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

by Pamela Druckerman

A photo spread in Neuf Mois (Nine Months) magazine shows a heavily pregnant brunette in lacy ensembles, biting into pastries and licking jam off her finger. “During pregnancy, it’s important to pamper your inner woman,” another article says. “Above all, resist the urge to borrow your partner’s shirts.”

rub sweet almond oil on my belly to avoid stretch marks. (I do this dutifully, and get none.)

He wanted to be a dad, but he also wanted a croissant. “In the U.S. sometimes I have the feeling that if it’s not difficult for you, you have to feel bad about that,” he says.

“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.”

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.

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.

One rule on the handout was that 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.

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.

Mischel concludes that having the willpower to wait isn’t about being stoic. It’s about learning techniques that make waiting less

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 (pronounced gew-tay)—the French afternoon snack.

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.

The first is that, after the first few months, a baby should eat at roughly the same times each day. The second is that babies should have a few big feeds rather than a lot of small ones. And the third is that the baby should fit into the rhythm of the family.

Martine says that for the first few months she nursed Paulette on demand. Around the third month, to get her to wait three hours between feeds, she took her for walks or put her in a sling, where Paulette would usually quickly stop crying.

In one of the centennial tributes to Dolto, a French psychoanalyst summed up Dolto’s teachings this way: “Human beings speak to other human beings. Some of them are big, some of them are small. But they communicate.”

Everyone believes that for the cadre to seem immutable, it has to be consistent. “The prohibitions are always consistent,

and we always give a reason for them,” Sylvie tells me.

“You start thinking: This kid’s doing all that stuff. How is my kid going to compete? And then you have to check yourself and say: That’s not the point. We don’t want him competing with someone like that.”

In France, there’s an expression for mothers who spend all their free time schlepping their kids around: maman-taxi. This isn’t a compliment. Nathalie, a Parisian architect, tells me that she hires a babysitter to bring her three kids to all their activities on Saturday mornings. She and her husband go out to lunch. “When I’m there I give them 100 percent, but when I’m off, I’m off,” Nathalie tells me.

The phrase has become a kind of verbal tic. Emily says “I’m a bad mother” so often that, though it sounds negative, I realize that she must find the phrase soothing. For American mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the Internet or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things.

The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt. To the contrary, they consider it unhealthy and unpleasant, and they try to banish it.

“I’m not forcing her to finish, just to taste everything and sit with us.”

His favorite paradox is that in order for parents to have authority, they should say yes most of the time. “If you always forbid, you’re authoritarian,” Marcelli tells me, over coffee and chocolates. He says the main point of parental authority is to authorize children to do things, not to block them.

In Dolto’s view, by the time a child is six years old, he should be able to do everything in the house—and in society—that concerns him.1