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

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Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 8

by Pamela Druckerman


  This is yet another way that French parents teach their kids to wait. They model waiting themselves. Little girls who grow up in homes where the mother doesn’t eat the cupcake surely grow up to be women who don’t eat the cupcake either. (My own mother has many wonderful qualities, but she always eats the cupcake.)

  It strikes me that Martine doesn’t expect her daughter to be perfectly patient. She assumes that Paulette will sometimes grab stuff and make mistakes. But Martine doesn’t overreact to these mistakes, the way that I tend to. She understands that all this baking and waiting is practice in building a skill.

  In other words, Martine is even patient about teaching patience.

  When Paulette tries to interrupt our conversation, Martine says, “Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.” It’s both very polite and very firm. I’m struck both by how sweetly Martine says it and by how certain she seems that Paulette will obey her.

  Martine has been teaching her children patience since they were tiny. When Paulette was a baby, Martine usually waited five minutes before picking her up when she cried (and, of course, Paulette did her nights at two and a half months).

  Martine also teaches her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. “The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,” she says of her son, Auguste.

  A child who can play by himself can draw upon this skill when his mother is on the phone. And it’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In another study, of college-educated mothers in the United States and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.5

  Parents who value this ability are probably more apt to leave a child alone when he’s playing well by himself. When French mothers say that it’s important to take cues from a child’s own rhythm, part of what they mean is that when the child is busy playing, they leave him alone.

  This seems to be another example of French mothers and caregivers intuitively following the best science. Walter Mischel says the worst-case scenario for a kid from eighteen to twenty-four months of age is “the child is busy and the child is happy, and the mother comes along with a fork full of spinach . . .

  “The mothers who really foul it up are the ones who [theeigare coming in when the child is busy and doesn’t want or need them, and are not there when the child is eager to have them. So becoming alert to that is absolutely critical.”

  Indeed, an enormous U.S. government study of the effects of child care6 found that what’s especially crucial is the mother’s or caregiver’s “sensitivity”—how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world. “The sensitive mother is aware of the child’s needs, moods, interests, and capabilities,” a backgrounder explains. “She allows this awareness to guide her interactions with her child.” Conversely, having a depressed mother is very bad, because the depression stops the mother from tuning in to her child.

  Mischel’s conviction about the importance of sensitivity doesn’t just come from research. He says that his own mother was alternately smothering and absent. Mischel still can’t ride a bike, because she was too afraid of head injuries to let him learn. But neither of his parents came to hear him give the valedictory address at his high school graduation.

  Of course American parents want their kids to be patient. We believe that “patience is a virtue.” We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turns, to set the table, and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. As with sleep, we tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.

  French parents and caregivers can’t believe that we’re so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. For them, having kids who need instant gratification would make life unbearable. When I mention the topic of this book at a dinner party in Paris, my host—a French journalist—launches into a story about the year he lived in Southern California. He and his wife, a judge, had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they’d met each other’s kids, who ranged in age from about seven to fifteen.

  From my hosts’ perspective, the weekend quickly became maddening. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted.

  To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge. “What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said ‘no,’” the journalist said. “They did n’importe quoi,” his wife added. This was apparently contagious. “The worst part is, our kids started doing n’importe quoi, too,” she says.

  After a while, I realize that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce t [tlyabohose limits. But within those limits, the kids have a lot of freedom.

  American parents impose limits, too, of course. But often they’re different from the French ones. In fact, French people often find these American limits shocking. Laurence, the nanny from Normandy, tells me she won’t work for American families anymore, and that several of her nanny friends won’t either. She says she quit her last job with Americans after just a few months, mostly over the issue of limits.

  “It was difficult because it was n’importe quoi; the child does what he wants, when he wants,” Laurence says.

  Laurence is tall with short hair and a gentle, no-nonsense manner. She’s reluctant to offend me. But she says that compared with the French families she’s worked for, in the American homes there was much more crying and whining. (This is the first time that I hear the onomatopoeic French verb chouiner—to whine.)

  The last American family she worked for had three kids, ages eight, five, and eighteen months. For the five-year-old girl, whining “was her national sport. She whined all the time, with tears that could fall at a moment’s notice.” Laurence believed that it was best to ignore the girl, so as not to reinforce the whining. But the girl’s mother—who was often home, in another room—usually rushed in and capitulated to whatever the girl was asking for.

  Laurence says the eight-year-old son was worse. “He always wanted a little bit more, and a little bit more.” She says that when his escalating demands weren’t met, he became hysterical.

  Laurence’s conclusion is that, in such a situation, “the child is less happy. He’s a little bit lost. . . . In the families where there is more structure, not a rigid family but a bit more cadre, everything goes much more smoothly.”

  Laurence’s breaking point came when the mother of the American family insisted that Laurence put the two older kids on a diet. Laurence refused, and said she would simply feed them balanced meals. Then she discovered that after she put the kids to bed and left, at about eight thirty P.M., the mother would feed them cookies and cake.

  “They were stout,” Laurence says of the three children.

  “Stout?” I ask.

  “I say ‘stout’ so I don’t say ‘fat,’” she says.

  I’d like to write off this story as a stereotype. Obviously not all American kids behave this way. And French kids do plenty of n’importe quoi, too. (Bean will later say sternly to her eight-month-old brother, in imitation of her own teachers, “Tu ne peux pas faire n’importe quoi”—you can’t do whatever.)

  But the truth is, in my own home, I’ve witnessed American kids doing quite a lot of n’imp
orte quoi..<">Bu=0000801809 >7 When American families come over, the grown-ups spend much of the time chasing after or otherwise tending to their kids. “Maybe in about five years we’ll be able to have a conversation,” jokes a friend from California, who’s visiting Paris with her husband and two daughters, ages seven and four. We’ve been trying for an hour just to finish our cups of tea.

  She and her family arrived at our house after spending the day touring Paris, during which the younger daughter, Rachel, threw a series of spectacular tantrums. When the dinner I’m preparing isn’t ready, both parents come into the kitchen and say that their girls probably can’t wait much longer. When we finally sit down, they let Rachel crawl under the table while the rest of us (Bean included) eat dinner. The parents explain that Rachel is tired, so she can’t control herself. Then they wax about her prodigious reading skills and her possible admission to a gifted kindergarten.

  During the meal, I feel something stroking my foot.

  “Rachel is tickling me,” I tell her parents, nervously. A moment later, I yelp. The gifted child has bitten me.

  Setting limits for kids isn’t a French invention, of course. Plenty of American parents and experts also think limits are very important. But in the United States, this runs up against the competing idea that kids need to express themselves. I sometimes feel that the things Bean wants—to have apple juice instead of water, to wear a princess dress to the park, to be carried instead of pushed in a stroller—are immutable and primordial. I don’t concede to everything. But repeatedly blocking her urges feels wrong and possibly even damaging.

  It’s also just hard for me to conceive of Bean as someone who can sit through a four-course meal or play quietly when I’m on the phone. I’m not even sure I want her to do those things. Will it crush her spirit? Would I be stifling her self-expression and her possibility of starting the next Facebook? With all these doubts, I often capitulate.

  I’m not the only one. At Bean’s fourth birthday party, one of her English-speaking friends walks in carrying a wrapped present for Bean and another one for himself. His mother says he got upset at the shop because he wasn’t getting a present, too. My friend Nancy tells me about a new parenting philosophy that’s meant to eliminate this battle of wills: you never let your child hear the word “no,” so that he can’t say it back to you.

  In France, there’s no such ambivalence about “non.” “You must teach your child frustration” is a French parenting maxim. In my favorite series of French kids’ books, Princesse Parfaite (Perfect Princess), the heroine, Zoé, is pictured pulling her mother toward a crêpe stand. The text explains, “While walking past the crêperie, Zoé made a scene. She wanted a crêpe with blackberry jam. Her mother refused, because it was just after lunch.”

  On the next page, Zoé is back in the bakery, dressed as the Perfect Princess of the title. This time she’s covering her eyes so she won’t see the piles of fresh brioche. She’s being sage. “As [Zoé] knows, to avoid [owscov being tempted, she turns her head to the other side,” the text says.

  It’s worth noting that in the first scene, where Zoé isn’t getting what she wants, she’s crying. But in the second one, where she’s distracting herself, she’s smiling. The message is that children will always have the impulse to give in to their vices. But they’re happier when they’re sage and in command of themselves. (It’s also worth noting that Parisian parents don’t let their little girls go shopping in princess outfits. Those are strictly for parties, and for dressing up at home.)

  In the book A Happy Child, French psychologist Didier Pleux argues that the best way to make a child happy is to frustrate him. “That doesn’t mean that you prevent him from playing, or that you avoid hugging him,” Pleux says. “One must of course respect his tastes, his rhythms and his individuality. It’s simply that the child must learn, from a very young age, that he’s not alone in the world, and that there’s a time for everything.”

  I’m struck by how different the French expectations are when—on that same seaside holiday when I witnessed all the French kids happily eating in restaurants—I take Bean into a shop filled with perfectly aligned stacks of striped “mariner” T-shirts in bright colors. Bean immediately begins pulling them down. She barely pauses when I scold her.

  To me, Bean’s bad behavior seems predictable for a toddler. So I’m surprised when the saleswoman says, without malice, “I’ve never seen a child do that before.” I apologize and head for the door.

  Walter Mischel says that capitulating to kids starts a dangerous cycle: “If kids have the experience that when they’re told to wait, that if they scream, mommy will come and the wait will be over, they will very quickly learn not to wait. Non-waiting and screaming and carrying on and whining are being rewarded.”

  French parents delight in the fact that each child has his own temperament. But they take for granted that any healthy child is capable of not whining, not collapsing after he’s told “no,” and generally not nagging or grabbing stuff.

  French parents are more inclined to view a child’s somewhat random demands as caprices—impulsive fancies or whims. They have no problem saying no to these demands. “I think [Frenchwomen] understand earlier than American women that kids can have demands and those demands are unrealistic,” a pediatrician who treats French and American children tells me.

  A French psychologist writes8 that when a child has a caprice—for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy—the mother should remain extremely calm and gently explain that buying the toy isn’t in the day’s plan. Then she should try to bypass the caprice by redirecting the child’s attention, for example by telling a story about her own life. “Stories about parents are always interesting to children,” the psychologist says. (After reading this, in every crisis I shout to Simon: “Tell a story about your life!”)

  The psychologist says that throughout this the mother should stay in close communication with the child, by embracing him or looking him in the eye. But she must also make him understand that “he can’t have everything right away. It’s essential not to leave him thinking that he is all-powerful, and that he can do everything and have everything.”

  French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them. To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration. They also treat coping with frustration as a core life skill. Their kids simply have to learn it. The parents would be remiss if they didn’t teach it.

  Laurence, the nanny, says that if a child wants her to pick him up while she’s cooking, “It’s enough to explain to him, ‘I can’t pick you up right now,’ and then tell him why.”

  Laurence says her charges don’t always take this well. But she stays firm and lets the child express his disappointment. “I don’t let him cry eight hours, but I let him cry,” she says. “I explain to him that I can’t do otherwise.”

  This happens a lot when she’s watching several children at once. “If you are busy with one child and another child wants you, if you can pick him up obviously you do. But if not, I let him cry.”

  The French expectation that even little kids should be able to wait comes in part from the darker days of French parenting, when children were expected to be quiet and obedient. But it also comes from the belief that even babies are rational people who can learn things. According to this view, when we rush to feed Bean whenever she whimpers, we’re treating her like an addict. Whereas expecting her to have patience would be a way of respecting her.

  As with teaching kids to sleep, French experts view learning to cope with “no” as a crucial step in a child’s evolution. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own. A French child psychiatrist writes that this éducation should begin when a baby is three to six months old. “His mother begins to make him wait a bit sometimes, thus introducing a temporal dimension into his spirit. It’s thanks to these little frust
rations that his parents impose on him day after day, along with their love, that lets him withstand, and allows him to renounce, between ages two and four, his all-powerfulness, in order to humanize him. This renunciation is not always loud, but it’s an obligatory passage.”9

  In the French view, I’m doing Bean no service by catering to her whims. French experts and parents believe that hearing “no” rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires. “As small children you have needs and desires that basically have no ending. This is a very basic thing. The parents are there—that’s why you have frustration—to stop that [process],” says Caroline Thompson, a family psychologist who runs a bilingual practice in Paris.

  Thompson, who has a French mother and an English father, points out that kids often get very angry at their parents when par [entompents block them. She says English-speaking parents often interpret this anger as a sign that the parents are doing something wrong. But she warns that parents shouldn’t mistake angering a child for bad parenting.

  To the contrary, “If the parent can’t stand the fact of being hated, then he won’t frustrate the child, and then the child will be in a situation where he will be the object of his own tyranny, where basically he has to deal with his own greed and his own need for things. If the parent isn’t there to stop him, then he’s the one who’s going to have to stop himself or not stop himself, and that’s much more anxiety-provoking.”

  Thompson’s view reflects what seems to be the consensus in France: making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustration turns them into happier, more resilient people. And one of the main ways to gently induce frustration, on a daily basis, is to make children wait a bit. As with The Pause as a sleep strategy, French parents have homed in on this one thing. They treat waiting not just as one important skill among many but as a cornerstone of raising kids.

 

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