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Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

 
9780449807606: Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
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The secret behind France's astonishingly well-behaved children.

When American journalist Pamela Druckerman has a baby in Paris, she doesn't aspire to become a "French parent." French parenting isn't a known thing, like French fashion or French cheese. Even French parents themselves insist they aren't doing anything special.

Yet, the French children Druckerman knows sleep through the night at two or three months old while those of her American friends take a year or more. French kids eat well-rounded meals that are more likely to include braised leeks than chicken nuggets. And while her American friends spend their visits resolving spats between their kids, her French friends sip coffee while the kids play.

Motherhood itself is a whole different experience in France. There's no role model, as there is in America, for the harried new mom with no life of her own. French mothers assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children and that there's no need to feel guilty about this. They have an easy, calm authority with their kids that Druckerman can only envy.

Of course, French parenting wouldn't be worth talking about if it produced robotic, joyless children. In fact, French kids are just as boisterous, curious, and creative as Americans. They're just far better behaved and more in command of themselves. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are- by design-toddling around and discovering the world at their own pace.

With a notebook stashed in her diaper bag, Druckerman-a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal-sets out to learn the secrets to raising a society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents. She discovers that French parents are extremely strict about some things and strikingly permissive about others. And she realizes that to be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

While finding her own firm non, Druckerman discovers that children-including her own-are capable of feats she'd never imagined.

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About the Author:
Pamela Druckerman is a former staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered foreign affairs. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Marie Claire, and appeared on The Today Show and NPR's Morning Edition. Her previous book, Lust in Translation, was translated into eight languages. She has a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia. She lives in Paris.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

contents

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

glossary of french parenting terms

attend (ah-tahn)—wait, stop. A command that a French parent says to a child. “Wait” implies that the child doesn’t require immediate gratification, and that he can entertain himself.

au revoir (oh-reh-vwa)—good-bye. What a French child must say when he leaves the company of a familiar adult. It’s one of the four French “magic words” for kids. See bonjour.

autonomie (oh-toh-no-mee)—autonomy. The blend of independence and self-reliance that French parents encourage in their children from an early age.

bêtise (beh-teeze)—a small act of naughtiness. Labeling an offense a mere bêtise helps parents respond to it with moderation.

bonjour (bohn-juhr)—hello, good day. What a child must say when he encounters a familiar adult.

caca boudin (caca booh-dah)—literally, “caca sausage.” A curse word used almost exclusively by French preschoolers.

cadre (kah-druh)—frame, or framework. A visual image that describes the French parenting ideal: setting firm limits for children, but giving them tremendous freedom within those limits.

caprice (kah-preese)—a child’s impulsive whim, fancy, or demand, often accompanied by whining or tears. French parents believe it is damaging to accede to caprices.

classe verte (klass vehr-tuh)—green class. Beginning in about first grade, a class trip in which students spend a week or so in a natural setting. The teacher chaperones, along with a few other adults.

colonie de vacances (koh-loh-nee duh vah-kahnce)—vacation colony. One of hundreds of group holidays for kids as young as four, without their parents, usually in the countryside.

complicité (kohm-plee-see-tay)—complicity. The mutual understanding that French parents and caregivers try to develop with children, beginning from birth. Complicité implies that even small babies are rational beings, with whom adults can have reciprocal, respectful relationships.

crèche (khresh)—a full-time French day-care center, subsidized and regulated by the government. Middle-class French parents generally prefer crèches to nannies or to group care in private homes.

doucement (doo-ceh-mahnt)—gently; carefully. One of the words that parents and caregivers say frequently to small children. It implies that the children are capable of controlled, mindful behavior.

doudou (doo-doo)—the obligatory comfort object for young children. It’s usually a floppy stuffed animal.

école maternelle (eh-kole mah-tehr-nell)—France’s free public preschool. It begins in September of the year a child turns three.

éducation (eh-doo-cah-see-ohn)—upbringing. The way that French parents raise their kids.

enfant roi (an-fahnt rwa)—child king. An excessively demanding child who is constantly the center of his parents’ attention and who can’t cope with frustration.

équilibre (eh-key-lee-bruh)—balance. Not letting any one part of life—including being a parent—overwhelm the other parts.

éveillé/e (eh-vay-yay)—awakened, alert, stimulated. This is one of the ideals for French children. The other is for them to be sage.

gourmand/e (goohre-mahn)—someone who eats too quickly, too much of one thing, or too much of everything.

goûter (gew-tay)—the afternoon snack for kids, eaten at about four thirty P.M. The goûter is the only snack of the day. It can also be a verb: Did you already goûter?

les gros yeux (leh grohz yuh)—“the big eyes.” The look of admonishment that French adults give children, signaling them to stop doing a bêtise.

maman-taxi (mah-mo tax-ee)—taxi mother. A woman who spends much of her free time shuttling her child to extra-curricular activities. This is not équilibrée.

n’importe quoi (nemporta kwa)—whatever; anything you like. A child who does n’importe quoi acts without limits or regard for others.

non (noh)—no; absolutely not.

profiter (proh-feeh-teh)—to enjoy the moment and take advantage of it.

punir (pew-near)—to punish. To be puni—punished—is serious and important.

rapporter (ra-poor-tay)—to tell on someone; to tattle. French children and adults believe that it’s very bad to do this.

sage (sah-je)—wise and calm. This describes a child who is in control of himself or absorbed in an activity. Instead of saying “be good,” French parents say “be sage.”

tétine (teh-teen)—pacifier. It’s not uncommon to see these in the mouths of French three- or four-year-olds.

bringing up bébé

french children don’t throw food

When my daughter is eighteen months old, my husband and I decide to take her on a little summer holiday. We pick a coastal town that’s a few hours by train from Paris, where we’ve been living (I’m American, he’s British), and we book a hotel room with a crib. She’s our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?

We have breakfast at the hotel. But we have to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discover that two restaurant meals a day, with a toddler, deserve to be their own circle of hell. Bean is briefly interested in food: a piece of bread or anything fried. But within a few minutes she starts spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demands to be sprung from her high chair so she can dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

Our strategy is to finish the meal quickly. We order while we’re being seated, then we beg the server to rush out some bread and bring us all our food, appetizers and main courses, simultaneously. While my husband has a few bites of fish, I make sure that Bean doesn’t get kicked by a waiter or lost at sea. Then we switch. We leave enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.

On the walk back to our hotel we swear off travel, joy, and ever having more kids. This “holiday” seals the fact that life as we knew it eighteen months earlier has officially vanished. I’m not sure why we’re even surprised.

After a few more restaurant meals, I notice that the French families all around us don’t look like they’re in hell. Weirdly, they look like they’re on vacation. French children the same age as Bean are sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There’s no shrieking or whining. Everyone is having one course at a time. And there’s no debris around their tables.

Though I’ve lived in France for a few years, I can’t explain this. In Paris, kids don’t eat in restaurants much. And anyway, I hadn’t been watching them. Before I had a child, I never paid attention to anyone else’s. And now I mostly just look at my own. In our current misery, however, I can’t help but notice that there seems to be another way. But what exactly is it? Are French kids just genetically calmer than ours? Have they been bribed (or threatened) into submission? Are they on the receiving end of an old-fashioned seen-but-not-heard parenting philosophy?

It doesn’t seem like it. The French children all around us don’t look cowed. They’re cheerful, chatty, and curious. Their parents are affectionate and attentive. There just seems to be an invisible, civilizing force at their tables—and I’m starting to suspect, in their lives—that’s absent from ours.

Once I start thinking about French parenting, I realize it’s not just mealtime that’s different. I suddenly have lots of questions. Why is it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’ve clocked at French playgrounds, I’ve never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why don’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids are demanding something? Why haven’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours has?

And there’s more. Why is it that so many of the American kids I meet are on mono-diets of pasta or white rice, or eat only a narrow menu of “kids” foods, whereas most of my daughter’s French friends eat fish, vegetables, and practically everything else? And how is it that, except for a specific time in the afternoon, French kids don’t snack?

I hadn’t thought I was supposed to admire French parenting. It isn’t a thing, like French fashion or French cheese. No one visits Paris to soak up the local views on parental authority and guilt management. Quite the contrary: the American mothers I know in Paris are horrified that French mothers barely breastfeed and let their four-year-olds walk around with pacifiers.

So how come they never point out that so many French babies start sleeping through the night at two or three months old? And why don’t they mention that French kids don’t require constant attention from adults, and that they seem capable of hearing the word “no” without collapsing?

No one is making a fuss about all this. But it’s increasingly clear to me that, quietly and en masse, French parents are achieving outcomes that create a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visit our home, the parents usually spend much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build LEGO villages. There are always a few rounds of crying and consoling. When French friends visit, however, we grown-ups have coffee and the children play happily by themselves.

French parents are very concerned about their kids.1 They know about pedophiles, allergies, and choking hazards. They take reasonable precautions. But they aren’t panicked about their children’s well-being. This calmer outlook makes them better at both establishing boundaries and giving their kids some autonomy.

I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and, my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. One writer defines the problem as “simply paying more attention to the upbringing of children than can possibly be good for them.”2 Another, Judith Warner, calls it the “culture of total motherhood.” (In fact, she realized this was a problem after returning from France.) Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.

So why do we do it? Why does this American way of parenting seem to be hardwired into our generation, even if—like me—you’ve left the country? First, in the 1990s, there was a mass of data and public rhetoric saying that poor kids fall behind in school because they don’t get enough stimulation, especially in the early years. Middle-class parents took this to mean that their own kids would benefit from more stimulation, too.3

Around the same period, the gap between rich and poor Americans began getting much wider. Suddenly, it seemed that parents needed to groom their children to join the new elite. Exposing kids to the right stuff early on—and perhaps ahead of other children the same age—started to seem more urgent.

Alongside this competitive parenting was a growing belief that kids are psychologically fragile. Today’s young parents are part of the most psychoanalyzed generation ever and have absorbed the idea that every choice we make could damage our kids. We also came of age during the divorce boom in the 1980s, and we’re determined to act more selflessly than we believe our own parents did.

And although the rate of violent crime in the United States has plunged since its peak in the early 1990s,4 news reports create the impression that children are at greater physical risk than ever. We feel that we’re parenting in a very dangerous world, and that we must be perpetually vigilant.

The result of all this is a parenting style that’s stressful and exhausting. But now, in France, I’ve glimpsed another way. A blend of journalistic curiosity and maternal desperation kicks in. By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I’ve decided to figure out what French parents are doing differently. It will be a work of investigative parenting. Why don’t French children throw food? And why aren’t their parents shouting? What is the invisible, civilizing force that the French have harnessed? Can I change my wiring and apply it to my own offspring?

I realize I’m on to something when I discover a research study5 led by an economist at Princeton, in which mothers in Columbus, Ohio, said child care was more than twice as unpleasant as comparable mothers in the city of Rennes, France, did. This bears out my own observations in Paris and on trips back home to the United States: there’s something about the way the French parent that makes it less of a grind and more of a pleasure.

I’m convinced that the secrets of French parenting are hiding in plain sight. It’s just that nobody has looked for them before. I start stashing a notebook in my diaper bag. Every doctor’s visit, dinner party, playdate, and puppet show becomes a chance to observe French parents in action, and to figure out what unspoken rules they’re following.

At first it’s hard to tell. French parents seem to vacillate between being extremely strict and shockingly permissive. Interrogating them isn’t much help either. Most parents I speak to insist that they’re not doing anything special. To the contrary, they’re convinced that France is beset by a “child king” syndrome in which parents have lost their authority. (To which I respond, “You don’t know from ‘child kings.’ Please visit New York.”)

For several years, and through the birth of two more children in Paris, I keep uncovering clues. I discover, for instance, that there’s a “Dr. Spock” of France, who’s a household name around the country, but who doesn’t have a single English-language book in print. I read this woman’s books, along with many others. I interview dozens of parents and experts. And I eavesdrop shamelessly during school drop-offs and trips to the supermarket. Finally, I think I’ve discovered what French parents do differently.

When I say “French parents” I’m generalizing of course. Everyone’s different. Most of the parents I meet live in Paris and its suburbs. Most have university degrees and professional jobs and earn above the French average. They aren’t the superrich or the media elites. They’re the educated middle and upper-middle classes. So are the American parents I compare them to.

Still, when I travel around France I see that middle-class Parisians’ basic views on how to raise kids would sound familiar to a working-class mother in the French provinces. Indeed, I’m struck that while French parents may not know exactly what they do, they all seem to be doing more or less the same things. Well-off lawyers, caregivers in French day-care centers, public-school teachers, and old ladies who chastise me in the park all spout the same basic principles. So does practically every French baby book and parenting magazine I read. It quickly becom...

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  • ISBN 13 9780449807606
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