Top Quotes: “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting” — Pamela Druckerman

Introduction

“After a few more restaurant meals, I notice that the French families all around us don’t look like they’re in hell. Weirdly, they look like they’re on vacation. French children the same age as Bean are sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There’s no shrieking or whining. Everyone is having one course at a time. And there’s no debris around their tables.”

“Once I start thinking about French parenting, I realize it’s not just mealtime that’s different. I suddenly have lots of questions. Why is it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’ve clocked at French playgrounds, I’ve never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why don’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids are demanding something? Why haven’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours has?

And there’s more. Why is it that so many of the American kids I meet are on mono-diets of pasta or white rice, or eat only a narrow menu of “kids” foods, whereas most of my daughter’s French friends eat fish, vegetables, and practically everything else? And how is it that, except for a specific time in the afternoon, French kids don’t snack?”

“How come they never point out that so many French babies start sleeping through the night at two or three months old? And why don’t they mention that French kids don’t require constant attention from adults, and that they seem capable of hearing the word “no” without collapsing?

No one is making a fuss about all this. But it’s increasingly clear to me that, quietly and en masse, French parents are achieving outcomes that create a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visit our home, the parents usually spend much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats; helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build LEGO villages. There are always a few rounds of crying and consoling. When French friends visit, however, we grown-ups have coffee and the children play happily by themselves.

French parents are very concerned about their kids. They know about pedophiles, allergies, and choking hazards. They take reasonable precautions. But they aren’t panicked about their children’s well-being. This calmer outlook makes them better at both establishing boundaries and giving their kids some autonomy.”

“The French have managed to be involved without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there’s no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother tells me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are — by design — often just toddling around by themselves.”

“There are plenty of French parenting books, magazines, and Web sites. But these aren’t required reading, and nobody seems to consume them in bulk. Certainly no one I meet is comparison shopping for a parenting philosophy or can refer to different techniques by name. There’s no new, must-read book, nor do the experts have quite the same hold on parents.”

Pregnancy

“The Frenchwomen I meet aren’t at all blasé about motherhood, or about their babies’ well-being. They’re awed, concerned, and aware of the immense life transformation that they’re about to undergo. But they signal this differently. American women typically demonstrate our commitment by worrying and by showing how much we’re willing to sacrifice, even while pregnant, whereas Frenchwomen signal their commitment by projecting calm and flaunting the fact that they haven’t renounced pleasure.”

“American pregnancy calculators tell me that with my height and build I should gain up to thirty-five pounds during my pregnancy. But French calculators tell me to gain no more than twenty-six and a half pounds. (By the time I see this, it’s too late.)”

“Everyone takes for granted that pregnant women should battle to keep their figures intact. While my podiatrist is working on my feet, she suddenly announces that I should rub sweet almond oil on my belly to avoid stretch marks. (I do this dutifully, and get none.) Parenting magazines run long features on how to minimize the damage that pregnancy does to your breasts. (Don’t gain too much weight, and take a daily jet of cold water to the chest.)

French doctors treat the weight-gain limits like holy edicts. Anglophones in Paris are routinely shocked when their obstetricians scold them for going even slightly over.”

“The main reason that pregnant Frenchwomen don’t get fat is that they are very careful not to eat too much. In French pregnancy guides, there are no late-night heapings of egg salad or instructions to eat way past hunger in order to nourish the fetus. Women who are “waiting for a child” are supposed to eat the same balanced meals as any healthy adult. One guide says that if a woman is still hungry, she should add an afternoon snack consisting of, for instance, “a sixth of a baguette,” a piece of cheese, and a glass of water.

In the French view, a pregnant woman’s food cravings are a nuisance to be vanquished. Frenchwomen don’t let themselves believe — as I’ve heard American women claim — that the fetus wants cheesecake. The Guidebook for Mothers to Be, a French pregnancy book, says that instead of caving in to cravings, women should distract their bodies by eating an apple or a raw carrot.

This isn’t all as austere as it sounds. Frenchwomen don’t see pregnancy as a free pass to overeat, in part because they haven’t been denying themselves the foods they love — or secretly binging on those foods — for most of their adult lives.”

“In Paris’s top maternity hospitals and clinics, about 87 percent of women have epidurals, on average (not counting C-sections). In some hospitals it’s 98 or 99 percent.”

Babies

“I talk to French parents about sleep, too. They’re neighbors, work acquaintances, and friends of friends. They all claim that their own kids began sleeping through the night much earlier. Samia says her daughter, who’s now two, started “doing her nights” at six weeks old; she wrote down the exact date. Stephanie, a skinny tax inspector who lives on our courtyard, looks ashamed when I ask when her son, Nino, began “doing his nights.” “Very late, very late!” Stephanie says. “He started doing his nights in November, so it was … four months old! For me it was very late.””

“What’s maddening is that while French parents can tell you exactly when their kids began sleeping through the night, they can’t explain how this came about. They don’t mention sleep training, “Ferberizing” — a sleep technique developed by Dr. Richard Ferber — or any other branded method. And they claim that they never let their babies cry for long periods. In fact, most French parents look a little queasy when I mention this practice.”

““He decided to sleep,” Fanny explains. “I never forced anything. You give him food when he needs food. He just regulated it all by himself.”

Fanny’s husband, Vincent, who’s listening to our conversation, points out that three months is exactly when Fanny went back to work. Like other French parents I speak to, he says this timing isn’t a coincidence. He says Antoine understood that his mother needed to wake up early to go to the office. Vincent compares this understanding to the way ants communicate through chemical waves that pass between their antennae.”

“French parents do offer a few sleep tips. They almost all say that in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night. And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully “observed” their babies, and then followed the babies’ own “rhythms.” French parents talk so much about rhythm, you’d think they were starting rock bands, not raising kids.

“From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep,” explains Alexandra, the mother whose babies slept through the night practically from birth.”

“Like the French, he starts babies off on vegetables and fruits rather than bland cereals. He’s not obsessed with allergies. He talks about “rhythm” and teaching kids to handle frustration. He values calm. And he gives real weight to the parents’ own quality of life, not just to the child’s welfare.

So how does Cohen get the babies of Tribeca to do their nights?

“My first intervention is to say, when your baby is born, just don’t jump on your kid at night,” Cohen says. “Give your baby a chance to self-soothe, don’t automatically respond, even from birth.”

Maybe it’s the beer (or Cohen’s doe eyes), but I get a little jolt when he says this. I realize that I’ve seen French mothers and nannies pausing exactly this little bit before tending to their babies during the day. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was deliberate or that it was at all significant. In fact, it had bothered me. I didn’t think that you were supposed to make babies wait. Could this explain why French babies do their nights so early on, supposedly with few tears?”

““The parents who were a little less responsive to late-night fussing always had kids who were good sleepers, while the jumpy folks had kids who would wake up repeatedly at night until it became unbearable,” he writes. Most of the babies Cohen sees are breast-fed. That doesn’t seem to make a difference.

One reason for pausing is that young babies make a lot of movements and noise while they’re sleeping. This is normal and fine. If parents rush in and pick the baby up every time he makes a peep, they’ll sometimes wake him up.

Another reason for pausing is that babies wake up between their sleep cycles, which last about two hours. It’s normal for them to cry a bit when they’re first learning to connect these cycles. If a parent automatically interprets this cry as a demand for food or a sign of distress and rushes in to soothe the baby, the baby will have a hard time learning to connect the cycles on his own. That is, he’ll need an adult to come in and soothe him back to sleep at the end of each cycle.

Newborns typically can’t connect sleep cycles on their own. But from about two or three months they usually can, if given a chance to learn how. And according to Cohen, connecting sleep cycles is like riding a bike: if a baby manages to fall back to sleep on his own even once, he’ll have an easier time doing it again the next time. (Adults wake up between their sleep cycles, too, but typically don’t remember this because they’ve learned to plunge right into the next one.)

Cohen says that sometimes babies do need to be fed or picked up. But unless we pause and observe them, we can’t be sure. “Of course, if [the baby’s] requests become more persistent, you’ll have to feed her,” Cohen writes. “I’m not saying let your baby wail.” What he’s saying is, just give your baby a chance to learn.

This idea isn’t entirely new to me. It sounds familiar from some of my American sleep books. But it’s usually mentioned among lots of other advice. I may have tried it once or twice with Bean but never with particular conviction. No one ever pointed it out to me as the one, crucial, most important thing to do and to stick with.”

“According to Cohen, it’s only until the baby is four months old. After that, bad sleep habits are formed.”

“She sometimes waited five or ten minutes before picking them up. She wanted to see whether they needed to fall back to sleep between sleep cycles or whether something else was bothering them: hunger, a dirty diaper, or just anxiety.

Alexandra — who wears her curly blond hair in a ponytail — looks like a cross between an earth mother and a high school cheerleader. She’s extremely warm. She wasn’t ignoring her newborn babies. To the contrary, she was carefully observing them. She trusted that when they cried, they were telling her something. During The Pause, she watched and listened. (She adds that there’s another reason for The Pause: “to teach them patience.”)”

“An article in Maman! magazine points out that in the first six months of a baby’s life, 50 percent to 60 percent of his sleep is sommeil agité (agitated sleep). In this state, a sleeping baby suddenly yawns, stretches, and even opens and closes his eyes. “The error would be to interpret this as a call, and thus derail our baby’s sleep train by picking him up,” the article says.”

“Parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that.”

“Of course, some French babies miss the four-month window for sleep teaching. When this happens, French experts usually recommend some version of crying it out. Sleep researchers aren’t ambivalent about this either. The meta-study found that letting kids cry it out, either by going cold turkey (known by the unfortunate scientific term “extinction”) or in stages (“graduated extinction”), works extremely well and usually succeeds in just a few days. “The biggest obstacle associated with extinction is lack of parental consistency,” the study says.”

“A psychologist quoted in Maman! magazine says that babies who learn to play by themselves during the day — even in the first few months — are less worried when they’re put into their beds alone at night. De Leersnyder writes that even babies need some privacy. “The little baby learns in his cradle that he can be alone from time to time, without being hungry, without being thirsty, without sleeping, just being calmly awake. At a very young age, he needs time alone, and he needs to go to sleep and wake up without being immediately watched by his mother.’”

Diet

“From the age of about four months, most French babies eat at regular times. As with sleep techniques, French parents see this as common sense, not as part of a parenting philosophy. What’s even stranger is that these French babies all eat at roughly the same times. With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about eight A.M., twelve P.M., four P.M., and eight P.M. Votre Enfant (Your Child), a respected French parenting guide, has just one sample menu for four- or five-month-olds. It’s this same sequence of feeds.

In French these aren’t even called “feeds,” which after all sounds like you’re pitching hay to cows. They’re called “meals.” And their sequence resembles a schedule I’m quite familiar with: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus an afternoon snack. In other words, by about four months old, French babies are already on the same eating schedule that they’ll be on for the rest of their lives (grown-ups usually drop the snack).”

Wait!

“Could it be that making children delay gratification — as middle-class French parents do — actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Whereas middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, go to pieces under stress? Are French parents once again doing — by tradition and instinct — exactly what scientists like Mischel recommend?

Bean, who usually gets what she wants almost immediately, can go from calm to hysterical in seconds. And whenever I go back to America, I realize that miserable, screaming toddlers demanding to get out of their strollers or pitching themselves onto the sidewalk are part of the scenery of daily life.

I rarely see such scenes in Paris. French babies and toddlers, who are used to waiting longer, seem oddly calm about not getting what they want right away. When I visit French families and hang out with their kids, there’s a conspicuous lack of whining and complaining. Often — or at least much more often than in my house — everyone’s calm and absorbed in what they’re doing.

In France I regularly see what amounts to a minor miracle: adults in the company of small children at home, having entire cups of coffee and full-length adult conversations. Waiting is even part of the parenting vernacular. Instead of saying “quiet” or “stop” to rowdy kids, French parents often just issue a sharp attend, which means “wait.”

Mischel hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on any French children. (He’d probably have to do a version with pain au chocolat.) But as a longtime observer of France, he says he’s struck by the difference between French and American kids.

In America, he says, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.” That’s sometimes true even with his own grandchildren. “I don’t like it when I call a daughter, if she tells me that she can’t talk now because a child is pulling on her and she can’t say, ‘Hold on, I’m talking to Papa!’

Having kids who can wait makes family life more pleasant. Children in France “seem much more disciplined and more raised the way I was,” Mischel says. “With French friends coming over with small children, you can still have a French dinner…the expectation with French kids is that they’ll behave themselves in an appropriate, quiet way and enjoy the dinner.”

“Enjoy” is an important word here. For the most part, French parents don’t expect their kids to be mute, joyless, and compliant. Parents just don’t see how their kids can enjoy themselves if they can’t control themselves.

I often hear French parents telling their kids to be sage. Saying “sois sage” is a bit like saying “be good.” But it implies more than that. When I tell Bean to be good before we walk into someone’s house, it’s as if she’s a wild animal who must act tame for an hour but who could turn wild again at any moment. It implies that being good goes contrary to her true nature. When I tell Bean to be sage, I’m also telling her to behave appropriately. But I’m asking her to use good judgment and to be aware and respectful of other people. I’m implying that she has a certain wisdom about the situation and that she’s in command of herself. And I’m suggesting that I trust her.

Being sage doesn’t mean being dull. The French kids I know have a lot of fun. On weekends, Bean and her friends run shouting and laughing through the park for hours. Recess at her day care, and later at her school, are free-for-alls. There’s also a lot of organized fun in Paris, like children’s film festivals, theaters, and cooking classes, which require patience and attention. The French parents I know want their kids to have rich experiences and to be exposed to art and music. Parents just don’t see how kids can fully absorb these experiences if they don’t have patience. In the French view, having the self-control to be calmly present, rather than anxious, irritable, and demanding, is what allows kids to have fun.

French parents and caregivers don’t think that kids have infinite patience. They don’t expect toddlers to sit through symphonies or formal banquets. They usually talk about waiting in terms of minutes or seconds. But even these small delays seem to make a big difference. I’m now convinced that the secret of why French kids rarely whine or collapse into tantrums — or at least do so less than American kids — is that they’ve developed the internal resources to cope with frustration. They don’t expect to get what they want instantly. When French parents talk about the “education” of their children, they are talking, in large part, about teaching them how not to eat the marshmallow.

So how exactly do the French turn ordinary children into expert delayers? And can we teach Bean how to wait, too? Walter Mischel watched videotapes of hundreds of squirming four-year-olds taking the marshmallow test. He eventually figured out that the bad delayers focused on the marshmallow, whereas the good delayers distracted themselves. “The kids who manage to wait very easily are the ones who learn during the wait to sing little songs to themselves, or pick their ears in an interesting way, or play with their toes and make a game of it,” he tells me. The ones who didn’t know how to distract themselves and just fixated on the marshmallow ended up eating it.”

“Parents don’t have to specifically teach their kids “distraction strategies.” Mischel says kids learn this skill on their own, if parents just allow them to practice waiting. “I think what’s often underestimated in parenting is how extraordinary…the cognitive facilities of very young kids are, if you engage them,” he says.”

Baking

“Practically from the time kids can sit up, their moms begin leading them in weekly or biweekly baking projects. These kids don’t just spill some flour and mash a few bananas. They crack eggs, pour in cups of sugar, and mix with preternatural confidence. They actually make the whole cake themselves.

The first cake that most French kids learn to bake is gâteau au yaourt (yogurt cake), in which they use empty yogurt containers to measure out the other ingredients. It’s a light, not-too-sweet cake to which berries, chocolate chips, lemon, or a tablespoon of rum can be added.

It’s pretty hard to screw up.

All this baking doesn’t just yield lots of cakes. It also teaches kids how to control themselves. With its orderly measuring and sequencing of ingredients, baking is a perfect lesson in patience. So is the fact that French families don’t devour the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven, as I would. They typically bake in the morning or early afternoon, then wait and eat the cake or muffins as a goûter — the French afternoon snack.”

Communication

“Mischel says the worst-case scenario for a kid from eighteen to twenty-four months of age is “the child is busy and the child is happy, and the mother comes along with a fork full of spinach.”

“The mothers who really foul it up are the ones who are coming in when the child is busy and doesn’t want or need them, and are not there when the child is eager to have them. So becoming alert to that is absolutely critical.””

“A French psychologist writes that when a child has a caprice — for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy — the mother should remain extremely calm and gently explain that buying the toy isn’t in the day’s plan. Then she should try to bypass the caprice by redirecting the child’s attention, for example by telling a story about her own life. “Stories about parents are always interesting to children,” the psychologist says. (After reading this, in every crisis I shout to Simon: “Tell a story about your life!”)

The psychologist says that throughout this the mother should stay in close communication with the child, by embracing him or looking him in the eye. But she must also make him understand that “he can’t have everything right away. It’s essential not to leave him thinking that he is all-powerful, and that he can do everything and have everything.”

Development

“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.””

“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. 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.””

The Cadre

“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.””

““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!” The point of the cadre isn’t to hem in the child; it’s to create a world that’s predictable and coherent to her.

“You need that cadre or I think you get lost,” Fanny says. “It gives you confidence. You have confidence in your kid, and your kid feels it.”

The cadre feels enlightened and empowering for kids. But Rousseau’s legacy has a darker side, too. When I bring Bean to get her first inoculations, I cradle her in my arms and apologize to her for the pain she’s about to experience. The French pediatrician scolds me. “You don’t say ‘I’m sorry,” he says. “Getting shots is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.””

“Dolto famously insisted that older children “pay” her at the end of each session, with an object, like a stone, to emphasize their independence and accountability.”

Speech

“The French magazine Parents says that if a baby is scared of strangers, his mother should warn him that a visitor will be coming over soon. Then, when the doorbell rings, “Tell him that the guest is here, take a few seconds before opening the door … if he doesn’t cry when he sees the stranger, don’t forget to congratulate him.” I hear of several cases where, upon bringing a baby home from the maternity hospital, French parents give the baby a tour of the house. French parents often just tell babies what they’re doing to them: I’m picking you up; I’m changing your diaper; I’m getting ready to give you a bath. This isn’t just to make soothing sounds; it’s to convey information. And since the baby is a person, like any other, parents are often quite polite to him. (Plus it’s apparently never too early to start instilling good manners.)

The practical implications of believing that a baby or toddler understands what you say and can act on it are considerable. It means you can teach him to sleep through the night early on, to not barge into your room every morning, to sit properly at the table, to eat only at mealtimes, and to not interrupt his parents. You can expect him to accommodate – at least a little bit – what his parents need, too.”

“This is irritating, of course. But I don’t think I can stop her. Often I just pick up the books and put them back. But one morning, Simon’s French friend Lara is visiting. When Lara sees Bean pulling the books down, she immediately kneels next to her and explains, patiently but firmly, “We don’t do that.” Then she shows Bean how to put the books back on the shelf and tells her to leave them there. Lara keeps using the French word doucement – gently. (After this, I start to notice that French parents say doucement all the time.) I’m shocked when Bean listens to Lara and obeys.”

“Beginning in the early 1990s, research using this method has shown that “babies can do rudimentary math with objects” and that “babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do,” writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. A study at the University of British Columbia found that eight-month-olds understand probabilities.

There’s also evidence that babies have a moral sense. Bloom and other researchers showed six- and ten-month-old babies a sort of puppet show in which a circle was trying to roll up a hill. A “helper” character helped the circle go up, while a “hinderer” pushed it down. After the show, the babies were offered the helper and the hinderer on a tray. Almost all of them reached for the helper.

“Babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy,” Paul Bloom explains.

Of course, these experiments don’t prove that – as Dolto claims – babies understand speech. But they do seem to prove her point that, from a very young age, babies are rational. Their minds aren’t a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” At the very least, we should watch what we say to them.”

The Crèche

“Parents are charged sliding fees based on their incomes.

“I felt that it was a perfect system, absolutely perfect,” gushes my friend Esther, a French lawyer, whose daughter started at the crèche when she was nine months old. Even friends of mine who don’t work try to enroll their kids in the crèche. As a distant second choice, they consider part-time day care or nannies, which are subsidized, too. (Government Web sites give all the options.)”

“Charity-financed crèches opened in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Buffalo for the children of poor, working mothers. A few used the French name, but most were called “day nurseries.” By the 1890s there were ninety American day nurseries. Many cared for the children of recent immigrants. They were supposed to keep these kids off the streets and turn them into “Americans.’

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a separate “nursery school movement” in America to create private preschools and kindergartens for children aged around two to six. These grew out of new ideas about the importance of early learning and of stimulating kids’ social and emotional development. From the start, they appealed to middle- and upper-middle-class American parents.

The separate origins of day care and preschool explain why, more than a hundred years later, “day care” still has a working-class connotation in America, while middle-class parents battle to get their two-year-olds into preschool. It also explains why today’s American preschools often last just a few hours a day; it’s presumed that mothers of the students don’t have to work, or can afford nannies.

One segment of American society that isn’t ambivalent about day care is the U.S. military. The Department of Defense runs America’s largest day-care system, with about eight hundred child development centers – or CDCs – on military installations around the world. The centers accept kids from the age of six weeks and are typically open from six A.M. to six thirty P.M.

The American military’s day-care system looks remarkably like the French crèche. Operating hours wrap around the workday. Fees are scaled according to parents’ combined income. The government subsidizes about half the cost.”

“Kids don’t learn to read in a crèche. They don’t learn letters or other preliteracy skills. What they do is socialize with other kids. In America, some parents mention this to me as a benefit of day care. In France, all parents do. “I knew that it was very good, it was an opening to social life,” says my friend Esther.”

“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.”

“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 whiteboard near the entrance.

I sometimes photograph these menus and e-mail them to my mother. They read like the chalkboard menus at Parisian brasseries. 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.”

“Bean still seems to like the crèche. She chatters all the time about Maky and Lila (pronounced Leelah), 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.”

Motherhood & Womanhood

“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.”

“About 63 percent of French mothers do some breastfeeding. A bit more than half are still nursing when they leave the maternity hospital, and most abandon it altogether soon after that.”

“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).”

“People have more willpower when they don’t rule out ever eating certain foods but rather tell themselves that they will eat those foods later (such as, presumably, during the weekend). I also like the neutral, pragmatic French formulation “paying attention” over the value-laden American one, “being good” (and its guilt-ridden, demoralizing opposites: “cheating” and “being bad”). If you’ve merely stopped paying attention and had some cake, it seems easier to forgive yourself and to eat mindfully again at the next meal.”

“French women don’t just permit themselves physical time off; they also allow themselves to mentally detach from their kids. In Hollywood films, you know instantly if a female character has kids. That’s often what the film is about. But in the French romantic dramas and comedies I occasionally sneak out to watch, the fact that the protagonist has kids is often irrelevant to the plot. In one typical French film, Les Regrets, a small-town schoolteacher rekindles a love affair with her former boyfriend, who comes back to town when his mother becomes ill. During the film, we’re vaguely aware that the schoolteacher has a daughter. But the little girl appears only briefly. Mostly, the movie is a love story, complete with steamy sex scenes. The protagonist isn’t supposed to be a bad mother; it’s just that being a mother isn’t part of the story.”

“College-educated mothers rarely ditch their careers, temporarily or permanently, after having kids. When I tell Americans that I have a child, they usually ask, “Are you working?” Whereas French people just ask, “What do you do?””

“A white, upper-middle-class mother walks in with her toddler. She follows him around the miniature equipment, while keeping up a nonstop monologue. “Do you want to go on the froggy, Caleb? Do you want to go on the swing?”

Caleb ignores these questions. He evidently plans to just bumble around. But his mother tracks him, continuing to narrate his every move. “You’re stepping, Caleb!” she says at one point.

I assume that Caleb just landed a particularly zealous mother. But then the next upper-middle-class woman walks through the gate, pushing a blond toddler in a black T-shirt. She immediately begins narrating all of her child’s actions, too. When the boy wanders over to the gate to stare out at the lawn, the mother evidently decides this isn’t stimulating enough. She rushes over and holds him upside down. “You’re upside down!” she shouts. Moments later, she lifts up her shirt to offer the boy a nip of milk. “We came. to the park! We came to the park!” she chirps while he’s drinking.

This scene keeps repeating itself with other moms and their kids. After about an hour I can predict with total accuracy whether a mother is going to do this “narrated play” simply by the price of her handbag. What’s most surprising to me is that these mothers aren’t ashamed of how batty they sound. They’re not whispering their commentaries; they’re broadcasting them.

When I describe this scene to Michel Cohen, the French pediatrician in New York, he knows immediately what I’m talking about. He says these mothers are speaking loudly to flaunt what good parents they are.

The practice of narrated play is so common that Cohen included a section in his parenting book called Stimulation, which essentially tells mothers to cut it out. “Periods of playing and laughing should alternate naturally with periods of peace and quiet,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to talk, sing, or entertain constantly.””

“The French equivalent of a playdate is that I drop off Bean at her friend’s house, then I leave. (My Anglophone friends assume I’ll stay the whole time.) French parents aren’t curt; they’re practical. They correctly assume that I have other stuff to do. I sometimes stay for a cup of coffee when I return for the pickup.

It’s the same at birthday parties. American and British mothers expect me to stick around and socialize, often for several hours. No one ever says it, but I think part of why we’re there is to make sure our kids are comforted and okay.

But by the time a child is three, French birthday parties are drop-offs. We’re supposed to trust that our kids will be okay without us. Parents are usually invited to come back at the end for a glass of champagne and some hobnobbing with the other moms and dads. Simon and I are thrilled whenever we get invitations: it’s free babysitting, followed by a cocktail party.”

“Their kids take lessons in fencing, guitar, tennis, piano, and wrestling. But most just choose one activity per school term.”

“When we Americans talk about work-life balance, we’re describing a kind of juggling, where we’re trying to keep all parts of our lives in motion without screwing up any of them too badly.

The French also talk about l’équilibre. But they mean it differently. For them, it’s about not letting any one part of life – including parenting – overwhelm the rest.”

École Maternelle

“Bean has started école maternelle, France’s free public preschool. It’s all day four days a week except for Wednesdays. Maternelle isn’t compulsory, and kids can go part-time. But pretty much every three-year-old in France goes to maternelle full time and has a similar experience there. It’s France’s way of turning toddlers into French people.

The maternelle has lofty goals. It is, in effect, a national project to turn the nation’s solipsistic three-year-olds into civilized, empathetic people. A booklet for parents from the education ministry explains that in maternelle kids “discover the richness and the constraints of the group that they’re part of. They feel the pleasure of being welcomed and recognized, and they progressively participate in welcoming their fellow students.”

Charlotte, who’s been a teacher at maternelle for thirty years (and still charmingly has the kids call her maitresse – teacher or, literally, mistress), tells me that in the first year the kids are very egotistical. “They don’t realize that the teacher is there for everyone,” she says. Conversely, the pupils only gradually understand that when the teacher speaks to the group, what she’s saying is also intended for each of them individually. Kids typically do activities of their choosing in groups of three or four, at separate tables or parts of the classroom.

To me, maternelle seems like art school for short people. During Bean’s first year the walls of her classroom are quickly covered in the students’ drawings and paintings. Being able to “perceive, feel, imagine, and create” are goals of maternelle, too.

Kids aren’t taught to read in maternelle, which lasts until the year they turn six. They just learn letters, sounds, and how to write their own names. I’m told that some kids pick up reading on their own, though I couldn’t say which ones, since their parents don’t mention it. Learning to read isn’t part of the French curriculum until the equivalent of first grade, the year that kids turn seven.

This relaxed attitude goes against my most basic American belief that earlier is better. But even the most upwardly mobile parents of Bean’s school friends aren’t in any rush. “I prefer that they don’t spend time learning to read now,” Marion, herself a journalist, tells me. She and her husband say that at this stage it’s much more important for children to learn social skills, how to organize their thoughts, and how to speak well.

They’re in luck. While reading isn’t taught at maternelle, speaking definitely is. In fact, it turns out that the main goal of maternelle is for kids of all backgrounds to perfect their spoken French. A booklet for parents produced by the French government says this French should be “rich, organized, and comprehensible to others” (that is, they need to speak it much better than I do). Charlotte, the teacher, tells me that children of immigrants typically enter maternelle in September speaking bare-bones French or none at all. By March, they’re usually competent if not fluent.”

Language

“My friend Esther insists on bonjours at the threat of punishment. “If she doesn’t say bonjour, she stays in her room, no dinner with guests,” Esther explains. “So she says bonjour. It’s not the most sincere bonjour, but it’s the repetition, I’m hoping.”

Benoît, a professor and father of two, tells me there was a family crisis when he took his kids to stay with their grandparents. His three-year-old daughter would wake up grumpy and didn’t want to say bonjour to her grandfather until she’d had breakfast. She finally compromised by agreeing to say pas bonjour, Papi (not “good morning, Grandpa”) to him on the way to the table. “He was happy with that. In a way, she was acknowledging him,” Benoît explains.

Adults are supposed to say bonjour to one another, too, of course. I think tourists are often treated gruffly in Parisian cafés and shops partly because they don’t begin interactions with bonjour, even if they switch to English afterward. It’s crucial to say bonjour upon climbing into a taxi, when a waitress first approaches your table in a restaurant, or before asking a salesperson if the pants come in your size. Saying bonjour acknowledges the other person’s humanity. It signals that you view her as a person, not just as someone who’s supposed to serve you. I’m amazed that people seem visibly put at ease after I say a nice solid bonjour. It signals that-although I have a strange accent — we’re going to have a civilized encounter. In the United States, a four-year-old American kid isn’t obliged to greet me when he walks into my house. He gets to skulk in under the umbrella of his parents’ greeting. And in an American context, that’s supposed to be fine with me. I don’t need the child’s acknowledgment because I don’t quite count him as a full person; he’s in a separate kids’ realm. I might hear all about how gifted he is, but he never actually speaks to me.

When I’m at a family luncheon back in the United States, I’m struck that the cousins and stepcousins at the table, who range in age from five to fourteen, don’t say anything at all to me unless I pry it out of them. Some can only muster one-word responses to my questions. Even the teenagers aren’t used to expressing themselves with confidence to a grown-up they don’t know well.

Part of what the French obsession with bonjour reveals is that, in France, kids don’t get to have this shadowy presence. The child greets, therefore he is. Just as any adult who walks into my house has to acknowledge me, any child who walks in must acknowledge me, too. “Greeting is essentially recognizing someone as a person,” says Benoît, the professor. “People feel injured if they’re not greeted by children that way.”

These aren’t just social conventions; they’re a national project. In a meeting for parents at Bean’s school, her teacher says that one of the school’s goals is for students to remember the names of adults (Bean calls her teachers by their first names) and to practice saying bonjour, au revoir, and merci to them.”

“Saying bonjour signals to the child, and to everyone else, that she’s capable of behaving well. It sets the tone for the whole interaction between adults and children.

Parents acknowledge that greeting someone is in some ways an adult act. “I don’t think it’s easy to say hello,” says Denise, a medical ethicist with two girls, ages seven and nine. But Denise says it fortifies kids to know that their greeting matters to the adult. She explains: “I think the child who doesn’t say bonjour cannot really feel confident.””

“I know the difference between hitting the table and hitting a person. But being able to label an offense as a misdemeanor — a mere bêtise — helps me, as a parent, to respond appropriately. I don’t have to freak out and crack down every time Bean does something wrong or challenges my authority. Sometimes it’s just a bêtise. Having this word calms me down.”

“The French books I read to Bean start out with a similar structure. There’s a problem, and the characters struggle to overcome that problem. But they seldom succeed for very long. Often the book ends with the protagonist having the same problem again. There is rarely a moment of personal transformation, when everyone learns and grows.

One of Bean’s favorite French books is about two pretty little girls who are cousins and best friends. Eliette (the redhead) is always bossing around Alice (the brunette). One day Alice decides she can’t take it anymore and stops playing with Eliette. There’s a long, lonely standoff. Finally Eliette comes to Alice’s house, begging her pardon and promising to change. Alice accepts the apology. A page later, the girls are playing doctor and Eliette is trying to jab Alice with a syringe. Nothing has changed.

The end.

Not all French kids’ books end this way, but a lot of them do. The message is that endings don’t have to be tidy to be happy. It’s a cliché about Europeans, but you can see it in the morals of Bean’s French stories: Life is ambiguous and complicated. There aren’t bad guys and good guys. Each of us has a bit of both. Eliette is bossy, but she’s also lots of fun. Alice is the victim, but she also seems to ask for it, and she goes back for more.

We’re to presume that Eliette and Alice keep up their little dysfunctional cycle, because, well, that’s what a friendship between two girls is like. I wish I had known that when I was four, instead of finally figuring it out in my thirties. Writer Debra Olivier points out that American girls pick the petals off daisies saying, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Whereas little French girls allow for more subtle varieties of affection, saying, “He loves me a little, a lot, passionately, madly, not at all.”

Characters in French kids’ books can have contradictory qualities. In one of Bean’s Perfect Princess books, Zoé opens a present and declares that she doesn’t like it. But on the next page, Zoé is a “perfect princess” who jumps up and says merci to the gift giver.

If there were an American version of this book, Zoé would probably overcome her bad habits and morph fully into the perfect princess. The French book is more like real life: Zoé continues to struggle with both sides of her personality. The book tries to encourage princesslike habits (there’s a little certificate at the end for good behavior) but takes for granted that kids also have a built-in impulse to do bêtises.

There is also a lot of nudity and love in French books for four-year-olds. Bean has a book about a boy who accidentally goes to school naked. She has another about a romance between the boy who accidentally pees in his pants and the little girl who lends him her pants while fashioning her bandana into a skirt. These books — and the French parents I know — treat the crushes and romances of preschoolers as genuine.”

“When Bean and I visit a French family in Brittany, she and their little girl, Leonie, stick out their tongues at the little girl’s grandmother. The grandmother immediately sits them down for a talk about when it’s appropriate to do such things.

“When you’re alone in your room you can. When you’re alone in the bathroom you can … You can go barefoot, stick out your tongue, point at someone, say caca boudin. You can do all that, when you’re by yourself. But when you’re at school, non. When you’re at the table, non. When you’re with Mommy and Daddy, non. In the street, non. C’est la vie. You must understand the difference.”

Once Simon and I learn more about caca boudin, we decide to lift our moratorium on it. We tell Bean that she can say it, but not too much. We like the philosophy behind it and even occasionally say it ourselves. A curse word just for kids: How quaint! How French!”

“In French, twins aren’t called identical or fraternal. They’re called vrais or faux — real or fake. I get used to telling people that I’m waiting for two fake twin boys.”

Diet, Part 2

“My doctor writes me a prescription for abdominal re-education, too. She’s noticed that, more than a year after the twins are born, I still have a kind of bulge around my waist that’s part fat, part stretch, and part unknown substance. Frankly, I’m not sure what’s in there. I decide that it’s time to take action when I’m standing up on the Paris metro and a decrepit old woman offers me her seat. She thinks I’m pregnant.

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.”

“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 Votre Enfant 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.”

“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 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.”

“It becomes clear how French our kids’ eating habits have become when we visit America. My mom is excited to introduce Bean to that American classic, macaroni and cheese from a box. But Bean won’t eat more than a few bites. “That’s not cheese,” she says. (I think I detect her first sneer.)”

“I grow to dread the ubiquitous “kids’ menus” in American restaurants. It doesn’t matter what type of restaurant we’re in — seafood, Italian, Cuban. The kids’ menus all have practically identical offerings: hamburgers, fried chicken fingers (now euphemistically called chicken “tenders”), plain pizza, and perhaps spaghetti. There are almost never any vegetables, unless you count French fries or potato chips.”

“Instead of Fruit Roll-Ups, they eat fruit. They’re so used to fresh food that processed food tastes strange to them.”

“At most restaurants, kids are expected to order from the regular menu. When I ask for spaghetti with tomato sauce for Bean at a nice Italian restaurant, the French waitress very gently suggests that I order her something a bit more adventuresome — say the pasta dish with eggplant.”

“Though French kids eat hamburgers and fries sometimes, I’ve never met a French child who ate just one type of food or a parent who allowed this. It’s not that French kids are clamoring for more vegetables. Of course they like certain foods more than others. And there are plenty of finicky French three-year-olds. But these children don’t get to exclude whole categories of textures, colors, and nutrients just because they want to. The extreme pickiness that’s come to seem normal in America and Britain looks to French parents like a dangerous eating disorder or, at best, a wildly bad habit.”

“It turns out that French parents don’t start their babies off on bland, colorless grains. From the first bite, they serve babies flavor-packed vegetables. The first foods that French babies typically eat are steamed and pureed green beans, spinach, carrots, peeled zucchini, and the white part of leeks.

American babies eat vegetables, too, of course, sometimes even from the start. But we Anglophones tend to regard vegetables as obligatory vitamin-delivery devices and mentally group them in a dull category called “vegetables.” Although were desperate for our kids to eat vegetables, we don’t always expect them to. Bestselling cookbooks teach parents how to sneak vegetables into meatballs, fish sticks, and macaroni and cheese, without kids even noticing.”

“Parents take for granted that, while kids will prefer certain tastes over others, the flavor of each vegetable is inherently rich and interesting. Parents see it as their job to bring the child around to appreciating this. They believe that just as they must teach the child how to sleep, how to wait, and how to say bonjour, they must teach her how to eat.

No one suggests that introducing all these foods will be easy. The French government’s free handbook on feeding kids says all babies are different. “Some are happy to discover new foods. Others are less excited, and diversification takes a little bit longer.” But the handbook urges parents to be dogged about introducing kids to new foods and not giving up even after a child has rejected a food three or more times.

French parents advance slowly. “Ask your child to taste just one bite, then move on to the next course,” the handbook suggests. The authors add that parents should never offer a different food to replace the rejected one. And they should react neutrally if the child won’t eat something. “If you don’t react too much to his refusal, your child will truly abandon this behavior,” the authors predict. “Don’t panic. You can keep giving him milk to be sure he’s getting enough food.”

This long-term view of cultivating a child’s palate is echoed in Laurence Pernoud’s legendary parenting book J’élève mon enfant. Her section on feeding solids to babies is called How Little by Little a Child Learns to Eat Everything.

“He refuses to eat artichokes?” Pernoud writes. “Here again, you have to wait. When, a few days later, you try again, try putting a little bit of artichoke into a lot of puree,” for instance, of potatoes.

The government food guide tells parents to offer the same ingredients prepared many different ways. “Try steaming, baking, in parchment, grilled, plain, with sauce or seasoned.” The handbook’s authors say, “Your child will discover different colors, different textures and different aromas.”

The guide also suggests a talking cure, à la Dolto. “It’s important to reassure him, and to talk to him about this new food,” it says. The conversation about food should go beyond “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” They suggest showing kids a vegetable and asking, “Do you think this is crunchy, and that it’ll make a sound when you bite it? What does this flavor remind you of? What do you feel in your mouth?” They suggest playing flavor games like offering different types of apples and having the child decide which is the sweetest and which is the most acidic. In another game, the parent blindfolds the child and has him eat and identify foods he already knows.

All the French baby books I read urge parents to stay calm and cheerful at mealtimes, and above all to stay the course, even if their child doesn’t take a single bite. “Don’t force him, but don’t give up on proposing it to him,” the government handbook explains. “Little by little, he’ll get more familiar with it, he’ll taste it…and without a doubt, he’ll end up appreciating it.””

“Merle reminds the chefs to introduce new foods gradually and to prepare the foods all different ways. She suggests introducing berries first as a puree, since kids will already be familiar with that texture. After that, the chefs can serve the berries cut into pieces. One chef asks what to do about grapefruit. Merle suggests serving a thin slice sprinkled with sugar, then gradually serving it on its own. The same goes for spinach. “Our kids don’t eat spinach at all. It all goes in the garbage,” one chef grumbles. Merle tells her to mix it with rice to make it more appetizing. She says she’ll send out a “technical sheet” to remind everyone how to do this. “You repropose spinach in different ways throughout the year; eventually they will like it,” she promises.

Merle says that once one child starts eating spinach, the others will follow. “It’s the principle of nutritional education,” she says. Vegetables are a big concern for the group. One cook says her kids won’t eat green beans unless they’re slathered in crème fraîche or béchamel sauce. “You need to strike a balance; sometimes with sauce, sometimes without,” Merle suggests.”

“One extension of the tasting principle is that, in France, everyone eats the same dinner. There are no choices or substitutions. “I never ask, ‘What do you want?’ It’s ‘I’m serving this,’” Fanny tells me. “If she doesn’t finish a dish, serving this, it’s okay. But we all eat the same thing.”

American parents might see this as lording it over their helpless offspring. Fanny thinks it empowers Lucie. “She feels bigger when we all eat, not the same portions, but the same thing.” Fanny says.”

“When it’s time to eat, Fanny doesn’t austerely wave her finger at Lucie and order her to taste things. They talk about the food. Often they discuss the flavor of each cheese. And having participated in preparing the meal, Lucie is invested in how it turns out. There’s complicity. If a certain dish is a flop, “we all have a laugh about it,” Fanny says.

Part of keeping the mood light is keeping the meal brief. Fanny says that once Lucie has tasted everything, she’s allowed to leave the table. The book Votre Enfant says a meal with young kids shouldn’t last more than thirty minutes. French kids learn to linger over longer meals as they get older.”

“Fanny may have just raced home from the office, but, as they do at the crèche, she calmly serves dinner in courses. She gives Lucie a cold vegetable starter, such as shredded carrots in a vinaigrette. Then there’s a main course, usually pasta or rice with vegetables. Occasionally she’ll cook a bit of fish or meat, but usually she expects Lucie to have had most of her protein at lunch. “I try to avoid proteins [at night] because I think I’ve been educated like that. They say once per day is enough. I try to focus on vegetables.”

Some parents tell me that, in winter, they often serve soup for dinner, along with a baguette or maybe a bit of pasta. It’s a filling meal that relies heavily on grains and vegetables. A lot of parents puree these soups. And that’s dinner. Kids might drink some juice at breakfast or at the afternoon goûter. But at lunch and dinner they drink water, usually at room temperature or slightly chilled.

Weekends are for family meals. Almost all the French families I know have a large lunch en famille on both Saturday and Sunday. The kids are usually involved in cooking and setting up these meals. On weekends “we bake, we cook. I have cookbooks for children; they have their own recipes,” says Denise.”

“At Bean’s fifth birthday party, I announce that it’s time for the cake. Suddenly the kids — who’ve been raucously playing-file into our dining room and sit down calmly at the table. They’re all sage at once. Bean sits at the head of the table and hands out plates, spoons, and napkins. Except for lighting the candles and carrying out the cake, I don’t have much of a role. By five years old, sitting calmly at the table for any kind of eating is an automatic reflex for French kids. There’s no question of eating on the couch, in front of the television, or while looking at the computer.

Of course, one of the benefits of having some cadre in your home is that you can go outside of the cadre without worrying that it will collapse. Denise tells me that once a week she lets her two girls — who are seven and nine — have dinner in front of the television.

On weekends and during those ubiquitous school holidays, French parents are more relaxed about what time their kids eat and go to bed. They trust the cadre to be there when they need it again. Magazines run articles about easing your kids back onto an earlier schedule, once you get back from vacation.”

“They fit sweets inside the cadre. For a French kid, candy has its place. It’s a regular enough part of their lives that they don’t gorge on it like freed prisoners the moment they get their hands on it. Mostly, children seem to eat it at birthday parties, school events, and as the occasional treat. At these occasions, they’re usually free to eat all they want. When I try to limit the boys’ intake of candy and chocolate cake at the crèche’s Christmas party, one of their caregivers intervenes. She tells me I should just let them enjoy the party and be free. I think of my skinny friend Virginie, who pays strict attention to what she eats on weekdays, then eats whatever she wants on weekends. Kids, too, need moments when the regular rules don’t apply.”

“Chocolate has a more regular place in the lives of French kids. Middle-class French parents talk about chocolate as if it’s just another food group, albeit one to eat in moderation. When Fanny describes what Lucie eats in a typical day, the menu includes a bit of cookies or cake. “And obviously she’ll want chocolate in there somewhere,” Fanny says.

Hélène gives her kids hot chocolate when it’s cold outside. She serves it for breakfast, along with a hunk of baguette, or makes it their afternoon goûter, along with some cookies.”

“With sweets, too, the cadre is key. French parents aren’t afraid of sugary foods. In general, they will serve cake or cookies at lunch or at the goûter. But they don’t give kids chocolate or rich desserts with dinner. “What you eat in the evening just stays with you for years,” Fanny explains.

After dinner, Fanny typically serves fresh fruit or a fruit compote — those ubiquitous little tubs of applesauce with other pureed fruits mixed in. (These come with or without added sugar.) There’s a compotes section in French supermarkets. Fanny says she also buys all different types of plain yogurt and then gets jams for Lucie to mix in.”

“I’m not sure exactly when I started serving my kids meals in courses. But I now do it at every meal. It’s a stroke of French genius. This starts with breakfast. When the kids sit down, I put plates of cut-up fruit on the table. They nibble on this while I’m getting their toast or cereal ready. They can have juice at breakfast, but they know that for lunch and dinner we drink water. Even the union organizer doesn’t complain about that. We talk about how clean water makes us feel.

At lunch and dinner I serve vegetables first, when the kids are hungriest. We don’t move on to the main course until they at least make a dent in the starter. Usually they finish it. Except when I introduce an entirely new dish, I rarely have to resort to the tasting rule. If Leo won’t eat a food the first time I serve it, he’ll usually agree to at least smell it, and he’ll take a nibble soon after that.”

“It’s no surprise that the kids find the food more appetizing when it’s made with fresh ingredients and it looks good. I consider the balance of colors on their plates and occasionally slip in some slices of tomato or avocado if dinner looks monotone. We have a collection of colorful melamine plates. But for dinner I use white, which makes the colors of the food pop and signals to the kids that we’re having a grown-up meal.

I try to let them help themselves as much as possible. Beginning when the boys were quite young, I passed around a bowl of grated Parmesan on pasta nights and let them sprinkle it on all by themselves. They get to put a spoonful of sugar in their hot chocolates and occasionally in their yogurts. Bean frequently asks for a slice of Camembert, or a hunk of whatever cheese we’ve got, at the end of the meal.”

Discipline

“Frederique smiles again and says I need to make my “no” more convincing. What I lack, she says, is the belief that he’s really going to listen. She tells me not to shout but rather to speak with more conviction.

I’m scared that I’ll terrify him.

“Don’t worry,” Frederique says, urging me on.

Leo doesn’t listen the next time either. But I gradually feel my “no’s” coming from a more convincing place. They’re not louder, but they’re more self-assured. I feel like I’m impersonating a different sort of parent.

By the fourth try, when I’m finally brimming with conviction, Leo approaches the gate but — miraculously— doesn’t open it. He looks back and eyes me warily. I widen my eyes and try to look disapproving.

After about ten minutes, Leo stops trying to leave altogether. He seems to forget about the gate and just plays in the sandbox with Tina, Joey, and Bean. Soon Frederique and I are chatting, with our legs stretched ot in front of us.”

“Another way that French parents and educators build the cadre is simply by talking a lot about the cadre. That is, they spend a lot of time telling their kids what’s permissible and what’s not. All this talk seems to will the cadre into existence. It starts to take on an almost physical presence, much like a good mime convinces you there’s actually a wall.

This ongoing conversation about the cadre is often very polite. Parents say please a lot, even to babies. (They require politeness, too, of course, since they understand what’s being said.) In defining limits for kids, French parents often invoke the language of rights. Rather than saying “Don’t hit Jules,” they typically say, “You don’t have the right to hit Jules.” This is more than a semantic difference. It feels different to say it this way. The French phrasing suggests that theres a fixed and coherent system of rights, which both children and adults can refer to. It also makes clear that the child does have the right to do other things.”

“Another phrase that adults use a lot with children is “I don’t agree,” as in, “I don’t agree with you pitching your peas on the floor.” Parents say this in a serious tone, while looking directly at the child. “I don’t agree” is also more than just “no.” It establishes the adult as another mind, which the child must consider. And it credits the child with having his own view about the peas, even if this view is being overruled. Pitching the peas is cast as something the child has rationally decided to do, so he can decide to do otherwise, too.”

“Like Marc and Anne-Marie, the French parents and caregivers I meet have authority without seeming like dictators. They don’t aspire to raise obedient robots. To the contrary, they listen and talk to their kids all the time. In fact, the adults I meet who have the most authority all speak to children not as a master to a subject but as one equal to another. “You must always explain the reason” for something that’s forbidden, Anne-Marie tells me.”

““She had this look,” Clotilde Dusoulier, the Parisian food writer, says of her mother. With both her parents, “There was this tone of voice they used when all of a sudden they felt you had stepped over a line. They had a facial expression that was stern and annoyed and not happy. They would say, ‘No, you don’t say that!’ You would feel chastised and a bit humiliated. It would pass.’”

“French parents do speak sharply to their kids. But they prefer surgical strikes to constant carpet-bombing. Shouting is saved for important moments, when they really want to make a point. When I shout at my kids in the park or at home when we have French friends over, the parents look alarmed, as if they think that there’s been a serious offense.”

“This idea that you’re teaching, not policing, makes the tone a lot gentler in France. When Leo refuses to use his silverware at dinner, I try to imagine that I’m teaching him to use a fork, much like I’d teach him a letter of the alphabet. This makes it easier for me to be patient and calm. I no longer feel disrespected and angry when he doesn’t immediately comply. And with some of the stress off the situation, he’s more amiable about trying. I don’t yell, and dinner is more pleasant for everyone.”

“French parents, however, mean something different than American parents do when they call themselves “strict.” They mean that they’re very strict about a few things and pretty relaxed about everything else. That’s the cadre model: a firm frame, surrounding a lot of freedom.”

“They immediately jump on certain types of infractions. Their zero-tolerance areas vary. But almost all the parents I know say that their main nonnegotiable realm is respect for others.

They’re referring to all those bonjour’s, au revoir’s, and merci’s, and also about speaking respectfully to parents or other adults. Physical aggression is another common no-go area. American kids often seem to get away with hitting their parents, even though they know they’re not supposed to.

The French adults I know don’t tolerate this at all. Bean hits me once in front of our neighbor Pascal, a bohemian fiftyish bachelor. Pascal is normally an easygoing guy, but he immediately launches into a stern lecture about how “one does not do that.” I’m awed by his sudden conviction. I can see that Bean is awed, too.

At bedtime you can really see the French balance between being very strict about a few things and very relaxed about most others. A few parents tell me that at bedtime, their kids must stay in their rooms. But within their rooms, they can do what they want.

I introduce this concept to Bean and she really likes it. She doesn’t focus on the fact that she’s confined to her room. Instead she keeps saying, proudly, “I can do whatever I want.” She usually plays or reads for a while, then puts herself to bed.

When the boys are about two and they’re sleeping in beds rather than cribs, I introduce this same principle. Since they’re sharing a room, things tend to get a bit more boisterous. I hear a lot of crashing LEGOs. Unless it sounds dangerous, however, I avoid going back in after I’ve said good night. Sometimes, if it’s getting late and they’re still going strong, I come in and tell them that it’s bedtime, and that I’m turning off the lights. They don’t seem to view this as a violation of the do-what-you-want principle. By that point they’re usually exhausted and they climb into bed.”

“Marcelli is echoing another point I’ve heard a lot in France: without limits, kids will be consumed by their own desires. (“By nature, a human being knows no limits,” Marcelli tells me.) French parents stress the cadre because they know that without boundaries, children will be overpowered by these desires. The cadre helps to contain all this inner turmoil and calm it down.

That could explain why my children are practically the only ones having tantrums in the park in Paris. A tantrum happens when a child is overwhelmed by his own desires and doesn’t know how to stop himself. The other kids are used to hearing non, and having to accept it. Mine aren’t. My “no” feels contingent and weak to them. It doesn’t stop the chain of wanting.”

Conclusion

“One day, a notice goes up at Bean’s school. It says that parents of students ages four to eleven can register their kids for a summer trip to the Hautes-Vosges, a rural region about five hours by car from Paris. The trip, sans parents, will last for eight days.”

“My friend Andi, an artist who’s lived in France for more than twenty years, says that when her older son was six she found out that he had an upcoming class trip.

“Everyone tells you how great it is, because in April there’ll be a classe verte [literally, a green class]. And you say to yourself, ‘Hmm, what’s that? Oh, a field trip. And it’s a week? It lasts a week?’” At her son’s school, the trips are optional until first grade. After that, the whole class of twenty-five kids is expected to go on a weeklong trip with the teacher each spring.”

“By accident, I often run into the caregivers from the boys’ crèche leading a group of toddlers down the street to buy the day’s baguettes. It’s not an official outing; it’s just taking a few kids for a walk. Bean has been on school trips to the zoo or to a big park on the outskirts of Paris, which I learn about only by accident weeks later (when I happen to take her to the same zoo). I am rarely asked to sign waivers. French parents don’t seem to worry that anything untoward might be happening on these trips.

When Bean has a recital for her dance class, I’m not even allowed backstage. I make sure she has a pair of white leggings, which is the only instruction that’s been communicated to parents. I never speak to the teacher. Her relationship is with Bean, not with me. When we get to the theater, I just hand Bean over to an assistant, who shuttles her backstage.”

“French kids aren’t just more independent in their extracurricular activities. They also have more autonomy in their dealings with one another. French parents seem slower to intervene in playground disputes or to mediate arguments between siblings. They expect kids to work these situations out for themselves.”

“My contractor, Régis, an earthy, roguish fellow from Burgundy, thinks I’m nuts. He says the way to “child-proof” an oven is to let the kid touch it once and realize that it’s hot. Régis refuses to install rubber floors in the bathroom, saying that they would look terrible. I concede, but only when he also mentions the apartment’s resale value. I don’t budge on the oven.”

“The French believe that kids feel confident when they’re able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don’t praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well. Sociologist Raymonde Carroll says French parents want to teach their children to verbally “defend themselves well.” She quotes an informant who says, “In France, if the child has something to say, others listen to him. But the child can’t take too much time and still retain his audience; if he delays, the family finishes his sentences for him. This gets him in the habit of formulating his ideas better before he speaks. Children learn to speak quickly, and to be interesting.”

Even when French kids do say interesting things — or just give the correct answer — French adults are decidedly understated in response. They don’t act like every job well done is an occasion to say “good job.” When I take Bean to the free health clinic for a checkup, the pediatrician asks her to do a wooden puzzle. Bean does it. The doctor looks at the finished puzzle and then does something I’m not constitutionally capable of: practically nothing. She mutters the faintest “bon” — more of a “let’s move on” than a “good” — then proceeds with the checkup.”

“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.”

“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.’

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.”

“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 comes 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.”

“In France, kids don’t have the right to open the refrigerator and take whatever they want. They have to ask their parents first. This doesn’t just cut down on the snacking in the house. It also cuts down on the chaos.”

“Yes, it’s technically possible to teach three-year-olds how to recognize words. But what’s the rush? You don’t want to take time away from teaching children the things they most need to learn at that age, like how to be organized, articulate, and empathetic. French preschools teach kids how to have conversations, finish projects, and tackle problems. In my daughter’s Parisian kindergarten class one day, the assignment was for twenty-five illiterate five-year-olds to give talks on “justice” or “courage.” When these kids are six, they’ll learn to read in much less time than it would take to teach them at three.”

“When the tantrum happens at home and goes on for too long, parents typically send the child to her room and tell her to come out when she’s calm again. “If it’s too loud I say, ‘Go yell in your room. But I understand that it makes her very angry,” the mother of a five-year-old explains. Typically, “she goes into her room and yells, then she comes back out and does what I asked,” this mom claims. If a child manages to come out calmly, parents respond positively and then everyone moves on.

In short, be calm and sympathetic without giving in.”

“The French believe that everyone is entitled to a “secret garden” —a private realm. It’s part of being an independent person. Even very involved parents accept that their children need privacy — particularly as they grow older — and will have some secrets. They don’t expect to know every detail of their children’s lives. They do expect to know that, generally, everything is okay.”

“No matter how misguided your partner’s proclamations about the household rules are, don’t contradict him in front of the kids. Wait and speak to him in private. He should do the same for you. You’ll build complicity with your spouse. And since the rules aren’t up for discussion, they’ll have more force. You’ll both seem more authoritative to the children, and they’ll be reassured by the impression that there’s something solid at the family’s core.”