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

by Pamela Druckerman

American women claim—that the fetus wants cheese-cake. The Guidebook for Mothers to Be, a French pregnancy book, says that instead of caving in to cravings, women should distract their bodies by eating an apple or a raw carrot.

in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night.

“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.

before letting a baby cry it out, it’s crucial to explain to him what you’re about to do.

the good delayers were better at concentrating

and reasoning. And according to a report that Mischel and his colleagues published in 1988, they “do not tend to go to pieces under stress.”

the secret of why French kids rarely whine or collapse into tantrums—or at least do so less than American kids—is that they’ve developed the internal resources to cope with frustration. They don’t expect to get what they want instantly.

“The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,”

In the book Un enfant heureux (A Happy Child) French psychologist Didier Pleux argues that the best way to make a child happy is to frustrate him.

It’s simply that the child must learn, from a very young age, that he’s not alone in the world, and that there’s a time for everything.”

“he can’t have everything right away. It’s essential not to leave him thinking that he is all-powerful,

and that he can do everything and have everything.”

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 damag...

“If you are busy with one child and another child wants you, if you can pick him up obviously you do. But if not, I let him cry.”

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.

to an infant, the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

“sage comme une image” (quiet as a picture), the equivalent of the old English dictum that children should be seen but not heard.

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.

“The child who has an unusual reaction always has a reason for having it. . . . Our task is to understand what has happened,”

“We propose, we don’t force,”

“We try to teach them to wait, it’s very important. They can’t have everything right away.”

France ranks about six points above the developed-country average in UNICEF’s overall health-and-safety ranking, which includes infant mortality, immunization rates until age two, and deaths from accidents and injury up to age nineteen. The United States ranks about eighteen points below the average.

“If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child,”

“What happens to the child if he’s the only hope for his mother? I think this is the opinion of all psychoanalysts.”

Studies show that parents have higher rates of depression and that their unhappiness increases with each additional child3

It says that today’s young parents tend to “give up all their freedom and all their former pleasures, not as a matter of practicality but as a matter of principle.”

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.

There’s the national paid maternity leave (the United States has none), the subsidized nannies and crèches, the free universal preschool from age three, and myriad tax credits and payments for having kids.

it does ensure that Frenchwomen can have both a career and kids.

they should react neutrally if the child won’t eat something. “If you don’t react too much to his refusal, your child will truly abandon this behavior,”

By five years old, sitting calmly at the table for any kind of eating is an automatic reflex for French kids. There’s no question of eating on the couch,

We mostly stick to the French formula of having large, protein-heavy lunches and lighter, carbohydrate-driven dinners with vegetables.

This idea that you’re teaching, not policing, makes the tone a lot gentler in France.

When Americans describe someone as strict, they typically mean that the person has an all-encompassing authority.

they’re very strict about a few things and pretty relaxed about everything else. That’s the cadre model: a firm frame, surrounding a lot of freedom.

the main point of parental authority is to authorize children to do things, not to block them.

Parents “should only forbid him every once in a while . . . because it’s fragile or dangerous. But fundamentally, [the parent’s job] is to teach the child to ask before taking.”

“The sign of a successful education is to teach a child to obey until he can freely authorize himself to disobey from time to time. Because can one learn to disobey certain orders if one has not learned to obey?

without limits, kids will be consumed by their own desires. (“By nature, a human being knows no limits,”

A tantrum happens when a child is overwhelmed by his own desires and doesn’t know how to stop himself.

“The most important thing is that a child will be, in full security, autonomous as early as possible,”

the way to “childproof” an oven is to let the kid touch it once and realize that it’s hot.

“excessive praise . . . distorts children’s motivations; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of the intrinsic enjoyment.”

a child who sleeps poorly can become hyperactive and irritable, have trouble learning and remembering things, and have more accidents.

It turns out that if the child doesn’t snack much, she’s hungry by mealtimes, so she eats more.

You Choose the Foods, She Chooses the Quantities