When my sons were little, I used to carry around small notebooks, pencils, sharpeners and rubbers (that’s erasers to you Americans out there!) with us wherever we went. I found this little sketch book recently, it made me smile. Now that my sons are teenagers they spend a lot of time on their phones, as do I, as does my husband.
In December of 2023 I attended an editing course in Devon. I’ve begun to write a memoir about what it was like growing up in a commune and was looking for some tips. One of the facilitators, mother to a little boy, was curious to know how my unconventional upbringing had affected my own parenting. I’ve been reflecting on this question.
The thing is, most of us hippy kids just wanted to be normal (whatever that means!). We spent a large part of our childhood and young adulthood trying (and failing) to fit in with the village ‘straights’. By the time we’d managed to get enough hand me down clothes to look like them, they’d decided they wanted to look like us. This was most confusing.
Children aren’t born with prejudice, they learn it from their parents. When I first started going to our local primary school, the other kids in my class liked me. They all wanted to come to my birthday party. My birthday is mid April, which is around the time our nanny goat generally had kids. Also we had the best parties (our garden was enormous).
We had a lot of freedom at Shrubb Farm, perhaps more freedom than the ‘straight’ kids. It was fun! We had space to roam around, be in nature, be creative. We had other children and animals to play with. There was no TV but we had a playroom with a Wendy house in it. We used to listen to story records and make up puppet shows. The adults had time for us, there was always someone around. We used to make them watch our shows, even though we generally ended up arguing over who had Kermit the Frog. The adults were mostly benign and relaxed.
I’m not saying it was perfect, we had very little money, winter’s were cold and we ate too much brown rice. My biological father abandoned us the night Mum announced she was pregnant, which was frankly heartbreaking. But for me, the benefits of commune life outweighed the drawbacks. The more nuclear our family became, the more unhappy.
In many ways my kids have grown up in an environment which is very alien to me. For starters they all have the same dad. They were born in wedlock. Despite our ups and downs, the boys’ father and I are still together. We’ve lived in the same house for almost thirty years and our family is unquestionably nuclear. On the outside it may look like I’ve rejected what I was born into, and in some ways I have. But hang on a minute...
Some of the ways we lived at the commune, once considered weird, are now pretty mainstream. We may not eat with chopsticks or collectively ohm before supper, but we eat a surprising amount of brown rice and home grown vegetables. We don’t have a pony or a goat but we cycle a lot and rarely drive. We keep chickens for eggs, we make our own bread and I make some of our own clothes. We’re environmentalists. We grow vegetables, recycle and repair things. We’re not particularly ambitious. We both work part time. We don’t consume much. We play musical instruments, paint, draw, read books. We live in what many people would consider a rural backwater.
Like a lot of other parents I’m learning on the job. Remember the library books I mentioned previously? When my kids were small, we spent a lot of time at the library. I found books to make me laugh and cry and books which helped me parent my kids. SuperNanny was helpful, How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk is another good book. The Aargh to Zzzz of Parenting kept me sane (very funny and real).
The main difference between my generation and that of my kids is debt, the housing and climate crisis. Technology has changed everything too. We’ve had battles with gaming addiction, then COVID affecting mood and motivation. Personally I think it’s very tough for young men in the West right now. I worry about my kids’ future. Perhaps this is normal.
As parents we try to do our best for our kids don’t we? We try to give them what we wished we’d had when we were small as well as the best bits of what we did have. For me the former was was a proper dad and full siblings; the latter a sense of community and kinship, other children, fresh air, a deep connection with/appreciation of nature, creativity, time and space, a lack of pressure, playfulness and animals. We give what we can to our kids, but that’s no guarantee they will like us for it.