In Praise of Lazy Parenting
Written By Brett Paesel
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A mother shares her radical child-rearing philosophy
It's still dark when my 7-year-old son wakes me. "Mom. The tooth fairy didn't bring my dollar." I roll over slowly to face him. I'm buying time, willing my brain synapses to fire away so I can come up with a crafty excuse to explain why the tooth fairy neglected to replace his tooth with a dollar. For the third time.
"Hold on," I say, "maybe you're just not looking hard enough." My bones creak as I stand. "Let me get my glasses." I trudge over to my desk while Spencer bounces around me. As I reach for my glasses, I open the drawer with my other hand to retrieve a dollar, then palm it as I turn to put the glasses on. "Let's go look."
It's so easy to slip the dollar under Spencer's pillow while I pretend to search around that I wonder why I didn't think of it the last two times — when I suggested maybe the tooth fairy was out sick or on vacation.
When I tell a friend about this ingenious solution, she says, "Wow. I do this whole routine of sprinkling glitter near the bed and writing a note with silver ink in a fairy-sized font."
Why do these things never occur to me? So many moms knock themselves out. One impossibly industrious mother I know not only makes the cupcakes for her daughter's class birthday party, but writes each kid's name on top in icing (which practically requires a fairy-sized font). Last year on Spencer's birthday, I forgot about the cupcake ritual and had to snag some mini blueberry muffins at a 7-Eleven. When I placed the plastic containers on the teacher's desk and popped them open, a little girl yelled, "Those aren't cupcakes!" For which her clothespin got moved down a notch on her behavior chart. I felt a bit guilty about the demerit since she was only stating the obvious, but it's an unfair world out there. Maybe she's better off learning that sooner rather than later.
Is there something wrong with me? Do I love my children less than a mom who sews all of her son's favorite childhood T-shirts into a quilt he can take to college someday? Will my kids hate me because their baby books are more or less blank? Will they resent the fact that I didn't bronze anything? Every day I walk my oldest son to the bus before 7, work out, then spend six hours at a keyboard and another two on the phone. I love returning home to the endless chatter of my two boys. But since I can't be lazy on the job, at home I'm mostly looking for pursuits that can be accomplished supine.
The other night I dutifully decided to put forth a little extra effort: I went into the closet of rarely- to never-used craft items and retrieved an "easy" laminating kit that had been a gift from my mother-in-law, who once harbored a vague hope that I'd preserve something besides dust bunnies. I sat down at the dinner table with sticky plastic and a couple of my sons' drawings, which minutes later I'd managed to mangle into a sculptural ode to trash.
I stared at my handiwork, dejected, and wondered whether mommy inertia might not have an upside after all. This was well worth considering, so I put aside the plastic clumps, poured myself a glass of wine, and lay on the couch. Since I do my best thinking thus, I soon realized that my kids haven't really suffered from my lethargy — they've benefited.
Brotherly Love
I find it exhausting to arrange playdates — the calling, the messages, the picking up and the dropping off. The planning takes as long as the playdate itself. Luckily, a couple of my friends pop over occasionally to visit with their kids, so Spencer and Murphy aren't totally cut off from society.
I've noticed that an unintended benefit of my indolence is that my sons have made do with each other as playmates — thereby becoming best friends. This is something I hadn't anticipated, since they're almost four years apart. But last Saturday, after spending the entire afternoon with just each other, they told me they're starting a business together: selling information they've printed out from the Internet. I feel proud. And why mess with this potentially lucrative partnership?
Since Spence wants more sophisticated company, he's teaching 3-year-old Murphy to read. Spencer started reading at around 4 because, though I love reading chapter books, I tired of his repeated requests to hear dry accounts of the life cycle of beetles, or termites eating dung. If he taught himself to read, I told him, he wouldn't have to depend on me to entertain him. Now he has something to do on long car trips while Daddy and Mommy rock out to Led Zep.
Next: Achieving domestic harmony.
