I suddenly look around and realize that all those parents at the meeting knew that they were signing up for their kid to merely ‘discover’ and ‘awaken’ to the water, not to learn how to swim. Do their kids ‘discover’ the piano too, instead of learning how to play it?
French parents aren’t just doing a few things differently. They have a whole different view of how kids learn, and of who they are. I don’t just have a swimming-class problem; I seem to have a philosophical problem too.
In the 1960s, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget came to America to share his theories on the stages of children’s development. After each talk, someone in the audience typically asked him what he began calling the American Question. It was: ‘How can we speed these stages up?’
Piaget’s answer was: ‘Why would you want to do that?’ He didn’t think that pushing kids to acquire skills ahead of schedule was either possible or desirable. He believed that children reach these milestones at their own speeds, driven by their own inner motors.
The American question (I think it’s fair to assume that these days it’s a British question too) sums up an essential difference between French and Anglophone parents. We assign ourselves the job of pushing, stimulating and urging our kids from one developmental stage to the next. The better we are at parenting, we think, the faster our kids will move up. In my Anglophone playgroup in Paris, some of the mothers flaunt the fact that their kids take music classes, or that they go to a separate Portuguese-speaking playgroup. But often they don’t reveal too many details about these activities, so that no one else’s child can do them. These mothers would never admit that there’s competition between us, but it is palpable.
‘When every other helicopter parent is hovering anxiously over their offspring – encouraging them, guiding them and, yes, occasionally pushing them – it feels like a dereliction of duty not to do the same,’ a mother writes in the Telegraph.1
French parents just don’t seem so anxious for their kids to get ahead. They don’t push them to read, swim or do maths ahead of schedule. They aren’t trying to prod them into becoming prodigies. I don’t get the feeling that – surreptitiously or otherwise – we’re all in a race for some unnamed prize. They do sign their kids up for tennis, fencing and English lessons. But they don’t parade these activities as proof of what good parents they are. Nor do they hide the classes, like they’re some sort of secret weapon. 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’.
French parents have a different view of what the nature of a child is. When I start to read about this view, I keep coming across two people who lived 200 years apart: the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a French woman I had never previously heard of called Françoise Dolto. They’re the two great influences on French parenting. And their spirits are very much alive in France today.
The modern French idea of how to parent starts with Rousseau. The philosopher wasn’t much of a parent himself (or, like Piaget, even born French). He was born in Geneva in 1712, and didn’t have an ideal childhood. His mother died ten days after he was born. His only sibling, an older brother, ran away from home. Later his father, a watchmaker, fled Geneva because of a business dispute, leaving Jean-Jacques behind with an uncle. Rousseau abandoned his own children to orphanages soon after they were born. He said this was to protect the honour of their mother, a former seamstress whom he’d hired as a servant in Paris.
None of this stopped Rousseau from publishing Émile, or On Education, in 1762. It describes the education of a fictional boy named Émile (who will, after puberty, meet the lovely and equally fictional Sophie). The German philosopher Immanuel Kant later compared the book’s significance to that of the French Revolution. It remains a classic; French friends tell me they read it in high school. Émile’s impact is so enduring that passages and catchphrases from it are modern-day parenting clichés, like the importance of ‘awakening’. And French parents still take many of its precepts for granted.
Émile was published during a dire time for French parenting. A Parisian police official estimated that of the 21,000 babies born in Paris in 1780, 19,000 were sent to live with wet nurses as far away as Normandy or Burgundy.2 Some of these newborns died en route, bouncing around in the back of cold wagons. Many others died in the care of the poorly paid, overburdened wet nurses, who took on too many babies and often kept them tightly swaddled for long periods, supposedly to keep them from hurting themselves.
For working parents, wet nurses were an economic choice; it was cheaper to pay a nurse than to hire someone to replace the mother in the family shop.3 For upper-class mothers, however, it was a lifestyle choice. There was social pressure to be free to enjoy a sophisticated social life. The child ‘interferes not just in his mother’s married life, but also in her pleasures’, writes a French social historian.4 ‘Taking care of a child was neither amusing, nor chic.’
Rousseau tried to upend all of this with Émile. He urged mothers to breastfeed their own babies. He decried swaddling, ‘padded bonnets’ and ‘leading strings’, the child-safety devices of his day. ‘Far from being attentive to protecting Émile from injury, I would be most distressed if he were never hurt and grew up without knowing pain,’ Rousseau wrote. ‘If he grabs a knife he will hardly tighten his grip and will not cut himself very deeply.’
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’. ‘In the morning let Émile run barefoot in all seasons,’ he wrote. He allows the fictional boy to read just a single book: Robinson Crusoe.
Until I read Émile, I was mystified by all the talk among French parents and educators about letting children ‘awaken’ and ‘discover’. One of the teachers at Bean’s crèche gushed at the parents’ meeting that the kids go to a local gymnasium on Thursday mornings not to exercise but to ‘discover’ their bodies. The nursery’s mission statement says that kids should ‘discover the world, in pleasure and gaiety . . .’ Another centre near by is simply called Enfance et Découverte – Childhood and Discovery. The highest compliment anyone seems to pay a baby in France is that he is ‘éveillé’ – alert and awakened. Unlike in America, this isn’t a euphemism for ‘ugly’.
Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn’t always require the parent’s active involvement. It can come from staring at the sky, smelling dinner as it’s being prepared, or letting him play alone on a blanket. It’s a way of sharpening the child’s senses and preparing him to discern between different experiences. It’s the first step towards teaching him to be a cultivated, discerning adult.
I’m in favour of all this awakening, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I’m just puzzled by the emphasis. We Anglophone parents – as Piaget discovered – tend to be more interested in having kids acquire concrete skills and reach developmental milestones.
And we tend to think that how well and how quickly kids advance depends on what their parents do. That means that parents’ choices and the quality of their intervention are crucial. In this light, baby sign language, pre-reading strategies, and picking the right nursery understandably seem critically important. So does the never-ending search for parenting experts and advice.
I see this cultural difference in my little Parisian courtyard. Bean’s room is filled with black-and-white flash cards, baby blocks with the ABC printed on them, and the Baby Einstein DVDs that we’ve gladly received as gifts from English-speaking friends and family. We play Mozart as background music constantly, because we’ve heard it will make her smarter.
But my French neighbour Anne, the architect, had never heard of Baby Eins
tein. She wasn’t interested when I told her about it. Anne liked to let her little girl sit and play with old toys bought at jumble sales, or meander around our shared courtyard.
I later mention to Anne that there is an opening at our local nursery school. Bean could start a year early. This would mean taking her out of her crèche, where she is one of the oldest kids, and where I fear she isn’t being sufficiently challenged.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ Anne asks. ‘There are so few years to just be a child.’
The University of Texas study found that with all this awakening, French mothers aren’t trying to help their kids’ cognitive development or make them advance in school. Rather, they believe that awakening will help their kids forge ‘inner psychological qualities such as self-assurance and tolerance of difference’. Others believed in exposing children to a variety of tastes, colours and sights, simply because doing so gives the children pleasure.5
This pleasure is ‘the motivation for life’, one of the mothers said. ‘If we didn’t have pleasure, we wouldn’t have any reason to live.’
In the twenty-first-century Paris of parents and children that I inhabit, Rousseau’s legacy takes two apparently contradictory forms. 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 the 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 between you and him as to which of the two will be the master.’
For him, the only possible master is the parent. It seems clear that Rousseau is the inspiration behind the cadre – or framework – that is the model for today’s French parents. The ideal of the cadre is that parents are very strict about certain things, but very relaxed about almost everything else.
Fanny, the publisher with two young children, tells me that before she even had kids, she heard a well-known French actor on the radio talking about being a parent. He put her ideas about the cadre – and the way she herself was brought up – into words.
‘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.’
Almost all the French parents I meet describe themselves as ‘strict’. This doesn’t mean that they’re constantly ogres. It means that, like Fanny, they are very strict about a few key areas. These things are the backbone of the cadre.
‘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 back. I rarely let these go.’
For Fanny, these areas are eating, sleeping and watching TV. ‘For all the rest she can do what she wants,’ she tells me. Even within these key areas, Fanny tries to give her daughter 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, OK. 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 the child in; it’s to create a world that’s predictable and coherent to her. ‘You need that cadre or I think you get lost,’ Fanny says. ‘It gives you confidence. You have confidence in your kid, and your kid feels it.’
The cadre feels enlightened and empowering for kids. But Rousseau’s legacy has a darker side too. When I take Bean to get her first inoculations, I cradle her in my arms and apologize to her for the pain she’s about to experience. The French paediatrician scolds me.
‘You don’t say, “I’m sorry,”’ he says. ‘Getting injections, and experiencing pain, is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.’ He seems to be channelling Rousseau, who said, ‘If by too much care you spare them every kind of discomfort, you are preparing great miseries for them.’ (I’m not sure what Rousseau thought about suppositories.)
Rousseau wasn’t sentimental about children. He wanted to make good citizens out of impressionable lumps of clay. Many thinkers continued to view babies as tabulae rasae – blank slates – for hundreds of years. 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.
In France, the idea that kids are second-class beings and only gradually gain status persisted into the 1960s. I’ve met French men and women now in their forties who, as children, weren’t allowed to speak at the dinner table unless they were first addressed by an adult. Children were often expected to be ‘sage comme une image’ – quiet as a picture, the equivalent of the old English dictum that children should be ‘seen but not heard’.
This conception of children began changing in France in the late 1960s, and came to a head after the 1968 student protests, which led to a general strike. What many people really wanted was a whole different way of life. France’s religious, socially conservative, male-dominated society, in place for centuries, suddenly seemed dated. The protesters envisioned a kind of personal liberation that included different life options for women, less of a rigid class hierarchy, and a daily existence that wasn’t just about ‘Métro, boulot, dodo’ – commute, work, sleep. Eventually the French government broke up the protests, sometimes violently. But the revolt had a profound impact on French society. (France is now, for example, one of the least religious countries in Europe.)
The authoritarian model of parenting was a casualty of 1968 too. If everyone was equal, why couldn’t children speak at dinner? The pure Rousseauian model – children as blank slates and obedient subjects – didn’t suit France’s newly emancipated society. And the French were fascinated by psychoanalysis. It suddenly seemed that by shutting kids up, parents might be screwing them up too.
French kids were still expected to be well behaved and to control themselves, but gradually after 1968 they were encouraged to express themselves too. The young French parents I know often use sage to mean self-controlled, but also happily absorbed in an activity. ‘Before it was “sage like a picture”. Now it’s “sage and awakened”, explained the French psychologist and writer Maryse Vaillant, herself a member of the famous ‘Generation of ’68’.
Into this generational upheaval walked Françoise Dolto. Dolto is the other titan of French parenting. French people I speak to – even those without kids – can’t believe that Anglophones haven’t heard of Françoise Dolto, or that only one of her books has ever been translated into English (it’s long out of print).
In France, Dolto is a household name, a bit like Dr Spock used to be in America. The centenary of her birth was celebrated in 2008 with a flood of articles, tributes, and even a made-for-TV movie about her life. UNESCO convened a three-day conference in Paris on Dolto. Her books are for sale in practically every French bookshop.
In the mid-1970s, Dolto was in her mid-sixties and already the most famous psychoanalyst and paediatrician in France. Then, in 1976, a French radio station began broadcasting daily twelve-minute programmes in which Dolto responded to listeners’ letters about parenting. ‘Nobody imagined the immediate and lasting success of the programme,’ recalled Jacques Pradel, th
en the programme’s 27-year-old host. He describes her responses to readers’ questions as ‘brilliance bordering on premonition’. ‘I don’t know where she got her answers,’6 he says.
When I watch film clips of Dolto from that period, I can see why she appealed to anxious parents. With her thick glasses and matronly outfits, she had the bearing of a wise grandmother. (The famous person she most resembles is Golda Meir.) And like her American counterpart Dr Spock, Dolto had the gift of making everything she said – even her more outrageous claims – sound like common sense.
Dolto may have looked like everyone’s grand-mère, but her message about how to treat kids was deliciously radical, and fitting for the new times. In a sort of emancipation of babies, she claimed that children are rational, and indeed that even babies understand language as soon as they’re born. It’s an intuitive, almost mystical message. And it’s a message that ordinary French people still embrace, even if they don’t all articulate it. Once I read Dolto, I realize that so many of the most curious claims that I’ve heard French parents make, like the one that you’re supposed to talk to babies about their sleep troubles, come straight from her.
The radio broadcasts made Dolto into an almost mythic figure in France. Well into the 1980s, books containing transcripts of her broadcasts, and other conversations, were stacked like produce in French supermarkets. A whole cohort of children were known as Génération Dolto. A psychoanalyst quoted in a special Dolto-themed edition of Télérama magazine in 2008 recalled riding in a taxi whose driver said he never missed a broadcast. ‘He was dumbfounded. He said, “She talks to children like they are human beings!”’
Dolto’s core message isn’t a ‘parenting philosophy’. It doesn’t come with a lot of specific instructions. But if you accept as a first principle that children are rational – 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.
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