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

by Pamela Druckerman

In another study, of college-educated mothers in the United States and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.5 Parents who value this ability are probably more apt to leave a child alone when he’s playing well by himself.

“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.”

Indeed, an enormous U.S. government study of the effects of child care6 found that what’s especially crucial is the mother’s or caregiver’s “sensitivity”—how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world. “The sensitive mother is aware of the child’s needs, moods, interests, and capabilities,” a backgrounder explains. “She allows this awareness to guide her interactions with her child.” Conversely, having a depressed mother is very bad, because the depression stops the mother from tuning in to her child.

Mischel’s conviction about the importance of sensitivity doesn’t just come from research. He says that his own mother was alternately smothering and absent. Mischel still can’t ride a bike, because she was too afraid of head injuries to let him learn. But neither of his parents ca...

It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce those limits. But within those limits, the kids have a lot of freedom.

The message is that children will always have the impulse to give in to their vices. But they’re happier when they’re sage and in command of themselves.

“If kids have the experience that when they’re told to wait, that if they scream, Mommy will come and the wait will be over, they will very quickly learn not to wait. Non-waiting and screaming and carrying on and whining are being rewarded.”

French parents delight in the fact that each child has his own temperament.

A French psychologist writes8 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!”)

French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them. To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration.

They also treat coping with frustration as a core life skill. Their kids simply have to learn it.

Laurence, the nanny, says that if a child wants her to pick him up while she’s cooking, “It’s enough to explain to him, ‘I can’t pick you...

A French child psychiatrist writes that this éducation should begin when a baby is three to six months old. “His mother begins to make him wait a bit sometimes, thus introducing a temporal dimension into his spirit. It’s thanks to these little frustrations that his parents impose on him day after day, along with their love, that lets him withstand, and allows him to renounce, between ages two and four, his all-powerfulness, in order to humanize him. This renunciation is not always loud, but it’s an obligatory passage.”9

“As small children you have needs and desires that basically have no ending. This is a very basic thing. The parents are there—that’s why you have frustration—to stop that [process],”

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.

The Schedule. It’s the same one again: morning, noon, four P.M., and eight P.M.

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So what are we all doing here? He says the point of these sessions is for children to discover the water, and to awaken to the sensations of being in

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.”

Rousseau thought children should be given space to let their development unfold naturally. He said Émile should be “taken daily to the middle of a field; there let him run and frisk about; let him fall a hundred times a day.”

He imagined a child who is free to explore and discover the world and let his senses gradually “awaken.”

Awakening is a kind of training for children in how to profiter—to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment.

“Why would you want to do that?” Anne asks. “There are so few years to just be a child.”

On the one hand, there’s the frolicking in the fields (or the pool). But on the other hand, there’s quite strict discipline. Rousseau says that a child’s freedom should be bound by firm limits and strong parental authority.

“Do you know the surest means of making your child miserable?” he writes. “It is to accustom him to getting everything. Since his desires grow constantly due to the ease of satisfying them, sooner or later powerlessness will force you, in spite of yourself, to end up with a refusal. And this unaccustomed refusal will give him more torment than being deprived of what he desires.”

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...

“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.

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,”

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the American psychologist and philosopher William James said that to an infant, the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Well into the twentieth century, it was taken for granted that children only slowly begin understanding the world and the fact of their own presence in it.

But if you accept that children are rational as a first principle—as French society does—then many things begin to shift. If babies understand what you’re saying to them, then you can teach them quite a lot, even while they’re very young. That includes, for example, how to eat in a restaurant.

Dolto always maintained an unusually lucid memory of how she had seen the world as a child. She rejected the prevailing view that children should be treated as a collection of physical symptoms. (At the time, bed wetters were still attached to “peepee-stops” that released electric shocks.) Instead, she spoke to children about their lives and assumed that many of their physical symptoms had psychological origins. “And you, what do you think?” she would ask her young patients.

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.

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.

In fact, she thought that babies begin eavesdropping on adult conversations—and intuiting the problems and conflicts swirling around them—from the womb.

Turkle writes that what a child most needs, according to Dolto, is “a structured inner life able to support autonomy and further growth.”

“I’m very much in favor of speech and language with children, even the smallest ones. They understand. For me, they understand.”

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.10 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.

But middle-class French parents—architects, doctors, fellow journalists—are clawing past one another to get a spot in their neighborhood crèche, which is open five days a week, usually from eight to six.

They are often right to worry, since the quality of American day care is extremely uneven. There are no national regulations. Some states don’t require caregivers to have any training.

“Everything is very encadré—built into a framework—the hour that they arrive and leave, for example. But inside this framework we try to introduce flexibility, fluidity and spontaneity, for the children and also for the [teaching] team.”

“For the moment I’m not free. You wait two seconds,” Mehrie says gently to the little girl. Then she turns to me and explains: “We try to teach them to wait, it’s very important. They can’t have everything right away.”

The caregivers speak calmly and respectfully to the kids, using the language of rights: you have the right to do this; you don’t have the right to do that.

They’re understandably anxious. Of the more than five hundred people who sit for this test, just thirty will be admitted to the training school. Applicants are grilled on reasoning, reading comprehension, math, and human biology. Those who advance to the second round face a psychological exam, an oral presentation, and interrogation by a panel of experts.

The thirty winners then do a year of coursework and internships, following a curriculum set by the government. They learn the basics of child nutrition, sleep, and hygiene, and practice mixing baby formula and changing diapers. They’ll do additional weeklong trainings throughout their careers.

During nearly three years that Bean is at the crèche, they potty-train her, teach her table manners, and give her a French immersion course. By Bean’s third year at the crèche, I suspect that the days are starting to feel long and that perhaps she’s not being stimulated enough.

Parenting quality is a much more important predictor of child development than type, quantity or quality of child care,” explains a backgrounder. Children fared better when their parents were more educated and wealthier, when they had books and play materials at home, and when they had “enhancing experiences” like going to the library. This was the same whether the child went to day care for thirty or more hours a week, or had a stay-at-home mother.

And as I mentioned earlier, the study found that what’s especially crucial is the mother’s “sensitivity”—how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world. This is also true at day care. One of the study’s researchers8 writes that kids get “high-quality” day care when the caregiver is “attentive to [the child’s] needs, responsive to her verbal and non-verbal signals and cues, stimulating of his curiosity and desire to learn about the world, and emotionally warm, supportive and caring.”