I realize that what we Americans should be fretting about isn’t just whether bad day care has bad outcomes (of course it does), but how unpleasant it is for kids to be in bad day care. We’re so concerned about cognitive development that we’re forgetting to ask whether children in day care 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 “day care,” which probably helps. The crèche certainly has benefits for us. We feel more like we’re part of France, or at least part of our neighborhood. Thankfully, we put our ongoing “to stay or not to stay in Paris” conversation on pause. We can’t really imagine moving someplace where we’d struggle to find decent, affordable child care. And we can see the next excuse for staying in France coming down the pike: the école maternelle, free public preschool, with spots 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” (a French version of “duck, duck, goose”). Also, she has mastered the command form of French. She is a bit too aggressive: she likes to k
ick me in the shins. But I suspect that her anger comes from her father, anyway. I don’t think I can blame day care for any of her faults.
Maky and Lila are still Bean’s dear friends. Occasionally we even take Bean back to the crèche to stare through the gates 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.
Chapter 7
nOyle MT bébé au lait
Warming up to the crèche turned out to be easy. Warming up to the other mothers there wasn’t. I’m aware that 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 Frenchwoman, you’re supposedly stuck with her for life. American insta-friends can drop you anytime.)
I have managed to befriend a few Frenchwomen in the time I’ve now lived in Paris. But most either don’t have kids or live across town. I’d just assumed that I’d also meet some other moms in my neighborhood 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 happens in America. My own mother is still close with 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 neighborhood and have age-appropriate kids—are practically indifferent to me. They barely say bonjour when we plop our toddlers down next to one another 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 know Bean’s name. They certainly don’t know mine.
This initial stage, if that’s what it is, doesn’t feel like a ramp up to friendship. 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 one another, we’ve each revealed our hometown, 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-toos.” 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 Americans do. I drop Bean off at the crèche in the morning wearing a ponytail and whatever was on the floor next to my bed. They arrive fully coiffed and perfumed. I don’t even gawk anymore when French mothers prance into the park dressed in high-heeled boots and skin sootd any jeans, while pushing strollers with tiny newborns in them. (Moms do get a bit fatter as you get farther 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. They have good posture. They don’t radiate that famous combination of fatigue, worry, and on-the-vergeness that’s bursting out of most American moms 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 must be more to it. Are they secretly struggling with anything? Where’s their belly fat? Are French mothers really perfect? And if so, are they happy?
After the baby is born, the first obvious difference between French and American moms is breastfeeding. For us Anglophone mothers, the length of time that we breast-feed—like the size of a Wall Street bonus—is a measure of performance. One former businesswoman in my Anglophone playgroup regularly sidles up to me and asks, faux innocently, “Oh, are you still nursing?”
It’s faux because we all know that our breastfeeding “number” is a concrete way to compete with one another. A mother’s score is reduced if she mixes in formula, relies too heavily on a breast-milk pump, or actually breast-feeds for too long (at which point she starts to seem like a crazed hippie).
In middle-class circles in the United States, 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 only increases its status.
You get bonus points from American moms for nursing in France, where breastfeeding isn’t encouraged and many people find the sight of 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, expatriate mothers list the strangest places they’ve nursed in Paris: inside Sacré-Coeur cathedral, on a tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery, and at a cocktail party at the Four Seasons Hotel George V. One mother says she breast-fed her baby “while standing and complaining at the e sninrtyasyJet counter 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 breast-feed. About 63 percent of French mothers do some breastfeeding.1 A bit more than half are still nursing when they leave the maternity hospital, and most abandon it altogether soon after that.
Long-term nursing is extremely rare. In the United States, 74 percent of mothers do at least some breastfeeding, and a third are still nursing exclusively at four months.2
It’s harder still for us Anglophones to understand why even a certain type of middle-class French mother—the ones who steam and puree organic leeks for their seven-month-olds and send their three-year-olds to the same African drumming classes that we do—don’t breast-feed much either.
“Don’t they have the same medical information we have?” one incredulous American mother asks me. Among Anglophone mothers, the reigning theories about why Frenchwomen 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 nursing demystifies the female breast, turning it into something utilitarian and animalistic. Just as French fathers strategically avoid a woman’s “business end” during the birth, they avoid viewing the female breast when it’s used for unsexy purposes.
There are small pockets of breastfeeding enthusiasts in France. But mostly there’s little peer pressure to nurse for a long time. When my British friend Alison, who teaches English in Paris, told her doctor that she was still nursing her thirteen-month-old, she says the doctor asked, “What does your husband say? And your shrink?” Enfant Magazine, one of the main French glossies, says 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 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 for him to pitch in. She points out that both girls are now perfectly healthy.
Alexandra adds, “It was good practice for the father to give a bottle at night. And I could sleep, and drink wine in restaurants. It wasn’t so bad for maman.”
Pierre Bitoun, a French pediatrician and longtime proponent of breastfeeding in France, says many Frenchwomen think they just don’t have enough milk. Dr. Bitoun says this is because French maternity hospitals often don’t encour son thage mothers to feed their newborns every few hours. That’s critical in the first few days, so that mothers produce enough milk to feed their babies. If they don’t nurse very frequently from the start, then they really don’t have enough milk, and a recourse to formula starts to seem inevitable. “By day three the kid has lost two hundred grams, and they say, ‘Oh, you don’t have enough milk, let’s give him some formula, the kid is starving.’ That’s what happens. It’s crazy.”
Dr. Bitoun speaks often at French hospitals to explain the science and the benefits of breastfeeding. But “the culture is stronger than the science,” he says. “Three quarters of the people I work with in hospitals don’t believe that breast milk is healthier than formula. They think there’s no difference. They think artificial milk is fine, or at least that’s what they say to mothers to avoid making them feel guilty.”
In fact, even though French children consume enormous amounts of formula, they beat American kids on nearly all measures of health. France ranks about six points above the developed-country average in Unicef’s overall health-and-safety ranking, which includes infant mortality, immunization rates until age two, and deaths from accidents and injury up to age nineteen. The United States ranks about eighteen points below the average.
French parents see no reason to believe that artificial milk is terrible or to treat breastfeeding as a holy rite. They assume that breast milk is far more critical for a baby born to a poor mother in sub-Saharan Africa than it is for one born to middle-class Parisians. “We look around and see that all the babies who drink formula are fine,” says Christine, the journalist, who has two young kids. “We all drank formula, too.”
I’m not so calm about it. In fact, I’m so panicked by my conversation with the breastfeeding consultant that, when I’m in the maternity hospital after Bean is born, I insist that she stay in the room with me around the clock. I wake up each time she whimpers and barely get any rest.
This suffering and self-sacrifice just seems like the natural order to me. But after a few days, I realize I’m probably the only mother in the maternity ward who’s subjecting herself to this torture. The others, even the ones who are breast-feeding, hand their babies over to the nursery down the hall at night. They feel entitled to a few hours sleep.
I finally feel shattered enough to give this a try, too, even though it feels enormously indulgent. I’m immediately won over by the system, and Bean doesn’t seem any worse for it. Contrary to the rumors, the nurses and puéricultrices who work in the nursery are more than happy to wheel her to my room whenever she needs to nurse and then take her away again.
France is probably never going to be ground zero for breastfeeding. But it does have the Protection maternelle et infantile (Mother and Infant Protection service), the same agency that oversees the crèche. This government health service has offices all over Paris that give free checkups and injections to all children until age six, even those who are in France illegally. Middle-class parents rarely use the PMI because the government insurance plan covers much of the cost of their visits to private pediatricia se pts ns. (The French government is the main insurer, but most French doctors are in private practice.)
I’m reluctant to use a public clinic. Will it be impersonal? Will it be clean? One crucial fact convinces me: it will be completely free. Our local PMI office is a ten-minute walk from our house. It turns out that we can see the same doctor each time we go. There’s a giant indoor playground in the immaculate waiting area. The PMI will send a puéricultrice to your house to check in on you and your baby when you get back from the hospital. If you get the baby blues, they’ve got an in-house shrink. All of this is free, too: there’s not even a bill. It’s worth weighing that against an ounce of breast milk.
I’m not taking any chances about breastfeeding. The American Academy of Pediatrics says I should nurse for twelve months, so I do, practically to the day. I give Bean a final, valedictory feed on her first birthday. Sometimes I do enjoy nursing. But often I find it irritating to interrupt whatever I’m doing to rush back home for feeds or—increasingly—for a date with my electric breast pump. Mostly I forge on because of everything I’ve read about the health benefits and because I want to stick it to that lady in my playgroup.
All the American peer pressure to breast-feed does serve a public-health purpose: it gets breast milk into our babies’ mouths. But it also makes us a little crazy. Frenchwomen can see that steamroller of anxiety and guilt coming from a few kilometers away, and they’re at least trying to resist it.
Dr. Bitoun says that in his years of campaigning for breastfeeding, he’s found that French mothers generally aren’t won over by the health arguments involving IQ points and secretory IgA. What does persuade them to nurse, he says, is the claim that both they and the baby will enjoy it. “We know that the pleasure argument is the only thing that works,” he says.
Many French mothers would surely like to breast-feed longer than they do. But they don’t want to do it under moral duress or flaunt it at two-year-olds’ birthdays. Powdered milk may be worse for babies, but it no doubt makes the early months of motherhood a lot more relaxing for French moms.
French mothers may be relaxed about not breast-feeding, but they aren’t relaxed about getting back in shape after they give birth. I’m shocked when I find out that the skinny waitress at the café where I go to write most days has a six-year-old. I had taken her for a twenty-three-year
-old hipster.
When I tell her about the expression “MILF” (“Mom I’d Like to Fuck”), she thinks it’s hilarious. There’s no French-language equivalent. In France, there’s no a priori reason why a woman wouldn’t be sexy just because she happens to have children. It’s not uncommon to hear a Frenchman say that being a mother gives a woman an appealing air of plenitude (happiness and fullness of spirit).
Of course some American moms quickly shed their baby weight, too. But it’s easy to find role models urging women in the other direction. A “New-Mom Makeover” fashion spread in American Baby magazine shows three embarrassed, still slightly chubby women smiling un sen eovcomfortably in loose-fitting dresses. They’ve strategically positioned their toddlers in front of their hips. The text is unapologetic: “Giving birth changes your body, and becoming a mom changes your life,” it says, before singing the praises of drawstring pants.
For some American moms, there’s something morally righteous about committing to motherhood at the expense of their bodies. It’s like giving yourself over to a higher cause. A sports-marketing consultant from Connecticut, who has a six-month-old, tells me that a Frenchwoman showed up at her local playgroup recently and immediately asked the group, in what I imagine to be a charming Gallic accent, “Okay, zo how eez everyone losing ze weight?” According to the consultant, she and the other American mothers fell silent. This wasn’t something they usually discussed. Sure, they would have loved to snap their fingers and knock off twenty pounds. But none of them were losing much weight. It seemed selfish to take time away from their babies to tend to their fat or even to talk too much about it.
You won’t silence any rooms in Paris by asking how new mothers lose their baby weight. Just as there’s enormous social pressure for women not to gain too much weight while they’re pregnant, there’s similar pressure to shed the weight soon after they give birth.
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 13