French Children Don't Throw Food

by Druckerman, Pamela

  Even when French kids do say interesting things – or just give the correct answer – French adults are decidedly understated in response. They don’t act like every job well done is an occasion for a ‘good job’. When I take Bean to the free health clinic for a check-up, the paediatrician asks her to do a wooden puzzle. Bean fits all the pieces together. The doctor looks at the finished puzzle and then does something I’m not constitutionally capable of: practically nothing. She mutters the faintest ‘bon’ – more of a ‘let’s move on’ than a ‘good’ – then proceeds with the check-up.

  Not only don’t teachers and authority figures in France routinely praise children to their faces. To my great disappointment, they also don’t routinely praise children to their parents. I had hoped this was a quirk of Bean’s rather sullen first-year teacher. The following year, she has two different teachers. One is a dynamic, extremely warm young woman named Marina, with whom Bean has an excellent rapport. But when I ask Marina how things are going, she says simply that Bean is ‘très compétente’. (I type this into Google Translate, to make sure I haven’t missed some nuance of compétent that might suggest brilliance. It just means ‘very competent’.)

  It’s good that my expectations are low when Simon and I have a mid-term meeting with Agnès, Bean’s other teacher. She, too, is lovely and attentive. And yet she also seems reluctant to label Bean, or make any general statements about her. She simply says, ‘Everything is fine.’ Then she shows us the one worksheet – out of dozens – that Bean had trouble finishing. I leave the meeting having no idea of how Bean ranks against her peers.

  After the meeting, I’m miffed that Agnès didn’t mention anything that Bean has done well. Simon points out that, in France, that’s not her job. Her role is to discover problems. If the child is struggling, the parents need to know. If the child is coping, there’s nothing more to say.

  This focus on the negative, rather than on trying to boost kids’ (and parents’) morale with positive reinforcement, is a well-known (and often criticized) feature of French schools. It’s almost impossible to get a perfect score on the French baccalauréat, the final exam at the end of senior school. A score of 14:20 is considered excellent, and 16:20 is practically perfect.3

  Through friends I meet Benoît, who’s a father of two and a professor at one of France’s elite universities. Benoît says his senior-school-aged son is an excellent student. However, the most positive comment a teacher ever wrote on one of his papers was ‘des qualités’ – some good qualities. Benoît says French teachers don’t grade their students on a curve, but rather against an ideal, which practically no one meets.4 Even for an outstanding paper, ‘the French way would be to say “correct, not too bad, but this and this and this and this are wrong”.’

  By senior school, Benoît says there’s little value placed on letting students express their feelings and opinions. ‘If you say, “I love this poem because it makes me think of certain experiences I had,” that’s completely wrong … What you’re taught in high school is to learn to reason. You’re not supposed to be creative. You’re supposed to be articulate.’

  When Benoît took a temporary posting at Princeton, he was surprised when students accused him of being a harsh grader. ‘I learned that you had to say some positive things about even the worst essays,’ he recalls. In one incident, ‘I had to justify giving a student a D.’ Conversely, I hear that an American who taught at a French high school got complaints from parents when she gave grades of 18:20 and 20:20. The parents assumed that the class was too easy, and that the grades were ‘fake’.

  * * *

  In general, the French parents I know are a lot more supportive than French teachers. They do praise their kids and give them positive reinforcement. Even so, they don’t smother them with praise, the way we Anglophones do.

  I’m starting to suspect that the French may be right in giving less praise. Perhaps they realize that those little zaps of pleasure kids get each time a grown-up says ‘good job’ could – if they arrive too often – simply make kids addicted to positive feedback. After a while, they’ll need someone else’s approval to feel good about themselves. And if kids are assured of praise whatever they do, then they won’t need to try very hard. They’ll be praised anyway.

  Since I’m American, what really convinces me is the research. Praise seems to be yet another realm in which French parents are doing – through tradition and intuition – what the latest scientific studies suggest.

  In their 2009 book NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that the old conventional wisdom that ‘praise, self-esteem and performance rise and fall together’ has been toppled by new research showing that excessive praise ‘distorts children’s motivations; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of the intrinsic enjoyment.’

  Bronson and Merryman discover research showing that when heavily praised students get to college, they ‘become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy’. These students ‘commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major. They’re afraid to commit to something because they’re afraid of not succeeding.’5

  This new research also refutes the conventional Anglophone wisdom that when kids fail at something, parents should cushion the blow with positive feedback. A better tack is to gently delve into what went wrong, giving kids the confidence and the tools to improve. French schools have their problems, but this is exactly what Bean’s French teachers were doing.

  The French seem to proceed through parenting using a kind of scientific method, to test what works and what doesn’t. In general, they seem unmoved by ideas about what should work on their kids, and clear-sighted about what actually does work. They conclude that some praise is good for a child, but that if you praise him too much, you’re not letting him live his life.

  Over the winter holidays I take Bean back to America. At a family gathering, she starts putting on a one-child show, which mostly involves acting like a teacher and giving the grown-ups orders. It’s cute but, frankly, not brilliant. Yet gradually, every adult in the room stops to watch, and to remark on how adorable Bean is (she wisely drops in some French phrases, knowing that these always impress).

  By the time the show is over, Bean is beaming as she soaks up all the praise. I think it’s the highlight of her visit. I’m beaming too. I interpret the praise for her as praise for me, which I’ve been starving for in France. All through dinner afterwards, everyone talks – within earshot of both of us – about how terrific her performance was.

  It’s great on holiday. But I’m not sure I’d want Bean to get that kind of unconditional praise all the time. It feels good, but it seems to come bundled with troubling side effects, including letting a child constantly interrupt. It might also throw off Bean’s internal calibration of what’s truly entertaining, and what’s not.

  I’ve accepted that, if we stay in France, my kids probably won’t ever learn to shoot a bow and arrow. (God forbid they’re ever attacked by eighteenth-century American Indians.) I’ve even toned down my praise a bit. But adjusting to the overarching French view on autonomy is a lot harder. Of course I know that my children have an emotional life that’s separate from mine, and that I can’t constantly protect them from rejection and disappointment. Nevertheless, the idea that they have ‘their lives’ and I have mine doesn’t reflect my emotional map.

  Still, I have to admit that my kids seem happiest when I trust them to do things for themselves. I don’t hand them knives and tell them to go carve a watermelon. They mostly know when things are way beyond their abilities. But I do let them stretch a bit, even if it’s just to carry a breakable plate to the dinner table. After these small achievements, they’re calmer and happier. Dolto is most certainly right that autonomy is one of a child’s most basic needs.

  She also may be right about age six being the threshold. One night, I’m sick with the flu and keeping Simon awake with my coughing. So in the middle
of the night I retreat to the couch. When the kids march into the living room at about 7:30 am, I can hardly move. I don’t start my usual routine of putting out breakfast.

  So Bean does. I lie on the couch, still wearing my eyeshades. In the background I hear her opening drawers, laying the table, and getting out the milk and cereal. She’s five and a half years old. And she’s taken my job. She’s even subcontracted some of it to Joey, who’s organizing the cutlery.

  After a few minutes, Bean comes over to me on the couch. ‘Breakfast is ready, but you have to do the coffee,’ she says. She’s calm, and very pleased. I’m struck by how happy – or more specifically how sage – being autonomous makes her feel. I haven’t praised or encouraged her. She’s just done something new for herself, with me as a witness, and is feeling very good about it.

  Dolto’s idea that I should trust my children, and that trusting and respecting them will make them trust and respect me, is very appealing. In fact, it’s a relief. The clutch of mutual dependency and worry that often seems to bind Anglophone parents to their kids feels inevitable at times, but it never feels good. It doesn’t seem like the basis for the best parenting.

  Letting children ‘live their lives’ isn’t about releasing them into the wild or abandoning them (though French school trips do feel a bit like that to me). It’s about acknowledging that children aren’t repositories for their parents’ ambitions, or projects for their parents to perfect. They are separate and capable, with their own tastes, pleasures and experiences of the world.

  My friend Andi ended up letting her older son go on that trip to the salt marshes. She says he loved it. It seems he didn’t need to be tucked in every night; it was Andi who needed to do the tucking. When it was time for Andi’s younger son to start taking the same class trips, she just let him go.

  Maybe I’ll get used to these trips too one day, though I haven’t let Bean go on one yet. I want my kids to be self-reliant, resilient and happy. I just don’t want to let go of their hands.

  Epilogue

  The Future in French

  MY MOTHER HAS finally accepted that we live across an ocean from her. She’s even studying French, though it’s not going as well as she’d like. An American friend of hers, who lived in Panama but spoke little Spanish, suggests a technique: say a Spanish sentence in the present tense, then shout the name of the intended tense. ‘I go to the store … pasado!’ means that she went to the store. ‘I go to the store … futuro!’ means that she’ll go later.

  I’ve forbidden my mother from doing this when she comes to visit. To my astonishment, I now have a reputation to protect. I have three kids in the local school, and courteous relationships with neighbourhood fishmongers, tailors and café proprietors.

  I still haven’t swooned for Paris. I get tired of the elaborate exchange of bonjours, and of using the distancing vous with everyone but colleagues and intimates. Living in France feels a bit too formal, and doesn’t bring out my freewheeling side. I realize how much I’ve changed when, on the Métro one morning, I instinctively back away from the man sitting next to the only empty seat, because I have the impression that he’s deranged. On reflection, I realize my only evidence for this is that he’s wearing shorts.

  Nevertheless, I’ve come to feel at home in Paris. As the French say, I’ve ‘found my place’. It helps that I’ve made some wonderful friends. It turns out that behind their icy facades, Parisian women need to mirror and bond too. They’re even hiding a bit of cellulite. These friendships have turned me into a bona fide Francophone. I’m often surprised, mid-conversation, to hear coherent French sentences coming out of my own mouth.

  It’s also exciting to watch my kids become bilingual. One morning, as I’m getting dressed, Leo points to my brassiere.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks.

  ‘A bra,’ I say.

  He immediately points to his arm. It takes me a second to understand that he means that the French word bras (with a silent ‘s’) means ‘arm’. He must have learned this word at his crèche. I quiz him and discover, to my surprise, that he knows all the main body parts in French.

  What has really connected me to France is discovering the wisdom of French parenting. Thanks to living in Paris, I’ve learned that children are capable of feats of self-reliance and mindful behaviour that, as an Anglophone parent, I might never have imagined. I can’t go back to not knowing this – even if we end up living elsewhere.

  Of course, some French principles are easier to implement when you’re actually on French soil. When the other children aren’t having midday snacks at the playground, it’s simpler not to give yours a snack either. It’s also easier to enforce boundaries for your kids’ behaviour when everyone around you is enforcing more or less the same ones (or as I often say to Bean, ‘Do they let you do this in school?’).

  But much about ‘French’ parenting doesn’t depend on where you live, or require access to certain types of cheese. It mostly requires a parent to shift how he conceives of his relationship to his children, and what he expects from them. That’s as accessible in Canterbury or Cleveland as it is in Cannes.

  Friends often ask whether I’m raising my kids to be more French or American. When I’m with them in public, I usually think they’re somewhere in between: badly behaved compared to the French kids I know, and pretty good compared to the Americans.

  They don’t always say bonjour and au revoir, but they know that they’re supposed to. Like a real French mother, I’m always reminding them of it. I’ve come to see this as part of an ongoing process called their éducation, in which they increasingly learn to respect other people, and to wait. This éducation seems, gradually, to be sinking in.

  I’m still striving for that French ideal: genuinely listening to my kids, but not feeling that I must always bend to their wills.1 And I still declare, ‘It’s me who decides,’ in moments of crisis, to remind everyone that I’m in charge. I see it as my job to stop my kids from being consumed by their own desires. But I also try to say yes as often as I can.

  Simon and I have stopped discussing whether we’ll stay in France. If we do, I’m not sure what’s in store as our children get older. By the time French kids become teenagers, their parents seem to give them quite a lot of freedom, and to be matter-of-fact about them having private lives, and even sex lives. Perhaps that gives the teenagers less reason to rebel.

  They seem to have an easier time accepting that maman and papa have private lives too. After all, maman and papa have always acted as if they do. They haven’t based life entirely around their children. Their offspring do plan to move out of their parents’ homes eventually. But if a Frenchman in his twenties still lives with his parents, it isn’t quite the humiliating tragedy that it is in America. They can let each other live their lives.

  The summer before Bean starts primary school I realize that the French way of parenting has really got under my skin. Practically all of her French friends are spending weeks of their summer holidays with their grandparents. I decide that we should send her to stay in Miami with my mother. My mum will be visiting us in Paris anyway, so she and Bean can fly back together.

  Simon is against it. What if Bean gets madly homesick and we’re an ocean away? I’ve found a day camp in Miami with daily swimming lessons. Because of the timing, she’ll have to start the camp mid-session. Won’t it be difficult for her to make friends? He suggests we wait a year, until she’s older.

  But Bean thinks the trip is a spectacular idea. She says she’ll be fine alone with her grandmother, and that she’s excited about the camp. Simon finally acquiesces, perhaps calculating that with Bean away, he’ll get to spend more time in cafés. I’ll fly to Miami to bring her home.

  I give my mother a few instructions: no pork, lots of sun-block. Bean and I spend a week fine-tuning the contents of her carry-on bag for the plane. We have a moment of melancholy, when I promise to call every day.

  And I do. But as soon as she arrives in Miami, Bean is so absorbed
in her adventure that she won’t stay on the phone for more than a minute or two. I have to rely on reports from my mum’s friends: ‘She ate sushi with us tonight, taught us some French, told us about some pressing issues concerning her friends from school, and went off to bed with a smile on her face,’ one of them emails me.

  After just a few days, Bean’s English – which was once mid-Atlantic-mysterious with a British twist – now sounds almost fully American. She says ‘car’ with a full, flat ‘ahr’. However, she’s definitely milking her status as an expatriate. My mum says they listened to her language tapes in the car, and that Bean declared, ‘That man doesn’t know French.’

  Bean does try to figure out what’s happened in Paris since she has been away. ‘Is Daddy fat? Is Mummy old?’ she asks us, after about a week. My mum says Bean keeps telling people when I’ll arrive in Miami, how long I’ll stay, and where we’ll go after that. Just as Françoise Dolto predicted, she needs both independence and a rational understanding of the world.

  When I tell friends about Bean’s trip, their reactions split straight down national lines. The North Americans say that Bean is ‘brave’ and ask how she’s coping with the separation. No Anglophone parents I know are sending kids her age off for ten-day stints with their grandparents, especially not across an ocean. But my French friends assume that detaching a bit is good for everyone. They take for granted that Bean is having fun on her own, and that I’m enjoying a well-deserved break.

  As the kids become more independent, Simon and I are getting along better. He’s still irritable, and I’m still irritating. But he’s decided that it’s OK to be cheerful sometimes, and to admit that he enjoys my company. Every once in a while, he even laughs at my jokes.