We had no trouble meeting other parents, partly because of our daughters’ skill for filling their weeks with playdates, and partly because in a city as dense as Paris, where almost all children go to local public schools, you are bound to run into other parents every day. Over the course of the year, talking to a lot of fellow parents about child rearing, we realized that many of the peculiar ways the French communicate—the automatic non, the inescapable bonjour, and great emphasis on “presentations”—start not at school, but with how parents raise their kids: with a tight leash, and relatively few doubts about the best techniques.
One striking feature of French families is their size: the French have a lot of children. According to official statistics the French have an average of two children per woman. This is the highest rate in Europe, equal to that of Ireland, as well as the United States’. It is also an interesting reversal: between 1750 and 1945, the French were notorious for producing many fewer children than the Germans, the British, and the Italians. Then, starting at the end of World War II, they turned into the European leaders of birthrate.1
In our girls’ immediate social circle, families of three children were common, and one had four. The girls only had one child without siblings in their group, the daughter of a divorced mother, our friend Brigitte. As we would discover, a lot of powerful and influential women in France have large families: in the French government, a third of female ministers had three children or more, which is double the national average (itself the highest in Europe). The same holds true for male ministers—the president himself has, officially, four children. And all French presidents since Charles de Gaulle have had four children.
To get to the bottom of the birthrate enigma, Jean-Benoît visited France’s national bureau of statistics, the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), located in a nondescript building with a spectacular view of one of Paris’s least attractive sites: the périphérique (ring) highway around the city. He went to talk to Pascale Breuil, the head of demographic and social studies, who examines the ins and outs of France’s population growth. Jean-Benoît was expecting to talk mostly about numbers. Instead, Madame Breuil explained why she thought the issue of France’s birthrate is mostly a cultural one.
Madame Breuil concluded that France’s high birthrate was not actually the product of the country’s generous social programs, like day care, health care, and family allowances. According to her, what really sets the French apart from the rest of Europe is their attitude about family itself. She compared France to Germany. Sixty percent of adults in France say they want to have three children or more. The same proportion of French men and women say that having a family is essential to their épanouissement personnel (personal fulfillment). That’s double the rate of Germans who think so. The French say the first condition for having a child is “finding the right person.” Germans say it’s having enough money and finding proper housing.
French families are not, in themselves, radically different from their North American counterparts. The typical family model is the same: two-generation units of parents and children, though French grandparents are still expected to pitch in and supply child care. (And from what we saw, most step up to the task to some degree.) The real difference is what the French think “family” means or represents. The French think of family as a timeless institution. Like all French institutions, it has a well-defined identity and plays a specific role in how society functions. In terms of taxes, for instance, the moment you are married, you declare your income tax as a couple. In France, when you form a family (by getting married or by having children if you are in a common law relationship), you are automatically given a livret de famille, an official family booklet that contains the records of marriages, divorces, births, and deaths, as well as the names of everybody’s parents and grandparents.2
Simply put, there’s very little way you can escape from being part of a family, administratively speaking. As a family, you are constantly asked for your livret de famille to prove you are entitled to one of the many incentives, allowances, and discounts for families. Even in French tax law, there is no such thing as personal income tax: the tax unit is a couple (even before they have children).3 When it comes to writing wills, the French have very little freedom over their estates. Most of what they leave behind goes automatically (and obligatorily) to children and the spouse; only a small proportion can be disposed of at will.
The French have never seriously questioned the value of the family unit, not even during France’s agitated revolutionary period when revolutionaries tried to rebuild France’s institutions from top to bottom—to the point of inventing a new calendar with new names for the days of the week and months. Modern French society is remarkably sensitive about redefining “family.” The year we were in Paris, one hundred thousand people took to the streets to protest same-sex marriage, dubbed mariage pour tous (marriage for all), an expression that brings the French as close as they’ll ever get to being politically correct. That march, impressive on its own, was just a curtain call of protest a year earlier by the same group—a collective of thirty Catholic and right-wing associations called the Manif pour tous (Demonstration for all)—when half a million people marched on the Champs-Élysées to defend “the family” (the Web site of the movement states they want to end “genealogy for all,” meaning no family trees for same-sex couples).
The French themselves were surprised by how belligerent, but also how popular, the Manif pour tous became. And France’s Left, in particular the Socialist government, in some ways folded to the pressure. It was utterly averse to fiddling with the French definition of “the family.” The only idea the government came up with to make same-sex marriage politically palatable was to separate marriage from family: same-sex marriage was authorized on May 18, 2013, but same-sex couples were denied access to assisted reproductive technology.
Julie was relaxing on a bench inside the enclosed children’s park in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens one afternoon while our daughters burned off some steam on the park’s mini zip line, called a tyrolienne in French. There was a mother beside her, tending to a baby in a stroller while the mother’s other, four-year-old daughter stick-fought with an umbrella to kill time. Julie was in the little girl’s line of fire and, predictably, got jabbed in the upper thigh. The mother shot up from her baby to scold the big sister. In typical North American style, Julie assured her she wasn’t really hurt and told her ce n’était pas grave, it wasn’t a big deal. But it was. The mother shot back to Julie, “Si. C’est grave!” (Yes, it is) and turned back to scold her daughter with new vigor. There was simply no way she was going to let a victim undermine her efforts to properly educate her daughter.
French ideas about parenting struck us as conservative, a little authoritarian, sometimes bordering on retrograde. Yet the more we saw how the French parenting philosophy worked out in practice, the less disturbing the techniques seemed.
In France, giving children a bonne éducation (a good education) is paramount. The term comes up frequently in discussions about children. It has little or anything to do with school. Rather, it’s the formal education the family provides. What exactly is a good education? Our friend Brigitte, the mother of one of our daughters’ friends, liked to regale us with stories of her extremely bourgeois upbringing in Paris’s “old money” sixteenth arrondissement. Among other things, her grandmother insisted on teaching Brigitte how to perform a proper curtsy. No French citizen of parenting age, in any Paris neighborhood, would call that part of a good education today. But some things haven’t changed. Brigitte was determined to instill in her own daughter the basic elements of a good education: teaching her to be sage (which literally translates as “wise” but means well behaved, good, calm), to present herself (say bonjour), to respect adults, to have good table manners and express herself properly. (The opposite of this is mal élevé [poorly raised], meaning bad-mannered, something the French universally condemn.)
; Part of what makes French parenting work is that everyone more or less agrees on the goal, and the techniques for achieving it. The American journalist and author Pamela Druckerman, who reports on Paris for The New York Times, identified one of the key elements to French parenting as the cadre, the frame. In her book Bringing Up Bébé, Druckerman describes how French parents just take for granted that kids need structure and rules. And parents don’t question what those rules should be.
As she dug into the topic during her research, Druckerman realized that one of the most striking features of French parenting philosophy was the absence of “philosophy.” Ideas about the degree and type of authority that should be exercised have evolved. No one would endorse the kind of naked authority their parents or grandparents exercised, at least not openly. But the French have not exactly thrown the old rules out with the bath water. For the French, exercising authority is part of a parent’s job. Children are corrected early, and firmly, in the interests of making them sage. And most French children, as we saw, pick up a sense of what’s right and wrong very early from their parents, who are pretty unequivocal about it. French parents are certainly less strict and authoritarian than they used to be, but the idea of the parent-as-friend is still almost universally ridiculed.
As Druckerman points out, the French don’t even have a word for “parenting.” The closest equivalent is the expression éducation familiale, family education. But there’s an important difference between the two. “Parenting” is a verb: it’s something you do. The ultimate goal is understated, even up for debate—do we raise kids to be autonomous? Secure? Adventuresome? As North Americans, we consider that parents all have different styles that correspond to their values (which is not to say we agree with the style or the values, just the basic principle that parenting is something of an individual art). The French notion of éducation familiale emphasizes both the action of educating and the result, which is une bonne éducation. We talked to a lot of French people from a lot of different situations and classes, and they all seem to think pretty much the same thing about what family education consists of.
Teaching kids to express themselves is a big part of it. One of the most remarkable features of the French is not just the ease with which they can speak but also the fact that they speak well. Through school and family, the French get the message very early, then consistently throughout their lives, that they are expected to exhibit a certain eloquence in their interactions with others. Children are taught eloquence as a life skill, and not just with the objective of facilitating future careers in the arts and or in show business. It applies to every element of French society. Not all French speak brilliantly, but everyone is expected to demonstrate some polish in verbal presentation—starting with saying the proper bonjour, merci, or au revoir. It makes a lot of sense for families to cultivate this skill, for the simple fact that people who speak well will always seem more educated than they actually are.
This attitude is not surprising considering what the French consider the objective of raising children. In a fascinating book called Devenir adulte: Sociologie comparée de la jeunesse en Europe (Growing up: Comparative sociology of European youth), the French sociologist Cécile Van de Velde identifies four European models for adulthood.4 For the English (and by extension Americans), the goal of growing up is to s’assumer (take responsibility for your life). In the Danish and Scandinavian model, becoming an adult is about se trouver (finding one’s self). For Spanish and Italians, it is more about s’installer (making a home).
For the French, Van de Velde claims, the objective of growing up is to se placer (find a “situation”), to find a good job and a good place in the system. The French éducation familiale is all about giving kids the skills they need to find the right “situation.” That’s why a lot of the values and habits French parents teach their kids work to help them be accepted and “fit in.” Kids are taught a number of codes very early in life.
The first one is to avoid ridicule, or being laughed at. It’s probably fair to say the fear of ridicule is pretty universal in all cultures. But North Americans, for example, believe so strongly in the merits of individuality that they’re willing to cut some slack when it comes to not “conforming.” Not the French. They pretty much agree that you should avoid anything that keeps you from fitting in.5
One of the most outstanding examples is in name choices. Names in France are remarkably conformist. It’s nothing like the extreme of Denmark, where 40 percent of the population shares the same twenty first names. But the French are not inclined to go anywhere near the endless innovating that Anglo-American societies do with first names, where anything seems to go, spelling mistakes included. This first-name conservatism in France is partly explained by history. In 1803, when Napoleon was not yet emperor, French law stated that children must be named after calendar saints, biblical figures, and people from documented history. In 1966, the law was loosened up to authorize names from mythology and French regions—the Bretons took to this with a vengeance. But as recently as 1993, French parents still had to get state approval for their first-name choices.
Parents today can choose any name they want, and the state can’t legally do anything to stop them, except in extreme cases, where it can prove that a name will “cause prejudice to a child,” like, say, Adulterine.
But curiously, the French still stick to the classics when it comes to naming children. Even today, Jean and Marie top the charts of popular French names. And one rarely sees names with really unorthodox spellings. The French just assume having a weird name will limit you in life. Our twin daughters, who are adopted, had as their original Haitian names something along the lines of Mandarine and Mandoline. Before the girls arrived, many of our North American friends were worried that changing their names would damage their identities by depriving them of a link to their Haitian origins. Our French friends uniformly congratulated us for changing the names and helping our daughters avoid (what they assumed would be) humiliation all their lives. Personne ne pourrait vivre avec ce nom, they said. No one can get through life with names like those. (The girls themselves thought nothing of changing their names and are very happy with our choices.)
The French would certainly have never voted, as Quebeckers did in 2014, for a government led by a certain Philippe Couillard. The name Couillard comes from couille (as in balls, for testicles), though the name actually derives from a medieval catapult in the shape of the male organ. It’s a common name in Quebec, but for the French, the link between Couillard and couille is just too ridiculous. There are people in France named Couillard, but they would have to change their names if they wanted to be elected. Avoiding ridicule is actually the primary reason people give when requesting an official name change in France. The changes are posted in France’s Journal officiel, the official gazette that publishes all legal notices, decrees, and decisions. The name issue is so sensitive that the list of people who have been granted new names appears only in the paper version of the document, not online.
A French sociologist, Baptiste Coulmont, carried out an interesting study examining France’s conservative name choices. His hypothesis was that names were a self-fulfilling prophecy.6 The parents who valued success the most would make the most conservative choices. Coulmont looked at the first names of students who had just done the bac (end of high school) exam (some seven hundred thousand students). Only 9 percent of these seven hundred thousand students managed to get a très bien (a mention) on the exam. So Coulmont studied which first names were on the list of the best students and—big surprise—three quarters of them were straight from the Napoleonic list, including Ulysse, Guillemette, Quitterie, Madeleine, Anne-Claire, Ella, Sibylle, Marguerite, Hannah, Irene, Octave, Domitille. Less than 2 percent of the best students had “modern” names (Asma, Sephora, Hakim, Kimberley, Assia, Cynthia, Brenda, Christian, Bilal, Brian, Melvin, Johann, Eddy, and Rudy). When Jean-Benoît mentioned this to a group of French friends, one woman tersely commented, “c’est norma
l” (it’s to be expected). Parents who choose unusual names “watch too much American TV.”
As part of their éducation familiale, kids learn to respect authority. As North Americans, we have always found French parents’ authoritarian streak a little startling, especially when it comes out of the mouths of some particular friends who are extremely liberal, leaning toward bohemian. We used to think French children accepted authority at home because they have to live with so much of it at school. Now we know it’s the other way around. School mirrors the values families teach anyway. By the time children find themselves in institutionalized education, whether in a crèche (day-care center), in a maternelle (kindergarten), or at elementary school, they have been getting strong doses of authority from their parents for years.
We saw this scenario unfold so many times while we were in France that all the faces melded into one prototypical parent with a child. That mother (it’s usually a mother, but not always) is marching somewhere leading a child by the hand, or sometimes by the neck. The child is sobbing. The mother repeats, loud enough to hear from the other side of the street: “You aren’t obeying! You aren’t obeying!” She says it at least ten times, in a half dozen different tones ranging from stern to completely indignant. The scene lasts between thirty seconds and several minutes. We never actually see how any of these stories start, and we never stick around to see how they end, but the gist is the same: irritated French people order their children to “obey.” Parents in New York, Chicago, Montreal, or Monterrey would only insist that their children “listen.”
The Bonjour Effect Page 7