I’m still mystified by France’s national baby-feeding schedule. How do French babies all end up eating at the same times, if their mothers don’t make them do it? When I point this out, mothers continue to wax about rhythms and flexibility, and about how each child is different.
But after a while, I realize that they also take a few principles for granted, even if they don’t always mention them. The first is that, after the first few months, a baby should eat at roughly the same times each day. The second is that babies should have a few big feeds rather than a lot of small ones. And the third is that the baby should fit into the rhythm of the family.
So while it’s true that mothers don’t force their babies onto a schedule, they do nudge them toward it by observing these three principles. The parenting book Your Child says the ideal is to breast-feed on demand for the first few months and then bring the baby “progressively and flexibly, to regular hours that are more compatible with daily life.”
If parents follow these principles and the baby wakes up at seven or eight, and they think he should wait about four hours between meals, he is going to be routed onto the national meal plan. He’ll eat in the morning. He’ll eat again around noon. He’ll have an afternoon feed around four. And then he’ll eat again at about eight P.M., before going to bed. When the baby cries at ten thirty A.M., his parents are going to assume that what’s best for him is to wait until lunchtime and have a big feed then. It might take a while for him to ease into this rhythm. Parents ease babies on to this schedule gradually, not abruptly. But eventually the baby gets used to it, the same way that grown-ups do. His parents get used to it, too. And it allows the whole family to eat together.
Martine says that for the first few months she nursed Paulette on demand. Around the third month, to get her to wait three hours between feeds, she took her for walks or put her in a sling, where Paulette would usually quickly stop crying. Martine then did the same thing when she wanted to space the feeding times out to fou [es e wr hours. She says she never let either of her kids cry for very long. Gradually they just fell into the rhythm of eating four times a day. “I was really flexible, I’m just like that,” she says.
The critical assumption is that while the baby has his own rhythm, the family and the parents have rhythms, too. The ideal, in France, is finding a balance between these two. Your Child explains, “You and your baby each have your rights, and every decision is a compromise.”
Bean’s regular pediatrician never mentioned this four-meal-a-day plan to me. But he’s away at Bean’s next appointment. His replacement is a young Frenchwoman who has a daughter about Bean’s age. When I ask her about the schedule, she says that—bien sûr—Bean should only be eating four times a day. Then the doctor grabs some Post-its and scribbles down The Schedule. It’s the same one again: morning, noon, four P.M., and eight P.M. When I later ask Bean’s regular doctor why he never mentioned this, he says he prefers not to suggest schedules to American parents, because they tend to become too doctrinaire about them.
It takes a few weeks, but we gradually nudge Bean onto this schedule. It turns out that she can take the wait. She just needed a bit of practice.
* * *
gâteau au yaourt
(Yogurt Cake)
2 six-ounce containers plain whole-milk yogurt (use the empty containers to measure the other ingredients)
2 eggs
2 containers sugar (or just one, depending on how sweet you like it)
1 teaspoon vanilla
Just under 1 container vegetable oil
4 containers flour
1 1⁄2 teaspoons baking powder
Crème fraîche (optional)
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Use vegetable oil to grease a 9-inch round cake pan or a loaf pan.
Gently combine the yogurt, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and oil. In a separate bowl, mix the flour and baking powder. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients; mix gently until ingredient
s are just combined (don’t overmix). You can add 2 containers frozen berries, a container of chocolate chips, or any flavoring you like. Bake for 35 minutes, then five minutes more if the cake doesn’t pass the knife test. It should be almost crispy on the outside, but springy on the [riniveinside. Let it cool. The cake is delicious served with tea and a dollop of crème fraîche.
* * *
Chapter 5
tiny little humans
When Bean is a year and a half, we register her at the Center for the Adaptation of the Young Child to the Aquatic Milieu, also known as Babies in the Water. It’s a weekly paid swimming class organized by our local town hall and held every Saturday at one of the public pools in our neighborhood.
A month before the first class, the organizers summon parents to an informational meeting. The other parents seem a lot like us: college-educated and willing to push strollers into the cold on Saturday mornings in order to teach their kids to swim. Each family is assigned a forty-five-minute swimming slot and reminded that—as in all public pools in Paris—men must wear Speedos, not trunks. (This is supposedly for hygiene. Men could wear swim trunks elsewhere and thus carry dirt into the pool.)
The three of us arrive at the pool, get undressed, and put on our swimsuits as discreetly as possible in the co-ed changing room. Then we slip into the pool alongside the other kids and their parents. Bean throws around some plastic balls, goes down the slide, and jumps off the rafts. At one point an instructor paddles up to us and introduces himself, then swims away. Before we know it, our time is up and the next shift of parents and kids is climbing into the pool.
I figure that this must be an introductory class, and that the lessons will begin the following week. But at the next class it’s the same thing: lots of splashing around but no one teaching anyone how to kick, blow bubbles, or otherwise begin to swim. In fact, there’s no organized instruction at all. Every so often the same instructor paddles by and makes sure we’re happy.
This time, I corner him in the pool: When is he going to start teaching my daughter how to swim? He smiles indulgently at me. “Children don’t learn how to swim in Babies in the Water,” he says, as if this is completely obvious. (I later learn that Parisian kids typically don’t learn to swim until they’re six.)
So what are we all doing here? He says the point of these sessions is for children to discover the water, and to awaken to the sensations of being in it.
Huh? Bean has already “discovered” water in the bathtub. I want her to swim! And I want her to swim as early as possible, preferably by age two. That’s what I thought I’d paid for, and why I dragged my family out of bed on a frigid Saturday morning.
I suddenly look around and realize that all those parents at the informational meeting knew that they were signing up for their kid to merely “discover” and “awaken” to the water, not to learn how to swim. Do their kids “discover” the piano, too, instead of learning how to play it?
It strikes me that French parents aren’t just doing a few things differently. They have a whole different view of how kids learn and of who they are. I don’t just have a swimming-class problem; I seem to have a philosophical problem, too.
In the 1960s, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget came to America to share his theories on the stages of children’s development. After each talk, someone in the audience typically asked him what he began calling The American Question. It was: How can we speed these stages up?
Piaget’s answer was: Why would you want to do that? He didn’t think that pushing kids to acquire skills ahead of schedule was either possible or desirable. He believed that children reach these milestones at their own speeds, driven by their own inner motors.
The American Question sums up an essential difference between French and American parents. We Americans assign ourselves the job of pushing, stimulating, and carrying our kids from one developmental stage to the next. The better we are at parenting, we think, the faster our kids will develop. In my Anglophone playgroup in Paris, some of t
he mothers flaunt the fact that their kids take music classes or that they go to a separate Portuguese-speaking playgroup. But often these same mothers are cagey about revealing any details of the activities, so that no one else can sign up their kids. These mothers would never admit that they’re being competitive, but the feeling is palpable.
French parents just don’t seem so anxious for their kids to get head starts. They don’t push them to read, swim, or do math ahead of schedule. They aren’t trying to prod them into becoming prodigies. I don’t get the feeling that—surreptitiously or otherwise—we’re all in a race for some unnamed prize. They do sign their kids up for tennis, fencing, and English lessons. But they don’t parade these activities as proof of what good parents they are. Nor are they guarded when talking about the classes, like they’re some sort of secret weapon. In France, the point of enrolling a child in Saturday-morning music class isn’t to activate some neural network. It’s to have fun. Like that swimming instructor, French parents believe in “awakening” and “discovery.”
In fact, French parents have a different view of the nature of a child. When I start to read about what this view is, I keep coming across two people who lived two hundred years apart: the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a Frenchwoman I had never previously heard of named Françoise Dolto. They’re the two great influences on French parenting. And their spirits are very much alive in France today.
The modern French idea of how to parent starts with Rousseau. The philosopher wasn’t himself much of a parent (or, like Piaget, even a native Frenchman). He was born in Geneva in 1712 and didn’t have an ideal childhood. His mother died ten days after he was born. His only sibling, an older brother, ran away from home. Later his father, a watchmaker, fled Geneva because of a business dispute, leaving Jean-Jacques behind with an uncle. Rousseau eventually moved to Paris, where he abandoned his own children to orphanages soon after they were born. He said this was to protect the honor of their mother, a former seamstress whom he’d hired as a servant.
None of this stopped Rousseau from publishing Émile, or On Education, in 1762. It describes the education of a fictional boy named Émile (who will, after puberty, meet the lovely and equally fictional Sophie). The German philosopher Immanuel Kant later compared the book’s significance to that of the French Revolution. French friends tell me they read it in high school. Émile’s impact is so enduring that passages and catchphrases from it are modern-day parenting clichés, like the importance of “awakening.” And French parents still take many of its precepts for granted.
Émile was published during a dire time for French parenting. A Parisian police official estimated that of the 21,000 babies born in Paris in 1780, 19,000 were sent to live with wet nurses as far away as Normandy or Burgundy.1 Some of these newborns died en route, bouncing around in the back of cold wagons. Many others died in the care of the poorly paid, overburdened wet nurses, who took on too many babies and often kept them tightly swaddled for long periods, supposedly to keep them from hurting themselves.
For working-class parents, wet nurses were an economic choice; it was cheaper to pay a nurse than to hire someone to replace the mother in the family store.2 For upper-class mothers, however, it was a lifestyle choice. There was social pressure to be free to enjoy a sophisticated social life. The child “interferes not just in his mother’s married life, but also in her pleasures,” writes a French social historian.3 “Taking care of a child was neither amusing, nor chic.”
Rousseau tried to upend all of this with Émile. He urged mothers to breast-feed their own babies. He decried swaddling, “padded bonnets,” and “leading strings,” the child-safety devices of his day. “Far from being attentive to protecting Émile from injury, I would be most distressed if he were never hurt and grew up without knowing pain,” Rousseau wrote. “If he grabs a knife he will hardly tighten his grip and will not cut himself very deeply.”
Rousseau thought children should be given space to let their development unfold naturally. He said Émile should be “taken daily to the middle of a field; there let him run and frisk about; let him fall a hundred times a day.” He imagined a child who is free to explore and discover the world and let his senses gradually “awaken.” “In the morning let Émile run barefoot in all seasons,” he wrote. He allows the fictional Émile to read just a single book: Robinson Crusoe.
Until I read Émile, I was mystified by all the talk among French parents and educators about letting children “awaken” and “discover.” One of the teachers at Bean’s day care gushed at a parents’ meeting that the kids go to a local gymnasium on Thursday mornings, not to exercise but to “discover” their bodies. The day care’s mission statement says that kids should “discover the world, in pleasure and gaiety . . .” Another center nearby is simply called Enfance et Découverte (Childhood and Discovery). The highest compliment anyone seems to pay a baby in France is that she is éveillée (alert and awakened). Unlike in America, this isn’t a euphemism for “ugly.”
Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn’t always require the parent’s active involvement. It can come from staring at the sky, smelling dinner as it’s being prepared, or playing alone on a blanket. It’s a way of sharpening the child’s senses and preparing him to distinguish between different experiences. It’s the first step toward teaching him to be a cultivated adult who knows how to enjoy himself. Awakening is a kind of training for children in how to profiter—to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment.
I’m in favor of all this awakening, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I’m just puzzled by the emphasis. We American parents—as Piaget discovered—tend to be more interested in having kids acquire concrete skills and reach developmental milestones.
And we tend to think that how well and how quickly kids advance depends on what their parents do. That means that parents’ choices and the quality of their intervention are extremely important. In this light, baby sign language, prereading strategies, and picking the right preschool understandably seem crucial. So does the never-ending American search for parenting experts and advice.
I see this cultural difference in my little Parisian courtyard. Bean’s room is filled with black-and-white flash cards, baby blocks with the ABCs printed on them, and the (now discredited) Baby Einstein DVDs that we’ve gladly received as gifts from American friends and family. We play Mozart constantly, to stimulate her cognitive development.
But my French neighbor Anne, the architect, had never heard of Baby Einstein. She wasn’t interested when I told her about it. Anne likes to let her little girl sit and play with old toys bought at yard sales or meander around our shared courtyard.
I later mention to Anne that there is an opening at our local preschool. Bean, who is among the oldest kids in her day care, could start a year early. This would mean taking her out of day care, where I fear she isn’t being sufficiently challenged.
“Why would you want to do that?” Anne asks. “There are so few years to just be a child.”
A University of Texas study found that with all this awakening, French mothers aren’t trying to help their kids’ cognitive development or make them advance in school. Rather, they believe that awakening will help their kids forge “inner psychological qualities such as self-assurance and tolerance of difference.” Others believe in exposing children to a variety of tastes, colors, and sights, simply because doing so gives the children pleasure.4
This pleasure is “the motivation for life,” one of the mothers says. “If we didn’t have pleasure, we wouldn’t have any reason to live.”
In the twenty-first-century Paris of parents and children that I inhabit, Rousseau’s legacy takes two apparently contradictory forms. On the one hand, there’s the frolicking in the fields ( c tht, or the pool). But on the other hand, there’s quite strict discipline. Rousseau says that a child’s freedom should be bound by firm limits and strong parental authority.
“Do you know the sures
t means of making your child miserable?” he writes. “It is to accustom him to getting everything. Since his desires grow constantly due to the ease of satisfying them, sooner or later powerlessness will force you, in spite of yourself, to end up with a refusal. And this unaccustomed refusal will give him more torment than being deprived of what he desires.”
Rousseau says the biggest parenting trap is to think that because a child can argue well, his argument deserves the same weight as your own. “The worst education is to leave him floating between his will and yours and to dispute endlessly between you and him as to which of the two will be the master.”
For Rousseau, the only possible master is the parent. He often seems to be describing the cadre—or frame—that is the model for today’s French parents. The ideal of the cadre is that parents are very strict about certain things but very relaxed about most everything else.
Fanny, the publisher with two young children, tells me that before she even had kids, she heard a well-known French actor on the radio talking about being a parent. He put her ideas about the cadre—and the way she herself was raised—into words.
“He said, ‘Education is a firm cadre, and inside is liberty.’ I really like that. I think the kid is reassured. He knows he can do what he wants, but some limits will always be there.”
Almost all the French parents I meet describe themselves as “strict.” This doesn’t mean that they’re constantly ogres. It means that, like Fanny, they are very strict about a few key things. These form the backbone of the cadre.
“I tend to be severe all of the time, a little bit,” Fanny says. “There are some rules I found that if you let go, you tend to take two steps backward. I rarely let these go.”
For Fanny, these areas are eating, sleeping, and watching TV. “For all the rest she can do what she wants,” she tells me about her daughter, Lucie. Even within these key areas, Fanny tries to give Lucie some freedom and choices. “With the TV, it’s no TV, just DVDs. But she chooses which DVD. I just try to do that for everything . . . Dressing up in the morning, I tell her, ‘At home, you can dress however you want. If you want to wear a summer shirt in wintertime, okay. But when we go out, we decide.’ It works for the moment. We’ll see what happens when she’s thirteen.”
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 9