Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
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Not all Frenchwomen do reeducation after they give birth. But many do. Why not? France’s national insurance picks up most or all of the cost, including the price of the white wand. The state even helps pay for some tummy tucks, usually when the mother’s belly hangs below her pubis, or when it’s inhibiting her sex life.
Of le somecourse, all this reeducation just gets mothers out of the starting gate. What do Frenchwomen do once their bellies and their pelvic floors are back in fighting shape?
Some do focus only on their kids. But unlike in the United States or Britain, the culture doesn’t encourage or reward this. Sacrificing your sex life for your kids is considered wildly unhealthy and out of balance. The French know that having a baby changes things, especially at first. Couples typically assume that there’s a very intense stretch after the birth, when it’s all hands on deck for the baby. After that, gradually, the mother and father are supposed to find their equilibrium as a couple again.
“There’s this fundamental assumption [in France] that every human being has desire. It never disappears for very long. If it does it means you’re depressed and you need to be treated,” explains Marie-Anne Suizzo, the University of Texas sociologist who studied French and American mothers.
The French mothers I meet talk about le couple in a whole different way from the American parents I know. “For me, the couple comes before the children,” says Virginie, the stay-at-home mom who taught me to “pay attention” to what I eat.
Virginie is principled, smart, and a devoted mother. She’s the only young Parisian I know who’s an observant Catholic. But she has no intention of letting her romantic life slacken just because she has three kids.
“The couple is the most important. It’s the only thing that you chose in your life. Your children, you didn’t choose. You chose your husband. So, you’re going to make your life with him. So you have an interest in it going well. Especially when the children leave, you want to get along with him. For me, it’s prioritaire.”
Not all French parents would agree with Virginie’s ranking. But in general, the question for French parents isn’t whether they’ll resume having full romantic lives again, but when. “No ideology can dictate the moment when the parents will feel truly ready to find each other again,” says the French psychosociologist Jean Epstein. “When conditions permit, and when they feel ready, the parents will give the baby his rightful place, outside their couple.”
American experts do sometimes mention that parents should take time for themselves. In Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care (which my friend Dietlind hands off to me before leaving Paris) there’s a two-paragraph section called Needless Self-sacrifice and Excessive Preoccupation. It says that today’s young parents tend to “give up all their freedom and all their former pleasures, not as a matter of practicality but as a matter of principle.” Even when these parents occasionally sneak off by themselves, “they feel too guilty to get full enjoyment.” The book urges parents to carve out quality time together, but only after making “all the necessary sacrifice of time and effort to your children.”
French experts don’t treat having quality time together as an afterthought; they’re adamant and unambiguous about it. That’s perhaps because they’re very sanguine and up-front about how hard babies can be on a marriage. “It isn’t for nothing that a gooingred number of couples separate in the first few years, or the first few months following the arrival of a child. Everything changes,” one article says.
In the French parenting books I read, le couple is treated as a central and crucial topic. Some French parenting Web sites occasionally have as many articles on le couple as they do on pregnancy. “The child must not invade the parents’ whole universe . . . for family balance, the parents also need personal space,” writes Hélène De Leersnyder, the pediatrician. “The child understands without a clash, and always very young, that his parents need time that’s not about work, the house, shopping, children.”
Once French parents emerge from the initial cocooning period, they take this call to coupledom seriously. There is actually a time of day in France known as “adult time” or “parent time.” It’s when the kids go to sleep. Anticipation of “adult time” helps explain why—once the fairy tales are read and the songs are sung—French parents are strict about enforcing bedtime. They treat “adult time” not as an occasional, hard-won privilege, but as a basic human need. Judith, an art historian with three young kids, explains that all three are asleep by eight or eight thirty because “I need a world for myself.”
French parents don’t just think these separations are good for parents. They also genuinely believe that they’re important for kids, who must understand that their parents have their own pleasures. “Thus the child understands that he is not the center of the world, and this is essential for his development,” the French parenting guide Your Child explains.
French parents don’t just have their nights to themselves. After Bean starts school, we are confronted with a seemingly endless series of midsemester two-week holidays. During these times I can’t even arrange a playdate. Most of Bean’s friends have been dispatched to stay with their grandparents in the countryside or the suburbs. Their parents use this time to work, travel, have sex, and just be alone.
Virginie says she takes a ten-day holiday alone with her husband every year. It’s nonnegotiable. Her kids, ages four to fourteen, stay with Virginie’s parents in a village about two hours by train from Paris. Virginie says guilt doesn’t enter into this holiday. “With what you construct between the two of you when you’re away for ten days, it has to be good for the kids, too.” She says that kids also occasionally need space from their parents. When they all reunite after the trip, it’s very sweet.
The French parents I meet grab adult time whenever they can. Caroline, the physical therapist, tells me without a trace of guilt that her mother is picking up her three-year-old son from maternelle on Friday afternoon and looking after him through Sunday. She says that on their weekend off, she and her husband plan to sleep late and go to the movies.
French parents even get pockets of adult time when their kids are home. Florence, forty-two, with three kids ages three to six, tells me that on weekend mornings, “the kids don’t have the right to enter our room until we open the door.” Until then, miraculously, they’ve learned to play by themselves. (Inspired by her story, Simon and I try this. To our thur amazement, it mostly works. Though we have to reteach it to the kids every few weeks.)
I have trouble explaining the concept of a date night to my French colleagues. For starters, there’s no “dating” in France. Here, when you start going out with someone, it’s automatically supposed to be exclusive. In France, a “date” sounds too tentative and too much like a job interview to be romantic. It’s the same once a couple lives together. Date night, with its implied sudden switch from sweatpants to stilettos, sounds contrived to my French friends. They take issue with the implication that “real life” is unsexy and exhausting and that they should schedule romance like it’s a trip to the dentist.
When the American movie Date Night comes to France, it’s titled Crazy Night. The couple in the film are supposed to be typical suburban Americans with kids. A reviewer for the Associated Press describes the pair as “tired, ordinary but reasonably content.” In an opening scene, they’re awakened in the morning when one of their children pounces on their bed. French critics are horrified by such scenes. A reviewer for Le Figaro describes the kids in the film as “unbearable.”
Despite having kids who don’t pounce on them in the morning, Frenchwomen would seem to have more to complain about than American women do. They lag behind Americans in key measures of gender equality, such as the percentage of women in the legislature and heading large corporations. And they have a bigger gap than we do between what men and women earn.5
French inequality is especially pronounced at home. Frenchwomen spend 89 percent more time than men doing household work and looking after c
hildren.6 In the United States, women spend 31 percent more time than men on household activities, and 25 percent more time on child care.7
Despite all this, my American (and British) girlfriends with kids seem a lot angrier at their husbands and partners than my French girlfriends are.
“I am fuming that he doesn’t bother to be competent about a whole slew of stuff that I ask him to do,” my friend Anya writes to me in an e-mail about her husband. “He’s turned me into a shrewish nag and once I get mad, it’s hard for me to cool back down.”8
American friends—or even acquaintances—regularly pull me aside at dinner parties to grumble about something their husbands have just done. Whole lunches are devoted to such complaints. They’re indignant about how, without them, their households would have no clean towels, living plants, or matching socks.
Simon gets many points for effort. He gamely takes Bean across town one Saturday to get some American-sized passport photos. But in a typical twist, he returns with photos that make Bean look like a five-year-old psychopath having a bad-hair day.
Since the boys were born, Simon’s incompeonld psychoptence is less charming. I no longer find it adorably mystifying when he breaks the second hands on all his watches or reads our expensive English-language magazines in the shower. Some mornings, our whole marriage seems to hinge on the fact that he doesn’t shake the orange juice before he pours it.
For some reason, we mostly fight about food. (I put up a Don’t Snap at Simon sign in the kitchen.) He leaves his beloved cheeses unwrapped in the refrigerator, where they quickly dry out. When the boys are a bit older, Simon gets a phone call while he’s brushing their teeth. I take over, only to discover that Leo still has an entire dried apricot in his mouth. When I complain, Simon says he feels disempowered by my “elaborate rules.”
When I get together with my Anglophone girlfriends, it’s just a matter of time before we start venting about such things. At one dinner in Paris, three of the six women at the table discover—in a ricochet of me-toos—that their husbands all retreat to the bathroom for a long session, just when it’s time to put the kids to bed. Their complaining is so intense, I have to remind myself that these are women in solid marriages and not on the verge of divorce.
When I get together with Frenchwomen of the same social class, this type of complaining doesn’t happen. When I ask, Frenchwomen acknowledge that they sometimes have to prod their husbands to do more around the house. Most say they’ve had their sulky moments, when it felt like they were carrying the whole household while their husbands were lying on the couch.
But somehow, in France, this imbalance doesn’t lead to what a writer in the bestselling American anthology The Bitch in the House calls “the awful, silent process of tallying up and storing away and keeping tabs on what he helped out with and what he did not.” Frenchwomen are no doubt tired from playing mother, wife, and worker simultaneously. But they don’t reflexively blame their husbands for this, or at least not with the venom that American women often do.
Possibly, Frenchwomen are just more private. But even the mothers I get to know well don’t seem to be secretly boiling over with the belief that the life they have isn’t the one they deserve. Their unhappiness seems like normal unhappiness. No matter how much I dig, I don’t find rage.
Partly, this is because Frenchwomen don’t expect men to be their equals. They view men as a separate species, which by nature isn’t good at booking babysitters, buying tablecloths, or remembering to schedule checkups with the pediatrician. “I think Frenchwomen accept more the differences between the sexes,” says Debra Ollivier, author of What French Women Know. “I don’t think that they expect men to rise to the plate with the same kind of meticulous attention and sense of urgency.”
When the Frenchwomen I know mention their partners’ inadequacies, it’s to laugh about how adorably inept the men are. “They’re just not capable; we’re superior!” jokes Virginie, as her girlfriends chuckle. Another mother breaks into peals of laughter when she describes how her husband blow-dries her daughter’s hair without brushing it first, so the little girl goes to school “looking like Don King.”
This outlook creates a virtuous cycle. Frenchwomen don’t harp on men about their shortcomings or mistakes. So the men aren’t demoralized. They feel more generous toward their wives, whom they praise for their feats of micromanagement and their command of household details. This praise—instead of the tension and resentment that builds in Anglophone households—seems to make the inequality easier to bear. “My husband says, ‘I can’t do what you do,’” another Parisian mom, Camille, proudly tells the group. None of this follows the American feminist script. But it seems to go a lot more smoothly.
Fifty-fifty equality just isn’t the gold standard for the Parisian women I know. Maybe this will change one day. But for now, the mothers I meet care more about finding a balance that works. Laurence, a management consultant with three kids, has a husband who works long hours during the week. (She has switched to part time.) The couple used to fight all weekend about who does what. But lately Laurence has been urging her husband to go to his aikido class on Saturday mornings, since he’s more relaxed afterward. She’d rather do a bit more child care in exchange for a husband who’s cheerful and calm.
French mothers also seem better at giving up some control and lowering their standards in exchange for more free time and less stress. “You just have to say, I’m going to come home, and there’s going to be a week’s worth of laundry in a pile,” Virginie tells me, when I mention that I’m taking Bean to the United States for a week and leaving Simon in Paris with the boys.9
There are structural reasons why Frenchwomen seem calmer than American women. They take about twenty-one more vacation days each year.10 France has less feminist rhetoric, but it has many more institutions that enable women to work. There’s the national paid maternity leave (the United States has none), the subsidized nannies and crèches, the free universal preschool from age three, and myriad tax credits and payments for having kids. All this doesn’t ensure that there’s equality between men and women. But it does ensure that Frenchwomen can have both a career and kids.
If you drop the forlorn hope of fifty-fifty equality, it becomes easier to enjoy the fact that some urban French husbands do quite a lot of child care, cooking, and dishwashing. A 2006 French study11 found that just 15 percent of fathers of infants participated equally in the babies’ care and 11 percent took primary responsibility. But 44 percent played very active supporting roles. You see these dads, adorably scruffy, pushing strollers to the park on Saturday mornings and bringing home bags of groceries afterward.
This latter category of dads often focused on housework and cooking, in particular. The French mothers I meet often say their husbands handle specific domains, like homework or cleaning up after dinner. Perhaps having this clear division of labor is the secret. Or maybe French couples are just more fatalistic about marriage.
“One of the great feelings of a couple and of marriage is gratitude to the person who hasn’t left,” says Laurence Ferrari, the anchorwoman of France’s top nightly news program. Ferrariogring, forty-four, is a pretty blonde who’s six months pregnant with her second husband’s baby. She’s speaking to the raffish, professionally provocative French philosopher Pascal Bruckner. The two are discussing “Love and Marriage: Are They a Good Combination?” for a French magazine.
Ferrari and Bruckner are part of the French elite—a rarified circle of journalists, politicians, academics, and businesspeople who socialize with and marry each other. Their views represent an exaggerated, perhaps aspirational version of how ordinary French people think.
“Today, marriage no longer has a bourgeois connotation. To the contrary, for me, it’s an act of bravado,” Ferrari says.
Marriage is a “revolutionary adventure,” Bruckner replies. “Love is an indomitable feeling. The tragedy of love is the fact that it changes, and we’re not the masters of this change.”
In a sign of how far we’ve come socially, Simon and I are invited away for the weekend—with kids—to the country home of my French friend Hélène and her husband, William. They, too, have twins and a singleton. Hélène, who’s tall with a heart-shaped face and ethereal blue eyes, grew up in Reims, the capital of the Champagne region. Her family’s vacation home is nearby in the Ardennes, close to the Belgian border.
Many of World War I’s battles took place in the Ardennes. For four years, French and German soldiers dug trenches on opposite sides of a narrow stretch of territory called no-man’s-land and fired artillery and machine guns at each other. The two sides lived in such close proximity that they knew each other’s work shifts and habits, the way neighbors do. Sometimes they’d hold up handwritten signs for the other side to read.
In the small town where Hélène’s family home is, it feels as if the shelling only recently stopped. People here don’t say “World War I,” they say “fourteen to eighteen.” Many of the homes and buildings destroyed in the war were never rebuilt, leaving a lot of the landscape covered in fields.
Hélène and William are ultradedicated parents all day long. But I notice that each night we’re there, as soon as the kids are down, they bring out the cigarettes and the wine, turn on the radio, and have what is obviously adult time. They want to profiter—to take advantage of the company and the warm summer night. (Hélène is so keen to profiter one afternoon when we’re driving with the kids that she pulls over to a field in the late afternoon, whips out a blanket from the trunk, and produces cake for our goûter. The setting is so picture perfect, it’s almost more pleasure than I can handle.)