How to talk to kids
Don't ask your poor children those automatic questions - 'Did you wash your hands, dear?' - those dull, automatic, querulous, duty questions (almost the only conversation that most parents have to offer). Note the look of dreadful exhaustion and ennui and boredom that comes into their otherwise quite happy faces. And don't say, 'How was school today, dear?' which really means: 'Please entertain me (mama) who is mentally totally lazy at the moment with not one witty or interesting thing to offer, and please give me an interesting and stimulating account of high marks.'
Years and years ago when my child was four years old, I suddenly learned not to do this. I learned - a bolt from Heaven - never to ask an automatic question, so boring, so mentally lazy, so exhausting. No, I would myself tell her something interesting and arresting: 'I saw Pat Greaves next door running and bawling because he was being chased by a strange yellow cat.' My child's eyes would sparkle with interest, and there we were, in the liveliest conversation, and behold! she was soon telling me the most interesting extraordinary things, her own ideas. At our meals together I felt that it was I, not she, who must be the wit, the raconteur, the delightful one, the fascinated listener to her remarks, the laugher at her jokes. Now, the light in a child's eyes is a splendid gauge and tells you in a split second if you are failing and becoming a bore and a schoolmarm. She has liked me ever since.
Another aspect of the same thing is this: I say to those youngish parents (the vast majority these days) who are exhausted by their children and, with pale, neurasthenic frowns on their foreheads, are always pleading, 'Plee-ase go to bed, dear ... Plee-ase now Jack, Sally, Jane, go in the other room dear and look at television.'
'No,' I say, 'you are doing it wrong. You are failing as parents. You should be so vigorous, healthy, in the pink of condition (cut out all the smoking and drinking and coffee breaks), so inexhaustible, rambustious, jolly, full of devilry and frolic, of stories, of dramatisations, of actions, of backward somersaults, or athletics and tomfoolery, of hilarity, that your children at last after hours of violent exercise, worn down by laughter and intellectual excitement, with pale, neurasthenic frowns on their foreheads cry: 'Plee...eease, Mama, go to bed!