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

by Pamela Druckerman

  All this criticism can intimidate kids. A girlfriend of mine who went to French schools until she moved to Chicago for high school, remembers being shocked by how American students spoke up confidently in class. She says that unlike in her French schools, students weren’t immediately criticized for being wrong or for asking dumb questions. Another friend, a French physician who lives in Paris, tells me excitedly about the new yoga class she’s taking, taught by an American woman. “She keeps telling me how well I’m doing and how beautiful I am!” she says of the teacher. In her many years of French schooling, my friend had probably never gotten so much praise.

  In general, the French parents I know are a lot more supportive than French teachers. They do praise their kids and give them positive reinforcement. Even so, they don’t slather on praise, the way we Americans do.

  I’m starting to suspect that French parents may be right in giving less praise. Perhaps they realize that those little zaps of pleasure kids get each time a grown-up says “good job” could—if they arrive too often—simply make kids addicted to positive feedback. After a while, they’ll need someone else’s approval to feel good about themselves. And if kids are assured of praise for whatever they do, then they won’t need to try very hard. They’ll be praised anyway.

  Since I’m American, what really convinces me is the research. Praise seems to be yet another realm in which French parents are doing—through tradition and intuition—what the latest scientific studies suggest.

  In their 2009 book NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that the old conventional wisdom that “praise, self-esteem and performance rise and fall together” has been toppled by new research showing that “excessive praise . . . distorts children’s motivations; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of the intrinsic enjoyment.”

  Bronson and Merryman point to research showing that when heavily praised students get to college, they “become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy.” These students “commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major. They’re afraid to commit to something because they’re afraid of not succeeding.”5

  This research also refutes the conventional American wisdom that when kids fail at something, parents should cushion the blow with positive feedback. A better tack is to gently delve into what went wrong, giving kids the confidence and the tools to improve. French schools may be a bit harsh, especially in the later years. But this is exactly what Bean’s French teachers were doing, and it certainly reflects what French parents believe.

  The French seem to proceed through parenting using a kind of scientific method, to test what wto ids orks and what doesn’t. In general, they are unmoved by ideas about what should work on their kids and clear-sighted about what actually does work. What they conclude is that some praise is good for a child, but that if you praise her too much, you’re not letting her live her life.

  Over the winter holidays I bring Bean back to the United States. At a family gathering, she starts putting on a one-child show, which mostly involves acting like a teacher and giving the grown-ups orders. It’s cute but, frankly, not brilliant. Yet gradually, every adult in the room stops to watch and to remark on how adorable Bean is. (She wisely drops in some French phrases and songs, knowing that these always impress.)

  By the time the show is over, Bean is beaming as she soaks up all the praise. I think it’s the highlight of her visit. I’m beaming, too. I interpret the praise for her as praise for me, which I’ve been starving for in France. All through dinner afterward, everyone talks—within earshot of both of us—about how terrific the show was.

  This is great on vacation. But I’m not sure I’d want Bean to get that kind of unconditional praise all the time. It feels good, but it seems to come bundled with other things, including letting a child constantly interrupt because she’s bursting with a sense of her own importance. It might also throw off Bean’s internal calibration of what’s truly entertaining and what’s not.

  I’ve accepted that if we stay in France, my kids probably won’t ever learn to shoot a bow and arrow. (God forbid they’re ever attacked by eighteenth-century American Indians.) I’ve even toned down my praise a bit. But adjusting to the overarching French view on autonomy is a lot harder. Of course I know that my children have an emotional life that’s separate from mine, and that I can’t constantly protect them from rejection and disappointment. Nevertheless, the idea that they have their lives and I have mine doesn’t reflect my emotional map. Or maybe it just doesn’t suit my emotional needs.

  Still, I have to admit that my kids seem happiest when I trust them to do things for themselves. I don’t hand them knives and tell them to go carve a watermelon. They mostly know when things are way beyond their abilities. But I do let them stretch a bit, even if it’s just to carry a breakable plate to the dinner table. After these small achievements, they’re calmer and happier. Dolto is most certainly right that autonomy is one of a child’s most basic needs.

  She also may be right about age six being the threshold. One night, I’m sick with the flu and keeping Simon awake with my coughing. I retreat to the couch in the middle of the night. When the kids march into the living room at about seven thirty A.M., I can hardly move. I don’t start my usual routine of putting out breakfast.

  So Bean does. I lie on the couch, still wearing my eyeshades. In the background I hear her opening drawers, setting the table, and getting out the milk and cereal. She’s five and a half years old. And she’s taken my job. She’s even subcontracted some of it to Joey, who’s organizing the silverware.

  After a few minutes, Bean cometesings over to me on the couch. “Breakfast is ready, but you have to do the coffee,” she says. She’s calm, and very pleased. I’m struck by how happy—or more specifically how sage—being autonomous makes her feel. I haven’t praised or encouraged her. She’s just done something new for herself, with me as a witness, and is feeling very good about it.

  Dolto’s idea that I should trust my children, and that trusting and respecting them will make them trust and respect me, is very appealing. In fact, it’s a relief. The clutch of mutual dependency and worry that often seems to bind American parents to their kids feels inevitable at times, but it never feels good. It doesn’t seem like the basis for the best parenting.

  Letting children “live their lives” isn’t about releasing them into the wild or abandoning them (though French school trips do feel a bit like that to me). It’s about acknowledging that children aren’t repositories for their parents’ ambitions or projects for their parents to perfect. They are separate and capable, with their own tastes, pleasures, and experiences of the world. They even have their own secrets.

  My friend Andi ended up letting her older son go on that trip to the salt marshes. She says he loved it. It seems he didn’t need to be tucked in every night; it was Andi who needed to do the tucking. When it was time for Andi’s younger son to start taking the same class trips, she just let him go.

  Maybe I’ll get used to these trips, though I haven’t signed up Bean for one yet. My friend Esther proposes that we send our daughters off together to a colonie de vacance next summer, when they’ll be six years old. I find this hard to imagine. I want my kids to be self-reliant, resilient, and happy. I just don’t want to let go of their hands.

  the future in french

  My mother has finally accepted that we live across an ocean from her. She’s even studying French, though it’s not going as well as she’d like. An American friend of hers, who lived in Panama but spoke little Spanish, suggests a technique: Say a Spanish sentence in the present tense, then shout the name of the intended tense. “I go to the store . . . pasado!” means that she went to the store. “I go to the store . . . futuro!” means that she’ll go later.

  I’ve forbidden my mother to do this when she comes to visit. To my astonishment, I now have a reputation to protect. I have three kids in the local school and c
ourteous relations with neighborhood fishmongers, tailors, and café proprietors. Paris finally cares that I’m here.

  I still haven’t swooned for the city. I get tired of the elaborate exchanges of bonjour and of using the distancing vous with everyone but colleagues and intimates. Living in France feels a bit too formal and doesn’t bring out my freewheeling side. I realize how much I’ve chaneryged when, on the metro one morning, I instinctively back away from the man sitting next to the only empty seat, because I have the impression that he’s deranged. On reflection, I realize my only evidence for this is that he’s wearing shorts.

  Nevertheless, Paris has come to feel like home. As the French say, I’ve “found my place.” It helps that I’ve made some wonderful friends. It turns out that behind their icy facades, Parisian women need to mirror and bond, too. They’re even hiding a bit of cellulite. These friendships have turned me into a bona fide Francophone. I’m often surprised, midconversation, to hear coherent French sentences coming out of my own mouth.

  It’s also exciting watching my kids become bilingual. One morning, as I’m getting dressed, Leo points to my brassiere.

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  “A bra,” I say.

  He immediately points to his arm. It takes me a second to understand: the French word bras (with a silent “s”) means “arm.” He must have learned this word at his crèche. I quiz him and discover that he knows most of the other main body parts in French, too.

  What has really connected me to France is discovering the wisdom of French parenting. I’ve learned that children are capable of feats of self-reliance and mindful behavior that, as an American parent, I might never have imagined. I can’t go back to not knowing this—even if we end up living elsewhere.

  Of course, some French principles are easier to implement when you’re actually on French soil. When other children aren’t having midday snacks at the playground, it’s easier not to give your child a snack either. It’s also easier to enforce boundaries for your own kids’ behavior when everyone around you is enforcing more or less the same boundaries (or as I often ask Bean, “Do they let you do this in school?”).

  But much about “French” parenting doesn’t depend on where you live, or require access to certain types of cheese. It’s as accessible in Cleveland as in Cannes. It mostly requires a parent to shift how she conceives of her relationship to her children and what she expects from them.

  Friends often ask whether I’m raising my kids to be more French or American. When I’m with them in public, I usually think they’re somewhere in between: badly behaved compared with the French kids I know and pretty good compared with the Americans.

  They don’t always say bonjour and au revoir, but they know that they’re supposed to. Like a real French mother, I’m always reminding them of it. I’ve come to see this as part of an ongoing process called their éducation, in which they increasingly learn to respect other people, and learn to wait. This éducation seems to be gradually sinking in.

  I’m still striving for that French ideal: genuinely listening to my kids but not feeling that I must bend to their wind ="-lls.1 I still declare, “It’s me who decides” in moments of crisis, to remind everyone that I’m in charge. I see it as my job to stop my kids from being consumed by their own desires. But I also try to say yes as often as I can.

  Simon and I have stopped discussing whether we’ll stay in France. If we do, I’m not sure what’s in store as our children get older. By the time French kids become teenagers, their parents seem to give them quite a lot of freedom and to be matter-of-fact about their having private lives, and even sex lives. Perhaps that gives the teenagers less reason to rebel.

  French teenagers seem to have an easier time accepting that maman and papa have private lives, too. After all, the parents have always acted as if they do. They haven’t based life entirely around their children. French kids do plan to move out of their parents’ homes eventually. But if a Frenchman in his twenties still lives with his parents, it isn’t quite the humiliating tragedy that it is in America. They can let each other live their lives.

  The summer before Bean starts kindergarten I realize that the French way of parenting has really gotten under my skin. Practically all of her French friends are spending weeks of their summer vacations with their grandparents. I decide that we should send Bean to stay in Miami with my mother. My mom will be visiting us in Paris anyway, so they can fly back together.

  Simon is against it. What if Bean gets madly homesick and we’re an ocean away? I’ve found a day camp with daily swimming lessons. Because of the timing, she’ll have to start the camp midsession. Won’t it be difficult for her to make friends? He suggests we wait a year, until she’s older.

  But Bean thinks the trip is a spectacular idea. She says she’ll be fine alone with her grandmother, and that she’s excited about the camp. Simon finally acquiesces, perhaps calculating that with Bean away, he’ll get to spend more time in cafés. I’ll fly to Miami to bring her home.

  I give my mother just a few instructions: no pork, lots of sunblock. Bean and I spend a week fine-tuning the contents of her carry-on bag for the airplane. We have a moment of melancholy, when I promise to call every day.

  And I do. But as soon as Bean arrives in Miami, she is so absorbed in her adventure that she won’t stay on the phone for more than a minute or two. I rely on reports from my mom and her friends. One of them writes in an e-mail to me, “She ate sushi with us tonight, taught us some French, told us about some pressing issues concerning her friends from school, and went off to bed with a smile on her face.”

  After just a few days, Bean’s English—which was once mid-Atlantic-mysterious with a British twist—now sounds almost fully American. She says “car” with a full, flat “ahr.” However, she’s definitely milking her status as an expatriate. My mom says they listened to her language tapes in the car and that Bean declared, “That man doesn’t know French.”

  Bean does try to figure out what’se oritish t happened in Paris while she was away. “Is Daddy fat? Is Mommy old?” she asks us, after about a week. My mom says Bean keeps telling people when I’ll arrive in Miami, how long I’ll stay, and where we’ll go after that. Just as Françoise Dolto predicted, she needs both independence and a rational understanding of the world.

  When I tell friends about Bean’s trip, their reactions split straight down national lines. The North Americans say that Bean is “brave” and ask how she’s coping with the separation. None are sending kids her age off for ten-day stints with their grandparents, especially not across an ocean. But my French friends assume that detaching a bit is good for everyone. They take for granted that Bean is having fun on her own and that I’m enjoying a well-deserved break.

  As the kids become more independent, Simon and I are getting along better. He’s still irritable, and I’m still irritating. But he’s decided that it’s okay to be cheerful sometimes and to admit that he enjoys my company. Every once in a while, he even laughs at my jokes. Weirdly, he seems to find Bean’s sense of humor hilarious.

  “When you were born, I thought you were a monkey,” he tells her playfully one morning.

  “Well, when you were born, I thought you were a caca,” she replies. Simon laughs so hard at this, he’s practically in tears. It seems I’ve just never hit on his preferred category of humor: scatological surrealism.

  I haven’t started making potty jokes, but I have made other concessions. I micromanage Simon less, even when I come out in the morning and he’s serving the kids unshaken orange juice. I’ve figured out that, like them, he craves autonomy. If that means a glass full

  of pulp for me, so be it. I no longer ask what he’s thinking about. I’ve learned to cultivate—and appreciate—having some mystery in our marriage.

  Last summer, we went back to the seaside town where I first noticed all those French children eating happily in restaurants. This time, instead of having one child with us, we have three. And instead of tryi
ng to manage in a hotel, we wisely rent a house with a kitchen.

  One afternoon, we take the kids out for lunch at a restaurant near the port. It’s one of those idyllic French summer days, when whitewashed buildings glow in the midday sun. And strangely, all five of us are able to enjoy it. We order our food calmly, and in courses. The kids stay in their seats and enjoy their food—including some fish and vegetables. Nothing lands on the floor. I have to do a bit of gentle coaching. It’s not as relaxing as dining out alone with Simon. But it really does feel like we’re on vacation. We even have coffee at the end of the meal.

  Click here for more titles by this author.

  acknowledgments

  I am extremely grateful to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, and to Ann Godoff and Virginia Smith at the Penguin Press.

  My profound thanks go to Sapna Gupta for her astute reading of the manuscript. Adam Kuper gave me advice and encouragement when I needed it most. Pauline Harris provided expert help with research. Ken Druckerman didn’t just comment on the early chapters; he also accepted packages on my behalf.

  Merci to my posse of mother readers: Christine Tacconet, Brooke Pallot, Dietlind Lerner, Amelia Relles, Sharon Galant, and the heroic Hannah Kuper, who read the chapters on pregnancy while having contractions herself.

  For their general support, often in the form of food or shelter, thanks to Scott Wenger, Joanne Feld, Adam Ellick, Jeffrey Sumber, Kari Snick, Patrick Weil, Lithe Sebesta, Adelyn Escobar, Shana Druckerman, Marsha Druckerman, Steve Fleischer, and Nancy and Ronald Gelles. Thanks to Benjamin Barda and my colleagues on the rue Bleue for their camaraderie, parenting tips, and lessons on how to enjoy lunch.

  I am indebted to the many French fam