In praise of hobbies

The overscheduled child has been a cliche for some years, even decades now, the primped and pampered product of parents with two incomes but little time

Standing in a patch of soggy dirt, mosquitoes nipping at my ankles, watching my daughter, still some way short of her sixth birthday, strive ineptly to stay atop a horse with a murderous (or is it suicidal?) glint in its eye, I wonder what I’m doing to myself. What am I doing to her? It started with that familiar summer complaint: no school and the stir-crazy kids were driving us nuts. Both my wife and I work largely from home and while it is a blessing, the boundaries between domestic and professional duties are porous, easily breached by a baby’s cry, or a bored daughter's demand to play “princess-explorers”. My “writerly” process is several hours of distracted procrastination to produce a couple of hundred words of folderol, which means my productivity when my children are around takes the plunge from its usual place on the edge of the abyss into its black depths.

My daughter struggles with her core strength, is less balanced, less coordinated than the average child of her age; her strengths, at least at this early point in her life, are verbal and mostly deployed to mock her hapless father. So we thought, having spoken to other parents of small children, that learning to ride might help. Another parent, whom we knew from my daughter’s school, extolled the virtues of capoeira. Yes! Why not the acrobatic martial art invented by African slaves in Brazil — which found its full expression in the distinctive, beautiful style of Brazilian football (between the 1950s and 1982) and individual players such as Pele, Ronaldinho and even Neymar — to tap into the latent physicality of the sedentary children of sedentary Delhi professionals? 

As we got sucked into the matrix of choices available in Delhi to occupy the children of people with money to spend, the initial impetus for the exercise was forgotten. Given that young children cannot — or are not allowed to, in these perpetually terrified times — go out and play unsupervised, parents seek out activities. And upper middle class parents, accustomed to rat races, compete to give their children the best, peer-reviewed “opportunities”. Soon, it’s not about the kids but about the parents, about our egos and insecurities.

And so I find myself, on four evenings every week, at a bog perfumed with horses**t, or in a capoeira studio in an “urban village” perfumed with bulls**t. And then there's tennis on Sundays, swimming whenever we can steal some time. And her school starts up again soon, so lego, ballet, music, play dates... what is it I'm doing again? 

The overscheduled child has been a cliché  for some years, even decades now, the primped and pampered product of parents with two incomes but little time. (Though I dispute the “little time” jibe, given the hours I spend schlepping from pointless activity to pointless activity.) In the US, where such intensive “parenting” is the norm among affluent families, research suggests it’s a form of class consolidation, of resume buffing in preparation for admission to selective colleges and the perpetuation of the gap between the haves and have-nots. It’s depressing that I know this and have still chosen to join the herd. Speaking to the New York Times — in a feature pointedly headlined “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting” — a professor sums up the position of beleaguered parents everywhere: “I read all the child-care books... I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.”

When I watch my daughter toil at ginga, or watch her feeding carrots to the horse she rode in her lesson, I feel a strange, ambivalent mix of amusement, pride and self-contempt. I don’t think of overscheduling, in the early childhood years (up to age eight, say), as a problem. I have no answer beyond fomo (fear of missing out, whether for my child or myself is ambiguous) for why I pay for all these extravagant “lessons”, though I realise I am participating in a farce. And I wonder if, having dragged our children dutifully from class to class, we are leaving them unable to seek refuge in that old-fashioned escape — the hobby.

In Laurence Sterne’s wonderfully madcap novel, Tristram Shandy, the hobby horse, however foolish, is a respite for variously troubled characters from the horrors of the world. I hope I have the courage, eventually, to leave my daughter to her hobbies. Not a purposeful activity, not an accomplishment, not an extra string to the bow to enhance a college application, just a hobby that inspires dedication and interest for no motive or goal than the hobby itself — a return to passionate amateurism in place of this voguish, ersatz professionalism.