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

by Pamela Druckerman

Françoise Dolto, the patron saint of French parenting. Dolto very clearly argued for leaving a child alone, safely, to muddle about and figure things out for herself.

kids aren’t taught to read in maternelle, which lasts until the year they turn six. They just learn letters, sounds, and how to write their own names. I’m told that some kids pick up reading on their own, though I couldn’t say which ones, since their parents don’t mention it. Learning to read isn’t part of the French curriculum until the equivalent of first grade, the year that kids turn seven.

much more important for children to learn social skills, how to organize their thoughts, and how to speak well.

Florence, forty-two, with three kids ages three to six, tells me that on weekend mornings, “the kids don’t have the right to enter our room until we open the door.” Until then, miraculously, they’ve learned to play by themselves.

“One of the great feelings of a couple and of marriage is gratitude to the person who hasn’t left,” says Pascal Bruckner,

“Instead of just being firm and saying, ‘No more of that, I’m not giving you more attention, this is bedtime, and this is parents’ time, now it’s my time as an adult with my friends, you’ve had your time, this is our time. And go to bed, that’s it,’—well, they don’t do that.

“Sometimes there are things in life you don’t really like, and you have to do them,” he says. “You don’t always do what you love or what you want to.”

American parents like me often view imposing authority in terms of discipline and punishment.

Instead, they talk about the éducation of kids. As the word suggests, this is about gradually teaching children what’s acceptable and what’s not.

They mean that 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. “We should leave the child as free as possible, without imposing useless rules on him,” Françoise Dolto says in The Major Stages of Childhood. “We should leave him only the cadre of rules that are essential for his security. And he’ll understand from experience, when he tries to transgress, that they are essential, and that we don’t do anything just to bother him.” In other words, being strict about a few key things makes parents seem more reasonable and thus makes it more likely that children will obey.