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April 16 - June 19, 2023
French parents seem to vacillate between being extremely strict and shockingly permissive.
On the one hand, middle-class French parents have values that look very familiar to me. Parisian parents are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature, and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes, and interactive science museums. Yet 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.”
When I ask French parents how they discipline their children, it takes them a few beats just to understand what I mean. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they ask. “Discipline,” I soon realize, is a narrow, seldom-used category that deals with punishment.
Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagine themselves to be doing all the time.
Within a few hours of meeting him, I realized that “love at first sight” just means feeling immediately and extremely calm with someone.
To be fair, I’m starting to think that it’s not Paris, it’s me. New York likes its women a bit neurotic. They’re encouraged to create a brainy, adorable, conflicted bustle around themselves—à la Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Despite having nothing more serious than boy troubles, many of my friends in New York were spending more on therapy than on rent. That persona doesn’t fly in Paris. The French do like Woody Allen’s movies. But in real life, the ideal Parisian woman is calm, discreet, a bit remote, and extremely decisive.
She orders from the menu. She doesn’t blather on about her childhood or her diet. 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.
The Americans I know also believe that pregnancy—and then motherhood—comes with homework. The first assignment is choosing from among myriad parenting styles. Everyone I speak to swears by different books. I buy many of them. But instead of making me feel more prepared, having so much conflicting advice makes babies themselves seem enigmatic and unknowable.
Who they are, and what they need, seems to depend on which book you read.
Someone tells me that Jane Birkin, the British actress and model who built a career in Paris and married the legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg, could never remember whether it was “un baguette” or “une baguette,” so she would just order “deux baguettes” (two baguettes). I can’t find the quote. But whenever I go to the bakery, I follow this strategy. Then—surely unlike the twiggy Birkin—I eat them both.
I am waiting for a child. It’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever done.
For starters, they don’t treat pregnancy like an independent research project. 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.
The infant mortality rate is 57 percent lower in France than it is in America.
This French norm is strictly codified. 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.)
I’ve read that babies look like their fathers when they’re born, to assure the dads of their paternity and motivate them to go out hunting (or investment banking) for the family. My first thought when our daughter comes out is that she doesn’t merely resemble Simon; she has his face.
stay in the hospital for six days, which is standard French practice. I see no reason to leave.
“Is she doing her nights?” (Elle fait ses nuits?) This is the first time I hear the French formulation of “Is she sleeping through the night?” At first I find it comforting. If they’re her nights, then she’ll inevitably claim them. Whereas if they’re just the nights, she might not.
Simon’s forward-looking view of the world suddenly seems like a curse: he’s thrown into a nightly depression, convinced that this is going to last forever.
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. “We believe a lot in le feeling,” Vincent says, using the English word. “We guess that children understand things.”
And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully “observed” their babies, and then followed the babies’ own “rhythms.”
“Sleep reveals the child and the life of the family,” De Leersnyder writes. “To go to bed and fall asleep, to separate himself from his parents for a few hours, the child must trust his body to keep him alive, even when he’s not in control of it. And he must be serene enough to approach the strangeness of pensée de la nuit (thoughts that come in the night).”
His practice, Tribeca Pediatrics, has expanded to five locations. And he’s published a pithy parenting book called The New Basics with his picture on the cover.
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.
“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.
Most say they started doing The Pause when their babies were a few weeks old.
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.
It’s suddenly clear to me that Alison, the marketing expert whose son fed every two hours for six months, wasn’t handed a baby with weird sleep needs. She unwittingly taught him to need a feed at the end of every two-hour sleep cycle. Alison wasn’t just catering to her son’s demands. Despite her best intentions, she was creating those demands.
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.
The study says there’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggressiveness, hyperactivity, and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things.
In Paris, crying it out has a French twist. I start to realize this when I meet Laurence, a nanny from Normandy who’s working for a French family in Montparnasse. Laurence has been looking after babies for two decades. She tells me that before letting a baby cry it out, it’s crucial to explain to him what you’re about to do. Laurence walks me through this: “In the evening, you speak to him. You tell him that, if he wakes up once, you’re going to give him his pacifier once. But after that, you’re not going to get up. It’s time to sleep. You’re not far away, and you’re going to come in and
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Laurence adds that a crucial part of getting a baby to do his nights, at any age, is to truly believe that he’s going to do it. “If you don’t believe it, it’s not going to work,” she says. “Me, I always think that the child is going to sleep better the next night. I always have hope, even if he wakes up three hours later. You have to believe.”
The French don’t believe that babies should withstand biblical-sized trials. But they also don’t think that a bit of frustration will crush kids. To the contrary, they believe it will make children more secure. According to Sleep, Dreams and the Child, “to always respond to his demands, and never tell him ‘no,’ is dangerous for the construction of his personality. Because the child won’t have any barrier to push up against, to know what’s expected of him.”
For the French, teaching a small baby to sleep isn’t a self-serving strategy for lazy parents. It’s a crucial first lesson for children in self-reliance and enjoying one’s own company.
On the third night, Simon and I both wake up to silence at two A.M. “I think she was waking up for us,” Simon says. “She thought that we needed her to do it.”
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.
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?
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.
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.”
In America, he says, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.”
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
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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 frustrating.
“There are many many ways of doing that, of which the most direct and the simplest . . . is to self-distract,” he says.
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.
In France the goûter is the official, and only, snack time. It’s usually at about four thirty P.M.,
According to UNICEF, 90 percent of French fifteen-year-olds eat the main meal of the day with their parents several times per week. In the United States and the United Kingdom, it’s about 67 percent.
When Paulette tries to interrupt our conversation, Martine says, “Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.” It’s both very polite and very
