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

by Pamela Druckerman

“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.

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

This is exactly what I’ve been seeing French parents doing. They don’t explicitly teach their kids distraction techniques. Mostly, they just seem to give them lots of opportunities to practice waiting.

It’s not just what and when French families eat that make their meals little capsules of patience training. It’s also how they eat, and with whom. From a very young age, French kids get used to eating meals in courses, with—at a minimum—a starter, a main course, and a dessert. They also get used to eating with their parents, which has to be better for learning patience. 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.

A child who can play by himself can draw upon this skill when his mother is on the phone. And it’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. 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.

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.

“It’s important to reassure him, and to talk to him about this new food,” it says. The conversation about food should go beyond “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” They suggest showing kids a vegetable and asking, “Do you think this is crunchy, and that it’ll make a sound when you bite it? What does this flavor remind you of? What do you feel in your mouth?” They suggest playing flavor games like offering different types of apples and having the child decide which is the sweetest and which is the most acidic. In another game, the parent blindfolds the child and has him eat and identify foods he already knows.

Steingarten’s experiment sums up the French approach to feeding kids: if you keep trying things, you eventually come around to liking most of them.

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. They even have their own secrets.

34. Keep Foods in the Rotation Even if a certain food isn’t a hit, make sure it keeps coming back. Put broccoli in soup, melt some cheese on it, or stir-fry it. Broccoli might never be your daughter’s favorite food. But with each taste, it will get closer to becoming part of her repertoire. She’ll come to regard it as normal. Once it’s solidly established, keep it in the mix. Ultimately, your child won’t love all foods. But she’ll give each one a chance.

42. Eat Chocolate Don’t treat candy like it’s kryptonite or try to pretend that refined sugar doesn’t exist. That will just make kids more likely to go overboard when they finally get their hands on some. Instead, teach them that sweets are occasional pleasures to enjoy in controlled doses. French kids eat small helpings of chocolate or cookies on a regular basis, usually at the afternoon goûter. They often eat cake on weekends, just not too much. On birthdays and at school parties, parents tend to give kids free rein. We all need some time away from the regular rules.