Libby Rees is a 10-year-old girl, author of what might well be the first self-help book written by a child for children. Entitled Help, Hope and Happiness, it is to be published next month and was written to help children who, like Libby, have faced difficulties, in this instance the messy-sounding break-up of her parents’ marriage.
(Sample quote from the book: “If you sit down and watch a movie which is really emotional and moving it is like turning a key in a lock, all your bottled- up feelings will be released and you will feel so much better.”)
What are we to make of this, apart from admiring the precocious marketing nous of the child for cleverly identifying what is surely, in these dysfunctional times, a giant gap in the market? Is it tragic that we should inhabit a world where children need self-help books at all, especially ones authored by other children?
I suppose it might be, and that one might argue that our lack of regard for what people like to call “traditional family values” has led to the sorry state of affairs where children look to another suffering child for comfort.
Looked at another way, though, the appearance of Help, Hope and Happiness would seem to indicate that, despite all the panicky fears that usually come crashing to the fore on the subject of children and divorce, or children and fractured families, those children are actually all right, or at any rate dealing with things rather better than their parents. Their coping mechanisms are in place.
During the past couple of generations children such as Libby — who may be unusually self-composed and articulate, but is certainly not unusual in terms of her family situation — have through circumstance and by sheer force of numbers been made to develop the kind of emotional intelligence and acuity which sadly continues to elude many of their elders.
And while one may regret the situations which have led to this precocious understanding of human fallibility, it is hard not to see such children’s ability to deal with unhappiness as an entirely good thing: for most adults, the kind of serene, rather Zen acceptance of the nastier things life chucks at you which Libby’s book advocates is only reachable after years, or possibly decades, of therapy. That, or a lobotomy.
And yet we persist in airing the old chestnut about divorce being catastrophic, even though this demonstrably is no longer true. The fear of the damage we inflict on our children by separating from their father (or mother) is the glue that holds thousands of unhappy, perhaps even violent marriages together.
I’ve never understood the “for the sake of the children” concept: it’s fine if you are both Oscar-worthy actors, somehow able to pretend that everything is rosy for years — or decades — on end, but otherwise, as a tactic, it seems both dishonest and doomed to failure. Children whose parents suddenly separate when they hit the age of 18 inevitably feel cheated, their whole childhood revealed as a patchwork of lies and pretence. Children whose parents tough it out, grim-faced, are rarely any happier: believing in “for the sake of the children” presupposes a spectacular lack of observational skills in said children.
As a divorced child of divorced parents myself, I’ve yet to come across any child who would prefer the living hell of two miserable, shouty (or mutinously silent) parents to the relative peace of separated parents living calmly — and happily — in different houses.
Libby Rees’s book would seem to back that argument up. Her own experience of her parents’ divorce sounds far from smooth: in an interview last week she talked about “the people from the court welfare”, and it emerged that she has chosen not to see her father, though he continues to seek access.
Libby says she can’t remember happy times with him, though she’s sure there were some. She doesn’t seem as ruffled by this as she might be: the coping strategies that she writes about in her book have helped her through.
It seems to me that droning on about the death of marriage and the evil it brings, or about it being a parent’s responsibility to stick things out for the children, or about the terrible emotional damage that will inevitably be wrought on the children of divorced parents is really supremely unhelpful to everyone.
The point is, divorces and separations happen. They happen every day. They’re not that bad. It may seem rather odd that it should have taken a 10-year-old child to point this out clearly — a nine-year-old, actually, when she wrote the book — but there you go: from the mouths of babes. It’s high time we adopted the Libby Rees approach, instead of sitting around weeping and wringing our hands, feeling like monsters for choosing happiness over a marriage that was a mistake — and it’s also high time to stop treating children like imbeciles.
They are far more knowing, and far cleverer, than we ever give them credit for, and decades of divorces have equipped them with not only a well-developed sense of self-preservation, but also with maturity of approach to this most emotional of subjects that would put most adults to shame.
oI’m not a bad person: I recycle paper and glass, I don’t drive, I give stuff to charity. Sometimes I sprout seeds. My turkey is organic. This year people are getting Oxfam goats for Christmas, or rather goats have been distributed in their name.
I was feeling quite virtuous about all this until a newspaper article made me realise that I am totally ethically unsound, with my bin bags full of wrapping paper, my proletarian non-organic sprouts, my chipolatas made from possibly (though I hope not) unhappy pigs, my Taittinger — to say nothing of the piles of electricity-guzzling non-recycled plastic toys that the children insist on. I have a Christmas tree. It’s 10ft tall and will end up in a landfill site. And decorations, rather than “Christmassy objects gathered from the wild”. I burn Diptyque candles, not “lichens and fungi”.
It’s all wrong, wrong, wrong. I do not use string bags instead of stockings, and don’t stuff them with eco-friendly light bulbs (now there’s a last-minute idea for a fabulous present), bio-dynamic champagne or vouchers for “a greening up session with an eco-coach”.
I am an ecological disaster zone, it turns out, an irresponsible citizen, a planet-killer. Which is nice to know, since we all need new things to feel inadequate about at this stress-free time of year. The funny thing is, come Christmas, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
