Anthropologist Desmond Morris does not have much time for prescriptive 'how-to' child manuals. Instead, he presents parents with the facts and lets them make the decisions themselves, writes ROISIN INGLE
ASK ANTHROPOLOGIST, UK national treasure and Naked Ape author Desmond Morris what surprised him most about the findings in his new book Child, his 62nd publication in a career spanning six decades, and it’s what he doesn’t say that is surprising.
He doesn’t point to his controversial claim that watching films as a child can be as beneficial a part of early childcare as being read books. He doesn’t bring up his championing of creches because they ape the way ancient tribal societies rear children.
What surprised him most, he says on the phone from his home in England, was just how full of ability children aged two to five really are. “They are capable of so much and have such a capacity for learning that it is quite simply astonishing,” says the 81 year old.
His latest book is full of equally not-so-shocking revelations. He warns that adults should not speak to children in baby language as it could slow down language acquisition, for example – advice which can be found in even the most elementary childcare books.
So no major surprises then in a book filled with beautiful pictures of photogenic children, but the observations in Child will ring true for the majority of parents, and relatives who have closely observed the young children in their lives.
In fairness, Morris himself who, with his last book Baby, came out as someone who does not have much time for prescriptive “how-to” child manuals in the Gina Ford or Supernanny tradition, does not make any great, groundbreaking claims for Child.
“This is merely meant to be a portrait of what it is like to be a pre-school child. It’s like if an alien came down to earth and observed a child of this age,” says Morris who, since the Naked Ape, Man Watching and the rest of his phenomenally successful oeuvre, has made a career out of looking at us humans through his finely tuned “alien” eye.
“It’s telling you what a three-year-old child is like, their growth rates, their physical journey, their mental abilities, their emotional development. It’s not up to me to tell people how to raise their children but I wrote this book because if they have all the facts, a parent will be better informed about the decisions they make.”
He clearly loves children and is fascinated by them. A world-renowned zoologist he has spent years observing the young from Mumbai to Manchester using ethology, the scientific study of animal behaviour, and applying it to humans.
He had one child himself, a son Jason, now the director of Horse Racing Ireland, and four grandchildren who live here and about whom he speaks with great joy.
To illustrate his wonder at the well-worn “children are capable of so much more than we give them credit for” theory, he excavates an anecdote from his own parenthood not used in the book. It happened when Jason was “exactly four years, and eight months” – he can be specific because part scientific observer, part proud daddy, he recorded it in a notebook at the time.
The family were living in Malta and Morris brought Jason outside one night to show him an eclipse. “I stood there explaining the science of the eclipse . . .when it was over what he said in response to my explanation shook me rigid. He said: ‘Now I understand. I am not your son, I am your moon and I will eclipse you’.” As far as often excruciating “things children say” anecdotes go, it’s pretty memorable.
He says he played lots of “categorising” games with Jason when he was young, an activity he advocates in Child. They would pass long car journeys by playing a “silly” car spotting game. By the age of five he could recognise and identify 100 makes of cars. “So what, you might say,” he muses. “But this silly game gave his brain the ability to organise items from an early age and it has stood him in good stead.
“If you ask Jason who won the 3.30 at Kempton on such a day in 1973 he’d be able to tell you,” he says.
Something else that he says helps with categorising skills and improving concentration are films, which may give succour to parents who feel guilty about sticking their children in front of the TV to watch DVDs. He believes the view that films such as the Star Wars series are of no value to young children is “mistaken”, and that they can be just as useful as reading books to children.
“The attention span of a young child is said to be only about three to five minutes. But a four year old may watch a film for over two hours without once taking her eyes off the screen,” he says.
"Films like Star Wars, Alice in Wonderlandor Cinderellamake the young brain work hard to learn, name, classify and understand a large cast of characters. This is generic rather than specific learning, and prepares the maturing brain cells for categorising the more practical details they will encounter years later at school."
When it comes to childcare, he says working mothers shouldn’t feel guilty about leaving their toddlers in creches or nursery schools because they mirror the way tribal societies let their children all play together in the village.
“That’s the natural way,” he says. “So mothers who go out to work should not feel too bad because they’re doing the natural thing. The important thing is that parents are not too tired to play with their children when they come home.”
His wife, Ramona, is a historian and did most of the research for the book. “She reads much quicker than me,” he explains. There won’t be a school-age follow on to Baby and Child because Morris says by the time a child is at school there are too many other influences at play in its development.
There will be other projects, though. Morris never really stops working, rising at noon and working until 3am or 4am. But while he has sold millions of books and been translated into dozens of languages, some of the books he writes sell very few copies.
A prolific painter and movie buff, he is working on a book about the Kuna Indians, a small tribe who live off the coast of Panama. “That is likely to have a very small readership,” he says, not at all bothered by this or the low sales of another recent book about the early bronze age of Cyprus, one of the many subjects in which he is fascinated.
He credits his longevity – “I didn’t expect to live this long”, he says – with the fact that he has retained a “playful outlook, childlike brain and curiosity”.
His son has been trying to persuade him to move to Ireland for a few years, but the thought of transporting his more than 10,000 books – he had to buy the house next door to store them all – puts him off.
“He keeps asking though, and I do love Ireland . . .” he says. Let’s hope his son persuades him. We could do with some more national treasures.
“It’s telling you what a three-year-old child is like, their growth rates, their physical journey, their mental abilities, their emotional development. It’s not up to me to tell people how to raise their children but I wrote this book because if they have all the facts, a parent will be better informed about the decisions they make
