Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Child psychologist and author of the seminal book 'Baby and Child', who argues that babies cannot be spoiled and the first six months are crucial.
On the island
Eight records
It means Cambridge, it means driving, which was the great thing of the day... and it means trad jazz which I adore.
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Singing this practically saved my sanity one particular spring.
Prelude No. 6 in D minor, BWV 851 (from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I)Favourite
There's also a kind of intellectual discipline in particularly the preludes and fugues, which I love...
O Isis und Osiris (from The Magic Flute)
This particular aria kind of bridges what to me is one of the most exciting things about being a parent or the child of parents...
Thème de Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games)
This movie... was the movie that clinched for me the passionate interest in how and why children develop the way they do that's been with me ever since.
God Bless Africa (from the film Cry Freedom)
I don't want ever to forget that this is arguably the most important thing that's happened in the world in the last ten years...
I wonder if they are. We seem to have been campaigning for the same kinds of change certainly for the last twenty-five years.
Playing this now is kind of a political statement... the thing that got forgotten in Rio was that we can't... save the environment if we don't feed the people who have to live in it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:09You've got two children of your own, Penelope, now grown up. But did you bring them up by the book, as it were?
I in as far as I used a book at all I used Benjamin Spock's book... I think I really brought my two up by my mum.
Presenter asks
5:31Your philosophy of child-rearing is a very liberal one... Have you any proof that it does work, that it is better than a disciplinarian regime?
Proof is so hard to come by, but what kind of proof are we after?... there's no happiness for anybody in the nose to nose clashes that can only end in tears.
Presenter asks
10:00You said that that was music that saved your sanity one spring. Can you tell me about that?
I was sent to boarding school really because nobody could think what to do with me... I cannot tell you how much I hated it. It was the lack of privacy, it was the oh, the whole thing.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Presenter asks
10:40Tell me then about your relationship with your father... He wrote an article... saying that children were an expensive and unrewarding bore.
I think we were temperamentally not matched. I was frightened of him always... A child who's frightened of you is extremely irritating... I think he was a man, and there are many of them, who wished his women didn't like having babies all the time.
Presenter asks
18:25If a mother doesn't impose a regime on the child, then she's in danger of the child imposing a regime on her... Defend.
Our great mistake in the West is that we're always looking forward in terror... Babies who are picked up when they cry readily in the first weeks and even months do not cry more often or for longer than other babies. They cry less because they are more confident.
Presenter asks
26:16You've also said in print, and I quote, 'My ideal society has no day nurseries or creches in it.'
The point I'm making is that I think we're trying to use institutions, group care, instead of people. I think babies need people... babies badly need one-to-one relationships... mothers can't, nor do I think they should, nor have they ever anywhere in the world cared twenty four hours a day single handed for babies.
“The baby is right and what the baby wants should be adhered to in the main... it isn't that I think you should do this really, for babies' sakes. But because if you don't, if you try to follow a set of rules that don't feel comfortable to you, you're going to be miserable, and that's what makes babies miserable.”
“What one's trying to do is to avoid such extremes that there's bound to be a backlash... babies and toddlers and young children are actually people, very much like you and me, except younger and less experienced, and that do as you would be done by obviates all fashion.”
“I cannot tell you how much I hated it... it was the lack of privacy, it was the oh, the whole thing.”
“I am quite clear that despite the very considerable unhappiness of that three or four years, I'm glad it happened... I think I'm glad the divorce happened.”
“Women are not having it all, they aren't having any of it at the moment... Women are not getting an equal bash at money making, at career structure, because children are holding them back from that.”