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

by Pamela Druckerman

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.

Just as stories of terrible sleepers are easy to find among Americans, stories of spectacular sleepers are easy to find among the French.

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.

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.

Wow! Parents teach their babies to wake up several times throughout the night because they jump to pick them up right away instead of pausing and observing if the baby will fall back to sleep first.

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. They are more prone to accidents, their metabolic and immune functions are weakened, and their overall quality of life diminishes.

Parents just don’t see how kids can fully absorb these experiences if they don’t have patience. In the French view, having the self-control to be calmly present, rather than anxious, irritable, and demanding, is what allows kids to have fun.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“Thus the child understands that he is not the center of the world, and this is essential for his development,”

“The kids need to understand that they’re not the center of attention. They need to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them.”

“The more spoiled a child is, the more unhappy he is,”

“Submission demeans,” Marcelli explains. “Whereas obedience allows a child to grow up.”

And if kids are assured of praise for whatever they do, then they won’t need to try very hard. They’ll be praised anyway.

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

French parents to a great extent believe that babies are rational, that you should combine a little bit of strictness with a lot of freedom, and that you should listen carefully to children but not do everything they say.

In France, children don’t decide what they’ll have for dinner. There are no choices or customizations. There’s just one meal, the same one for everyone.