Soon, in addition to commands, Bean is coming home with songs. She often sings one that we know only as ‘Tomola tomola, vatovi!’ in which she sings more and more loudly with each line, while making a spinning motion with her arms. It’s only later that I learn this is one of the most popular French children’s songs, which actually goes ‘Ton moulin, ton moulin va trop vite’ – about a windmill that’s going too quickly.
What really wins us over about the crèche is the food or, more specifically, the dining experience. Each Monday, the crèche posts its menu for the week on a giant white board near the entrance.
I sometimes photograph these menus and email them to my mother. They read like the chalkboard menus at Parisian brasseries. Every day, lunch is served in four courses: a cold vegetable starter; a main dish with a side dish of grains or cooked vegetables; a different cheese each day and a dessert of fresh fruit or fruit purée. There’s a slightly modified version for each age group. The youngest kids have the same foods, but puréed.
A typical menu starts with hearts of palm and tomato salad. This is followed by sliced turkey au basilic accompanied by rice in a provençal cream sauce. The third course is a portion of St Nectaire cheese with a slice of fresh baguette. Dessert is fresh kiwi.
A van arrives several times a week with seasonal, fresh, sometimes even organic ingredients. Aside from the occasional tin of tomato purée, nothing is processed or pre-cooked. A few vegetables are frozen, but never pre-cooked. Using these ingredients, an in-house cook prepares lunch from scratch each day.
I have trouble imagining two-year-olds sitting through a meal like this, so the crèche lets me sit in on lunch one Wednesday, when Bean is at home with a babysitter. I’m stunned when I realize how my daughter eats lunch most days. I sit quietly with my reporter’s notebook while her classmates assemble, in groups of four, at a series of square toddler-sized tables. One of her caregivers wheels up a cart filled with covered serving plates, and bread wrapped in plastic to keep it fresh. There’s an adult at each table.
First, the teacher uncovers and displays each dish. There’s a bright-red tomato salad in vinaigrette, and a side dish of peas, carrots and onions in a tomato sauce. ‘This is followed by le poisson,’ she says, to approving glances, as she reveals a flaky white fish in a light butter sauce. Next she previews the cheese course: ‘Today it’s le bleu,’ she says, showing the kids a crumbly blue cheese. Then she displays dessert: whole apples, which she’ll slice at the table.
The food looks simple, fresh and appetizing. The children eat with gusto. Except for the melamine plates, the bite-size pieces and the fact that some of the diners have to be prodded to say ‘merci’, I might be in a high-end restaurant.
Just who are the people taking care of Bean? To find out, one windy autumn morning I turn up for the annual entrance examination for ABC Puériculture, one of the schools that trains crèche workers. There are hundreds of nervous women (and a few men) in their twenties, who are looking shyly at each other or doing last-minute practice questions in thick workbooks.
They’re understandably anxious. Of the more than 500 people who sit the annual entrance test, just thirty are admitted to the training school. Applicants are grilled on reasoning, reading comprehension, maths and human biology. Those who advance to the second round face a psychological exam, an oral presentation and interrogation by a panel of experts.
The thirty winners then do a year of coursework and internships, following a curriculum set by the government. They learn the basics of child nutrition, sleep and hygiene. They practise mixing baby formula and changing nappies. They’ll have additional week-long training sessions throughout their careers.
In France, working in a crèche is a career. There are schools all over the country with similarly rigorous entrance standards, creating an army of skilled workers. Just half of the carers at a crèche must be auxiliaires or have a similar degree. A quarter must have degrees related to health, leisure or social work. Another quarter are exempt from any qualifications, but must be trained in-house.2 At Bean’s crèche, thirteen of the sixteen carers are auxiliaires or similar.
I start to see Anne-Marie and other caregivers at Bean’s crèche as the Rhodes Scholars of babycare. And I understand their confidence. They’ve mastered their subject and earned the respect of parents. And I’m indebted to them. During nearly three years that Bean is at the crèche, they potty-train her, teach her table manners, and give her a French immersion course.
By Bean’s third year at the crèche, I suspect that the days are starting to feel long, and that perhaps she’s not being stimulated enough. I’m ready for her to move on to nursery. But Bean still seems perfectly content. She chatters all the time about Maky and Lila (pronounced ‘Lee-lah’), her two best friends. (Interestingly, she’s gravitated to other children of foreigners: Lila’s parents are Moroccan and Japanese. Maky’s dad is from Senegal.) She has definitely been socialized. When Simon and I take Bean to Barcelona for a long weekend, she keeps asking where the other children are.
The kids in Bean’s section spend a lot of time running around and shouting in the Astroturf courtyard, which is stocked with little scooters and carts. Bean is usually out there when I pick her up. As soon as she spots me, she bolts over and throws herself happily into my arms, shouting the news of the day.
On Bean’s last day at the crèche, after the goodbye party and the clearing out of her locker, Bean gives a big hug and kiss goodbye to Sylvie, who’s recently been her main caregiver. Sylvie has been the model of professionalism all year. But when Bean embraces her, Sylvie begins to cry. I cry too.
By the end of crèche, Simon and I feel that she’s had a good experience. But we did often feel guilty dropping her off each day. And we can’t help but notice all the alarming headlines in the American press, on how nurseries affect kids.
Continental Europeans aren’t really asking about that any more. Sheila Kamerman at Columbia University says they generally believe that high-quality nurseries, with small groups and warm, well-trained caregivers who have made the job a career, are good for kids. And conversely, they assume that bad nurseries are bad for kids.
Americans have too many misgivings about nurseries to take this for granted. So the US government has funded the largest-ever study of how early childcare arrangements correlate with the way kids develop and behave later in life.3
Many of the headlines on nurseries in America come out of data from this giant study. These headlines often ignore one of the study’s principal findings: that early childcare arrangements just aren’t very significant. ‘Parenting quality is a much more important predictor of child development than type, quantity or quality of childcare,’ explains a press release. Children fared better when their parents were more educated and wealthier, when they had books and play materials at home, and when they had ‘enhancing experiences’ like going to the library. This was the same whether the child went to a nursery for thirty or more hours a week, or had a stay-at-home mother. And as I mentioned earlier, the study found that what’s especially crucial is the mother’s ‘sensitivity’ – how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world.
This is also true at a nursery. One of the study’s researchers4 writes that kids get ‘high-quality’ care when the caregiver is ‘attentive to [the child’s] needs, responsive to her verbal and non-verbal signals and cues, stimulating of her curiosity and desire to learn about the world, and emotionally warm, supportive and caring’.
Kids fared better with a caregiver who was sensitive, whether it was a nanny, a grandparent or a nursery worker. ‘It would not be possible to go into a classroom and, with no additional information, pick out which children had been in center care,’ the researcher writes.
What we should be fretting about isn’t just whether bad nurseries have bad outcomes (of course they do), but how unpleasant it is for kids to spend their days in bad nurseries. We’re so concerned about cognitive development that we’re forgetting to ask whethe
r children in nurseries are happy, and whether it’s a positive experience for them while it’s happening. That’s what French parents are talking about.
Even my mother gets used to the crèche. She starts calling it ‘the crèche’ instead of ‘daycare’, which probably helps. The crèche certainly has benefits for us. We do feel more a part of France, or at least a part of our neighbourhood. Thankfully, we put our ongoing ‘to stay or not to stay in Paris’ conversation on pause. We can’t really imagine moving somewhere where we’d struggle to find decent, affordable childcare. And we can see the next excuse for staying in France coming up soon: the école maternelle, free state nursery school, with places for just about everyone.
Mostly, we like the French crèche because Bean likes it. She eats blue cheese, shares her toys, and plays ‘tomate ketchup’ (the French version of ‘duck, duck, goose’). Also, she has mastered the command form of French. She is a bit too aggressive: she likes to kick me in the shins. But I suspect she’ll outgrow this. I don’t think I can blame the crèche for her faults.
Maky and Lila are still Bean’s dear friends. Occasionally we even take Bean back to the crèche to stare through the railings at the children who are now playing in the courtyard. And every once in a while, out of nowhere, Bean turns to me and says: ‘Sylvie cried.’ This was a place where she mattered.
7
Bébé au Lait
WARMING UP TO the crèche turned out to be easy. Warming up to the other mothers there isn’t. I’m aware that Anglo-American-style instant bonding between women doesn’t happen in France. I’ve heard that female friendships here start out slowly, and can take years to ramp up. (Though once you’re finally ‘in’ with a French woman, you’re supposedly stuck with her for life. Whereas your English-speaking insta-friends can drop you at any time.)
I have managed to make friends with a few French women in the time I’ve now lived in Paris. But most either don’t have kids or they live across town. The ones in my courtyard are barely around, or their kids are older. I’d just assumed that I’d also meet other mums in my neighbourhood, with kids the same age as Bean. In my fantasy, we’d swap recipes, organize picnics, and complain about our husbands. That’s how it’s supposed to happen. My own mother is still close to women she met in the playground when I was small.
So I’m unprepared when the French mothers at the crèche – who all live in my neighbourhood and have age-appropriate kids – barely say bonjour to me when we plop our toddlers down next to each other in the morning. I eventually learn the names of most of the kids in Bean’s classes. But even after a year or so, I don’t think any of the mothers knows Bean’s name. They certainly don’t know mine.
This initial stage, if that’s what it is, doesn’t feel like progress. Mothers I see several days a week at the crèche seem not to recognize me when we pass each other in the supermarket. Perhaps, as the cross-cultural books claim, they’re giving me privacy; to speak would be to forge a relationship, and thus create obligations. Or perhaps they’re just stuck up.
It’s the same at the playground. The Canadian and Australian mothers I occasionally meet there treat the playground like I do: as a place to mingle, and perhaps make friends for life. Within minutes of spotting each other, we’ve revealed our hometowns, marital status and views on bilingual schooling. Soon we’re mirroring like nobody’s business: ‘You trek to Concorde to buy Grape-Nuts cereal? Me too!’
But usually it’s just me and the French mothers. And they don’t do me too’s. In fact, they barely exchange glances with me, even when our kids are sparring over sandbox toys. When I try icebreakers like ‘How old is he?’ they usually mutter a number, then eye me like I’m a stalker. They rarely ask any questions back. When they do, they turn out to be Italian.
Granted, I’m in the middle of Paris, surely one of the world’s least friendly places. The sneer was probably invented here. Even people from the rest of France tell me that they find Parisians cold and distant.
I should probably just ignore these women. But I can’t help it: they intrigue me. For starters, many of them look so much better than we Anglophones do. I drop Bean off at crèche in the morning wearing a ponytail and whatever was on the floor next to my bed. They arrive fully coiffed, perfumed and looking like they have early-rising personal stylists. I don’t even gawk any more when French mothers prance into the park dressed in high-heeled boots and skinny jeans, while pushing buggies with tiny newborns in them. (Mums do get a bit fatter as you get further from central Paris.)
These mothers aren’t just chic; they’re also strangely collected. They don’t shout the names of their children across the park, or rush out with a howling toddler strapped into a pram. They have good posture. They don’t radiate that famous combination of fatigue, worry and on-the-vergeness that’s bursting out of most Anglophone mums I know (myself included). Except for the actual child, you wouldn’t know that they’re mothers.
Part of me just wants to force-feed these women some spoonfuls of fatty pâté. But another part of me is dying to know their secrets. Having kids who sleep well, wait and don’t whine surely helps them stay so calm. But there’s got to be more to it. Are they secretly struggling with anything? Where’s their belly fat? If this is all a façade, what’s behind it? Are French mothers really perfect? And if so, are they happy?
After the baby is born, the first obvious difference between French and Anglophone mums is breastfeeding. For us, the length of time that we breastfeed – like the size of a Wall Street bonus – is a measure of performance. One former businesswoman in my Anglophone playgroup used to sidle up to me and ask, faux innocently, ‘Oh, are you still nursing?’
It’s faux because we all know that our breastfeeding ‘number’ is a concrete way to compete. A mother’s score is reduced if she mixes in formula, relies too heavily on a breast-milk pump, or actually breastfeeds too long (at which point she starts to seem like a crazed hippie).
In Britain and the US, many mothers treat infant formula as practically a form of child abuse. The fact that breastfeeding requires endurance, inconvenience and in some cases physical suffering adds to its status.
You get bonus points from Anglophone mums for nursing in France, where breastfeeding isn’t encouraged and many people find it disturbing. ‘The breastfeeding mother is regarded, if not as an interesting oddity, then as someone who is performing above and beyond the call of duty,’ explains the parenting guide published by Message, the organization for Anglophone mothers in Paris.
We expatriates exchange horror stories about French doctors who – when confronted with the occasional cracked nipple or blocked duct – blithely tell mothers to switch to formula. To combat this, Message has its own army of volunteer ‘breastfeeding supporters’. Before I delivered Bean, one of them warned me never to hand my baby over to the hospital staff while I slept, lest they defy my instructions and give her a bottle when she cried. This woman made ‘nipple confusion’ sound scarier than autism.
All this adversity makes Anglophone mothers in Paris feel like lactating superheroes, battling the evil doctors and strangers who would like to steal antibodies from our babies. In chat rooms, mothers list the strangest places they’ve nursed in Paris: inside Sacré Coeur basilica, on a tomb at the Père Lachaise cemetery, and at a cocktail party at the Four Seasons Hotel George V. One mother says she breastfed her baby ‘while standing and complaining at the easyJet desk in Charles de Gaulle Airport. I sort of laid him on the counter.’ I pity the poor clerk.
Given our zeal, we can’t fathom why French mothers barely breastfeed. About 63 per cent of French mothers do some breastfeeding,1 compared to 76 per cent of mothers in the UK (and 90 per cent of mothers in London).2 Long-term breastfeeding is rare in France. A bit more than half of French mothers are still nursing when they leave the maternity hospital, but most abandon it soon after that.
It’s harder still for us Anglos to understand why even a certain type of middle-class French mother – the ones who st
eam and purée organic leeks for their seven-month-olds and send their older children to the same African drumming classes that we do – don’t breastfeed much either.
‘Don’t they have the same medical information we have?’ one incredulous American mother asks me. Among Anglophones, the reigning theories about why French women don’t nurse include: they can’t be bothered; they care more about their boobs than about their babies (though apparently it’s pregnancy, not breastfeeding, that stretches out breasts); and they just don’t know how important it is.
Locals tell me that breastfeeding still has a ‘peasant’ image, from the days when babies were farmed out to rural wet nurses. Others say that artificial-milk companies pay off hospitals, give away free samples in maternity wards, and advertise mercilessly. Olivier, who’s married to my journalist friend Christine, theorizes that breastfeeding demystifies the female breast, turning it into something utilitarian and animalistic. Just as French fathers steer clear of a woman’s business end during the birth, they avoid viewing the female breast when it’s used for unsexy purposes. ‘Men prefer not to see breastfeeding,’ Olivier says.
There are small pockets of breastfeeding enthusiasts in France. But mostly, there’s little peer pressure to nurse for a long time. My friend Alison, who’s from Brighton and teaches English in Paris, innocently told her doctor that she was still nursing her thirteen-month-old. Alison says the doctor immediately asked her, ‘What does your husband say? And your shrink?’ Enfant magazine acknowledges that ‘Breastfeeding after three months is always viewed badly by one’s entourage.’
Alexandra, the mother of two girls who works in a crèche, tells me that she didn’t give a drop of breast milk to either of her daughters. She says this without a trace of apology or guilt. She says she was thrilled that her husband, who’s a fireman, wanted to help care for the girls, and that bottle-feeding them was a great way to do this. She points out that both of her daughters are now perfectly healthy.
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