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

by Pamela Druckerman

  This certainty that the crèche is good for kids erases a lot of maternal guilt and doubt. My friend Hélène, an engineer, didn’t work during the first few years after her youngest daughter was born. But she was never remotely apologetic about sending the little girl to the crèche five days a week. This was in part so that Hélène could have time to herself, but also because she didn’t want her daughter to miss out on the communal experience.

  The main question people in France ask about day care is how to get more kids into it. Thanks to France’s current baby boom, you can’t run for public office in France—on the right or the left—without promising to build more crèches or expand existing ones. I read about a program to turn disused baggage areas in train stations into crèches for the children of commuters (much of the construction cost would go toward soundproofing).

  Competition for the existing spots in a crèche is—as the French say—énergique. A committee of bureaucrats and crèche directors in each of Paris’s twenty arrondissements convenes to dole out their available spots. In the well-heeled 16th arrondissement there are four thousand applicants for five hundred spots. In our less rarefied area in eastern Paris the odds of getting a spot are one in three.

  Scrambling for a spot in a crèche is one of the initiation rituals of new parenting. In Paris, women can officially begin petitioning the town hall when they’re six months pregnant. But magazines urge women to schedule a meeting with the director of their preferred crèche as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test.

  Priority goes to single parents, multiple births, adoptees, households with three or more kids, or families with “particular difficulties.” How to fit into this last, ambiguous category is the topic of furious speculation in online forums. One mother advises writing to town hall officials about your urgent need to return to work and your epic but ultimately failed efforts to find any other form of child care. She suggests copying this letter to the regional governor and the president of France, then requesting a private audience with the district mayor. “You go there with the baby in your arms, looking desperate, and you retell the same story as in the letter,” she says. “I can assure you that this will work.”

  Simon and I decide to work our only angle: being foreign. In a letter attached to our crèche application, we extol Bean’s budding multili kddiourngualism (she doesn’t actually speak yet) and describe how her Anglo-Americanism will enrich the crèche. As promised, Dietlind talks us up to the director of the crèche that her sons went to. I meet with this woman and try to project a mix of desperation and charm. I call the town hall once a month (for some reason, as with French couples, most of the crèche courting falls to me) to remind them of our “enormous interest and need for a spot.” Since I’m not French and can’t vote here, I decide not to bother the president.

  Amazingly, these attempts to massage the process actually work. A congratulatory letter arrives from our town hall explaining that Bean has been assigned a spot in a crèche for mid-September, when she’ll be nine months old. I call Simon, triumphant: we foreigners have beaten the natives at their own game! We’re amazed and giddy from the victory. But we also have the feeling that we’ve won a prize that we don’t quite deserve and aren’t even sure we want.

  I still have my doubts when we take Bean to her first day of crèche. It’s at the end of a dead-end street, in a three-story concrete building with a little Astroturf courtyard out front. It looks like a public school in America but with everything in miniature. I recognize some of the kids’ furniture from the Ikea catalog. It’s not fancy, but it’s cheerful and clean.

  The kids are divided by age into sections called small, medium, and large. Bean’s class is in a sunlit room with play kitchens, tiny furniture, and cubbyholes full of age-appropriate toys. Attached to the room is a glassed-in sleeping area where each child has his own crib, stocked with his pacifier and stuffed-animal companion, called a doudou.

  Anne-Marie, who’ll be Bean’s main caregiver, greets us. (She’s the same lady who gave haircuts to Dietlind’s sons.) Anne-Marie is a grandmother in her sixties, with short blond hair and a rotating collection of printed T-shirts from places her charges have traveled to. (We’ll eventually bring her one attesting to her love of Brooklyn.) Employees have worked at the crèche for an average of thirteen years. Anne-Marie has been there much longer. She and most of the other caregivers are trained as auxiliaires de puériculture, which has no exact American equivalent.

  A pediatrician and a psychologist each visit the crèche once a week. The caregivers chart Bean’s daily naps and poops, and report to me about how she’s eaten. They feed the kids Bean’s age one at a time, with the child either on someone’s lap or in a bouncy seat. They put the kids down to sleep at roughly the same time each day and claim not to wake them up. For this initial adaptation period, Anne-Marie asks me to bring in a shirt that I’ve worn so that Bean can sleep with it. This feels a bit canine, but I do it.

  I’m struck by the confidence that Anne-Marie and the other caregivers have. They’re quite certain about what children of each age need, and they’re equally confident in their abilities to provide this. They convey this without being smug or impatient. My one gripe is that Anne-Marie insists on calling me “mother of Bean” rather than Pamela; she says it’s too difficult to learn the names of all the parents.

  Given our doubts about day kts

  As in Marbeau’s day, Bean is supposed to arrive with a clean diaper. This becomes an almost Talmudic point of discussion between Simon and me. What constitutes “arrival”? If Bean poops on her way in the door, or while we’re saying good-bye, who changes the offending diaper? Is it us, or the auxiliaires?

  The first two weeks are an adaptation period, in which she stays for increasingly long periods at the crèche, with and without us. She cries a bit each time I leave, but Anne-Marie assures me that she quiets down soon after I go. Often one of the caregivers holds her up at the window facing the street so I can wave when I get outside.

  If the crèche is damaging Bean, we can’t tell. Pretty soon she’s cheerful when we drop her off and happy when we pick her up. Once Bean has been at the crèche for a while, I begin to notice that the place is a microcosm of French parenting. That includes the bad stuff. Anne-Marie and the other caregivers are mystified that I’m still nursing Bean when she’s nine months old and especially when I nurse her on the premises. They’re not thrilled with my short-lived plan to drop off pumped breast milk before lunch each day, though they don’t try to stop me.

  But all the big, positive French parenting ideas are in evidence, too. Since there’s so much agreement anyway on the best way to do things, French parents don’t have to worry that the caregivers aren’t following their personal parenting philosophy. For the most part, the caregivers reinforce the same schedule and habits as parents.

  For example, the caregivers talk to even very young children all the time at the crèche, with what seems like perfect conviction that the children understand.5 And there’s a lot of talk about the cadre. At a parents’ meeting, one of the teachers speaks almost poetically about it: “Everything is very encadré—built into a framework—the hour that they arrive and leave, for example. But inside this framework we try to introduce flexibility, fluidity and spontaneity, for the children and also for the [teaching] team.”

  Bean spends a lot of the day just ambling around the room, playing with whatever she wants. I’m concerned about this. Where are the music circles and organized activities? I soon realize that all this freedom is by design. It’s the French cadre model yet again: kids get firm boundaries, but lots of freedom within those boundaries. And they’re supposed to learn to cope with boredom and to play by themselves. “When the child plays, he constructs himself,” Sylvie, another of Bean’s caregivers, tells me.

  A mayor’s report on Parisian crèches calls for a spirit of “energetic discovery,” in which the children are “left to exercise their appetite for experimentation of their five senses,
of using their muscles, of sensations, and of physical space.” As kids get older they do have some organized activities, but no one is obliged to participate.

  “We propose, we don’t force,” another of Bean’s teachers explains. There’s soothing background music to launch the kids into their naps and a pile of books that they can read in bed. The kids gradually wake up to their goûter, the afternoon snack. The crèche isn’t the department of motor vehicles. It’s more like Canyon Ranch.

  In the playground there are few rules, also by design. The idea is to give kids as much freedom as possible. “When they’re outside, we intervene very little,” says Mehrie, another one of Bean’s caregivers. “If we intervene all the time, they go a little nuts.”

  The crèche also teaches kids patience. I watch as a two-year-old demands that Mehrie pick her up. But Mehrie is cleaning up the table where the children have just had lunch. “For the moment I’m not free. You wait two seconds,” Mehrie says gently to the little girl. Then she turns to me and explains: “We try to teach them to wait, it’s very important. They can’t have everything right away.”

  The caregivers speak calmly and respectfully to the kids, using the language of rights: you have the right to do this; you don’t have the right to do that. They say this with that same utter conviction that I’ve heard in the voices of French parents. Everyone believes that for the cadre to seem immutable, it has to be consistent. “The prohibitions are always consistent, and we always give a reason for them,” Sylvie tells me.

  I know the crèche is strict about certain things because, after a while, Bean repeats phrases she’s learned. We know they’re “crèche” phrases because the teachers there are her only source of French. It’s like she’s been wearing a wire all day, and now we get to listen to the tape. Most of what Bean repeats is in the command form, like “on va pas crier!” (we’re not going to scream). My rhyming favorites, which I immediately begin using at home, are “couche-toi!” (go to sleep) and “mouche-toi!” (blow your nose), said when you’re holding a tissue up to a child’s face.

  For a while Bean speaks French only in the command form or in these declarations of what’s permissible and what isn’t. When she plays “teacher” at home, she stands on a chair, wags her finger, and shouts instructions to imaginary children, or occasionally to our surprised lunch guests.

  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 fast.

  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 e-mail them to my mother. They read like the chalkboard menus at Parisian brasser kisi">Iies. Lunch is served in four courses: a cold vegetable starter, a main dish with a side of grains or cooked vegetables, a different cheese each day, and a dessert of fresh fruit or fruit puree. There’s a slightly modified version for each age group; the youngest kids mostly have the same foods, but pureed.

  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 slice of St. Nectaire cheese with a slice of fresh baguette. Dessert is fresh kiwi.

  An in-house cook at each crèche prepares lunch from scratch each day. A truck arrives several times a week with seasonal, fresh, sometimes even organic ingredients. Aside from the occasional can of tomato paste, nothing is processed or precooked. A few vegetables are frozen, but never precooked.

  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 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 square toddler-sized tables. One of her teachers wheels up a cart filled with covered serving plates and bread wrapped in plastic to keep it fresh. There’s a teacher at each table.

  First, the teacher uncovers and displays each dish. The starter is a bright-red tomato salad in vinaigrette. “This is followed by le poisson,” she says, to approving glances, as she displays a flaky white fish in a light butter sauce and a side dish of peas, carrots, and onions. Next she previews the cheese course: “Today it’s le bleu,” she says, showing the kids a crumbly blue cheese. Then she shows them dessert: whole apples, which she’ll slice at the table.

  The food looks simple, fresh, and appetizing. Except for the melamine plates, the bite-sized 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, I show up one windy fall morning at the annual entrance examination for ABC Puériculture, one of the schools that train crèche workers. There are hundreds of nervous women (and a few men) in their twenties, who are looking shyly at one another or doing last-minute practice questions in thick workbooks.

  They’re understandably anxious. Of the more than five hundred people who sit for this test, just thirty will be admitted to the training school. Applicants are grilled on reasoning, reading comprehension, math, 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, and practice mixing baby formula and changing diapers. They’ll do additional weeklong trainings throughout their careers.

  In France, workin kranrainig in day care is a career. There are schools all over the country with similarly rigorous entrance standards, creating an army of skilled workers to staff the crèches. Just half of caregivers at a crèche must be auxiliaires or have a similar degree. A quarter must have degrees related to health, leisure, or social work. A quarter are exempt from any qualifications but must be trained in-house.6 At Bean’s crèche, thirteen of the sixteen caregivers are auxiliaires or similar.

  I start to see Anne-Marie and other caregivers at Bean’s crèche as the Rhodes Scholars of baby care. And I understand their confidence. They’ve mastered a field 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 preschool. But Bean still seems to like the crèche. 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 bursts happily into my arms, shouting the news of the day.

  On Bean’s last day at the crèche, after the good-bye party and the clearing-out of her locker, Bean gives a big hug and kiss good-bye to Sylvie, who’s 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 Bean has had a good experience. But we did often feel guilty
dropping her off each day. And we can’t help but notice the drip of alarming headlines in the American press about how day care affects kids.

  Continental Europeans aren’t really asking about that anymore. Sheila Kamerman at Columbia says that Europeans pretty much take for granted that high-quality day care, 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 day care is bad for kids.

  Americans have too many misgivings about day care to take this for granted. So the U.S. government has funded the largest-ever study of how early child-care arrangements correlate with the way kids develop and behave later in life.7

  Many of the headlines on day care in America come out of data from this giant study. One of its principal findings is that early child-care arrangements just aren’t very significant. “Parenting k nt quality is a much more important predictor of child development than type, quantity or quality of child care,” explains a backgrounder. 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 day care 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 day care. One of the study’s researchers8 writes that kids get “high-quality” day care when the caregiver is “attentive to [the child’s] needs, responsive to her verbal and non-verbal signals and cues, stimulating of his 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 day-care 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.