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

by Pamela Druckerman

French parents are very concerned about their kids.1 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.

Jennifer, a mother and a reporter for The New York Times, complains that every activity her daughter attends, no matter how brief or at what time of day, now includes snacks.4 “Apparently we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes,” she writes.

In the 1960s, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget came to America to share his theories on the stages of children’s development. After each talk, someone in the audience typically asked him what he began calling the American Question. It was: How can we speed these stages up?

somehow, in France, this imbalance doesn’t lead to what a writer in the bestselling American anthology The Bitch in the House calls “the awful, silent process of tallying up and storing away and keeping tabs on what he helped out with and what he did not.” Frenchwomen

Partly, this is because Frenchwomen don’t expect men to be their equals. They view men as a separate species that by nature isn’t good at booking babysitters, buying tablecloths, or remembering to schedule checkups with the pediatrician. “I think Frenchwomen accept more the differences between the sexes,” says Debra Ollivier, author of What French Women Know. “I don’t think that they expect men to rise to the plate with the same kind of meticulous attention and sense of urgency.”

When the Frenchwomen I know mention their partners’ inadequacies, it’s to laugh about how adorably inept the men are. “They’re just not capable; we’re superior!” jokes Virginie, as her girlfriends chuckle. Another mother breaks into peals of laughter when she describes how her husband blow-dries her daughter’s hair without brushing it first, so the little girl goes to school “looking like Don King.”

lately Laurence has been urging her husband to go to his aikido class on Saturday mornings, since he’s more relaxed afterward. She’d rather do a bit more child care in exchange for a husband who’s cheerful and calm.

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

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