you think. That’s fine. Just make sure your child isn’t so bad that people express their displeasure by forming an angry mob. If your kid’s only exercise is running from torches and pitchforks, you’ve failed as a parent.

Beyond those basic criteria, the socialization goals for bare minimum parenting are pretty, well, minimal. A successful child can, when necessary, interact with other human beings without causing an incident. If your kid can go to the shops without setting anything on fire, you’ve done a passable job of raising them. And if they can’t resist burning stuff, there’s always online shopping. Just block the sites that sell matches.

Different Kinds of Social Deviants You Might Raise

DeviantProConBurglarThey can support themselves.They might get hired by a party of dwarves.NinjaThey’re quiet.It’s hard to enforce curfew.Gang LeaderAt least they showed some initiative.They won’t let you join.FurryAnimal costumes will keep them warm.It would’ve been easier to get a real dog.Heavy BreatherThey’re well oxygenated.They could become Dark Lord of the Sith.Open-Mouth ChewerThey eat what you cooked.They make you lose your lunch.Late Library Book ReturnerThey’re literate.They’re evil incarnate.

Not My Fault

The third benchmark is the one that will come up the most in your daily life. For you to be successful, your child must blame someone other than you for all their problems. I’d say they need to take personal responsibility, but that’s not how people work. Even when we make mistakes, it’s because someone else forced us into them. Nobody eats too much, drinks too much, or has too much sex through any fault of their own. Any excesses are a result of diseases or disorders brought on by bad genes or tragic life circumstances beyond our control. Except in the case of your child, it sort of is within your control. Because you’re the person who created them, both their genes and their life circumstances are your fault. Way to ruin everything. You really are a parent.

This is yet another area where overachieving parents make a serious mistake. Rather than simply dodging the blame, overachieving parents try to solve the underlying problem. But if you try to fix something, you’re basically admitting it was your fault in the first place. That’s why the most adult thing to do as a parent when you notice a problem is to stick your hands in your pockets and nonchalantly walk away. Let some overachieving parent swoop in and take the fall instead. They can’t help themselves.

You can’t make someone love you. You can’t even make them respect you. But as a bare minimum parent, you can trick them into not blaming you for everything. The world is falling apart, and the damage trickles down to the rest of us. Use that to your advantage. Make sure any problems you cause don’t stand out above all the other issues plaguing society. You’ll be fine as long as you aren’t worse than global warming.

There’s no shortage of alternative scapegoats. Blame right-wingers. Blame liberals. Blame any word ending in “ism.” Blame corporations or protesters or university professors or rednecks. It doesn’t matter where you place the blame as long as it isn’t on you. The goal isn’t to further a social cause. It’s to stop your kid from slandering you behind your back for the rest of your life. When I say bare minimum, I mean it.

Forget to Smile

The most important benchmark is the one that’s NOT on the list: happiness.

To overachieving parents, it seems like there’s nothing wrong with keeping your child smiling. Happy kids whine less, throw fewer temper tantrums, and are less likely to write a tell-all memoir bashing your parenting. There are few things worse than having to read an entire book to find out why your kid hates you. That’s what passive-aggressive text messages are for.

As a bare minimum parent, I’m not saying you should give your kid a wretched childhood. But making their happiness your top priority is the fastest way to ruin their life.

Think about it. My two-year-old is only happy when she’s playing in toilet water. That doesn’t make her successful, even though she’s very good at it. There are no trophies for defiling a bathroom.

Happiness is an emotional pleasure response. When my toddler splashes toilet water everywhere, her brain is flooded with endorphins. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for her or anyone else. It certainly doesn’t make me happy when I have to bleach the entire bathroom.

If happiness is your only goal for your kid, you might as well buy them heroin. There’s no one more joyful than a drug addict in the middle of a high, even as it literally kills them. The lesson here is unmistakable: We don’t know what’s good for us, and too much happiness is fatal.

I don’t want my two-year-old to grow up to be a hormone junkie or a serial toilet-water splasher. That’s why I don’t beat myself up when she’s unhappy. As a bare minimum parent, I just want her to be self-sufficient, reasonably social, and reluctant to blame me for everything that’s wrong with her life. If that fills her existence with gloom, so be it. At least she’ll be a functional human being. Take that, everyone who’s trying to get their kids on reality TV.

Activities That Make Kids Happy

ActivityProConTaking a Toy from Another KidThey gain a toy.They gain an enemy.Eating SweetsBuys you a few minutes of quiet.Buys your kid’s dentist a new car.Popping BalloonsMakes a fun bang.Enrages evil clowns.Drawing on the WallsAllows your kid to express themselves through art.Makes you express yourself through profanity.Digging Holes in the GardenYou might find pirate treasure.You’ll definitely find ways to kill grass.Knocking Over Someone Else’s Block BuildingReleases aggressive energy.It’s potential terrorist training.Flushing Random ObjectsGets rid of excess toys.Only until a plumber pulls them back out.Rolling Around in Toxic WasteMight make them superheroes.Will certainly make a mess.

The Road to Success

Happy or not, your kid needs to hit all three benchmarks to become a functional adult. Keep these metrics in mind as you read the rest of this book. Write them down. Get them tattooed on your arm. Or maybe just buy a highlighter. I don’t know, you do you.

Having a self-sufficient, nondeviant kid who doesn’t blame you for everything isn’t something new parents fantasize about. But after you’ve seen a few kids go wrong, you’ll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of my approach. You’re not raising the next Mozart or Einstein. But if you follow my method, you won’t raise the next Charles Manson, either. If you’re looking for a life goal, a good one is, “Don’t raise a serial killer.”

Instead, you’ll rear an average person who means the world to you but seems more or less unremarkable to everyone else. That’s what stressed-out, overachieving parents will end up with, too. They’ll just waste more effort getting there. They’re still trying to solve parenthood with an abacus while you’re using a supercomputer. If you run into trouble, don’t go back to the old ways. Just reboot and try again.

Luckily, you’ll have plenty of chances for a fresh start. Biology provides a margin for error that overachieving parents fail to take advantage of. The bad news is you’re about to make more mistakes than you can possibly imagine. The good news is nobody will remember them, not even your kid.

Chapter 3

You Won’t Make a Difference

Imagine this scene: A prestigious scientist stands up to receive a prestigious science award. After being handed the prize—something prestigious like a gift voucher—the scientist takes their spot behind the podium, well, prestigiously, because I don’t own a thesaurus. The crowd falls silent in anticipation of whatever prestigious science words they’re about to hear.

The winning scientist clears their throat.

“I’d like to thank my mother for breastfeeding me,” they say. “Thank you, and good night.”

Mic drop.

Cue the applause. The audience is on its feet. The geology section forms a mosh pit. A chemistry professor crowd-surfs. A lone biologist goes streaking.

Does something seem off about this scenario?

Not the partying, of course. Lab coats are made for hiding flasks.

The flaw is that no scientist at an awards ceremony has ever thanked their mum for breastfeeding them. Or for using formula. Or for doing pretty much anything before the scientist was old enough to remember it because, well, they don’t remember it.

Countless factors played a role in putting that scientist on the podium, but none of them can be traced back to the ostensibly life-or-death decisions new parents beat themselves up over every day. No matter how badly you mess up, one wrong parenting decision won’t turn a potential academic into a hobo who talks to cats. And even if it did, houses are overrated and everybody loves strays.

As a parent, you need to cut yourself some slack, especially for decisions when your child is very young. Almost any choice you make will probably be okay. There’s no need to invent reasons to feel like a failure. There will be plenty of real reasons later on.

The Missing Link

When your kid looks back on their childhood, they won’t care if you chose the right brand of pushchair or co-slept or bought mentally stimulating toys marketed under the name of a famous theoretical physicist. Although, for the record, everything is stimulating to a baby. They’re blown away by finding their own toes. And there are ten of those things, so that’s a lot of excitement.

This isn’t just a case of kids being ungrateful. There’s legitimately no evidence the stuff early parenting books go on and on about makes any difference long term. A baby in the eighty-fifth growth percentile isn’t any more likely to be the first person on Mars than a baby in the seventieth percentile. You’re raising a child, not a marrow. There’s no blue ribbon awarded by weight.

The connection between early parenting decisions and a child’s success later in life is so tenuous that no one has even studied it—that I know of. Again, I did absolutely no research for this book. If there were such a study, I wouldn’t read it anyway, so it might as well not exist. I take this bare minimum stuff seriously.

This lack of connection is obvious to anyone who takes a step back and looks at the big picture. That’s why new parents never figure it out. They don’t have time for perspective. They’re too busy dodging baby wee.

Selective Enrollment

Nowhere is this lack of context clearer than in the struggle to find the right nursery. Landing a spot in one of the best childcare facilities is just as hard as getting into a top university—and nearly as expensive. But nobody stops to ask how attending a lesser nursery would impact their child’s life. The answer, of course, is “not at all.” No defendant has ever gotten off the hook by telling a judge, “It’s not my fault, Your Honor. I went to a subpar preschool.” That excuse might play well in the court of parental opinion, but it will still get your kid twenty-five to life.

Yet try telling that to any parent who spent six months shopping for a nursery before they were even pregnant. They probably still ended up on a two-year waiting list. It’s never too early to find the right strangers to raise your child.

Again, not that it matters. Getting your kid into a top-tier nursery won’t turn your child into a genius. Even the most academically aggressive teachers don’t start exam prep work while children are still in nappies. A kid can’t comprehend the mysteries of the universe when they’re still baffled by the toilet.

Important Lessons Kids Learn at Nursery

LessonWhy It MattersDon’t bite.Cannibalism is frowned upon in most societies.Share.The communists won after all.Play nicely with others.It’s best if your enemies don’t know they’re your enemies.Eat fast.An unfinished snack is a vulnerable snack.Respect authority.Nursery is a tough time to start an insurrection.Glitter is amazing.