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July 30 - August 2, 2022
It turns out that to be a different kind of parent, you don’t just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.
To be fair, I’m starting to think that it’s not Paris, it’s me. New York likes its women a bit neurotic.
Despite having nothing more serious than boy troubles, many of my friends in New York were spending more on therapy than on rent.
If New York is about the woman who’s ruminating about her past screwups and fumbling to find herself, Paris is about the one who—at least outwardly—regrets nothing. In France “neurotic” isn’t a self-deprecating half boast; it’s a clinical condition.
“Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.”
He acquires languages the way I acquire shoes.
The only question strangers ask when they notice my belly is, “Are you waiting for a child?” It takes me a while to realize that they don’t think I have a lunch date with a truant six-year-old. It’s French for “Are you pregnant?”
Despite my qualms about Paris, there’s something nice about being pregnant in a place where I’m practically immune to other people’s judgments.
The point in France isn’t that anything goes. It’s that women should be calm and sensible.
“In the U.S. sometimes I have the feeling that if it’s not difficult for you, you have to feel bad about that,”
“The baby understands that?” I ask. “Of course he understands that,” she says. “How can he understand that?” “Because babies understand everything.”
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.
Saying “sois sage” is a bit like saying “be good.”
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.
“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.”
Setting limits for kids isn’t a French invention, of course. Plenty of American parents and experts also think limits are very important. But in the United States, this runs up against the competing idea that kids need to express themselves.
making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustration turns them into happier, more resilient people. And one of the main ways to gently induce frustration, on a daily basis, is to make children wait a bit. As with The Pause as a sleep strategy, French parents have homed in on this one thing. They treat waiting not just as one important skill among many but as a cornerstone of raising kids.
Rather, Dolto insisted that the content of what you say to a baby matters tremendously. She said it was crucial that parents tell their babies the truth in order to gently affirm what the babies already know.
The very words “day care” conjure images of pedophiles and howling babies in dirty, dimly lit rooms. “I want him to have a little more individual attention” is a euphemism for, “Unlike you, I actually love my child and don’t want to institutionalize him.”
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.”1
“We propose, we don’t force,”
Granted, I’m in the middle of Paris, surely one of the world’s least friendly places. The sneer was probably invented here. Even people from the rest of France tell me that they find Parisians cold and distant.
After the baby is born, the first obvious difference between French and American moms is breastfeeding. For us Anglophone mothers, the length of time that we breastfeed—like the size of a Wall Street bonus—is a measure of performance.
The fact that breastfeeding requires endurance, inconvenience, and in some cases physical suffering only increases its status.
Before I delivered Bean, one of them warned me never to hand over my baby to the hospital staff while I slept, lest they defy my instructions and give her a bottle when she cried. This woman made “nipple confusion” sound scarier than autism.
Hélène, the engineer with three kids, says that she’d really prefer not to work and to rely on her husband’s salary. But she won’t quit. “Husbands can disappear,” she explains.
Anyway, she adds, reassuring both of us, “The perfect mother doesn’t exist.”
“If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child,”
For the girls, I thought it was good to have a mother in love.”
As Bean’s French improves, she’s starting to bring home not just unfamiliar expressions but also new ideas and rules. Her new language is making her into not just a French speaker but into a French person. And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. I’m not even sure what a “French person” is.
The other Anglophone kids we know in Paris all have their own accents. Bean’s friend with a dad from New Zealand and a mother who’s half-Irish sounds full-on British. A boy with a Parisian mother and a Californian dad sounds like a French chef from 1970s American television. The little boy around the corner with a Farsi-speaking father and an Australian mom just sounds like a creaky Muppet.
In English, you wouldn’t tell a child that he’s committed a “small act of naughtiness.” We tend to label the kid rather than the crime,
In the English-speaking world, every problem seems to have a solution, and prosperity is just around the corner.
The message is that endings don’t have to be tidy to be happy.
Writer Debra Ollivier 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.”
I get to know a few people who grew up in France with American parents. When I ask whether they feel French or American, they almost all say that it depends on the context. They feel American when they’re in France and French when they’re in America.
Their unhappiness seems like normal unhappiness. No matter how much I dig, I don’t find rage.
“no smells or tastes are innately repulsive, and what’s learned can be forgot.”
For the French, “eating means sitting at the table with others, taking one’s time and not doing other things at the same time.” Whereas for Americans, “health is seen as the main reason for eating.”
If overparenting was an airline, Park Slope, Brooklyn, would be its hub.
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.
In theory, we believe that kids need limits. This is a truism of American parenting. However, in practice, we’re often unsure where these limits should be or we’re uncomfortable policing them.
“We have a saying in French: it’s easier to loosen the screw than to tighten the screw,
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.
“Submission demeans,” Marcelli explains. “Whereas obedience allows a child to grow up.”
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.
