‘These children are your fellow citizens, your brothers. They are poor, unhappy and weak: you should rescue them,’ he wrote in a crèche manual published in 1845. Then he added, ‘If you can save the lives of 10,000 children, make haste: 20,000 extra arms a year are not to be disdained. Arms are work and work creates wealth.’
In his manual, Marbeau instructs crèches to open from 5:30 am to 8:30 pm, to wrap around the typical workday for labourers. The life Marbeau describes for mothers isn’t too different from that of a lot of working mothers I know today:
‘She gets up before 5 o’clock, dresses her child, does some housework, runs to the Crèche, runs to work . . . at 8 o’clock she hastens back, fetches her child with the day’s dirty linen, rushes home to put the poor little creature to bed, and to wash his linen so it will be dry the next day, and every day the whole process is repeated! . . . how on earth does she manage!’ From the start, the crèche was also supposed to give a mother peace of mind, so she could ‘devote herself to her work with an easy conscience’.
Evidently Marbeau was quite persuasive. The first crèche opened in a donated building on the rue de Chaillot in Paris. Two years later there were thirteen crèches. The number continued to grow, especially in Paris.
Crèches never became as ubiquitous as the salles d’asile, which eventually became the école maternelle (Bean will attend this too). But crèches were tightly regulated. After the Second World War, the French government put them under the control of the newly formed Mother and Infant Protection service (PMI) and created an official degree programme for the job of ‘puéricultrice’, a person trained in caring for babies and young children.
By the beginning of the 1960s, the French poor were less desperate, and there were fewer of them. And more middle-class mothers were working. The crèche began attracting these women’s families too. The number of spots nearly doubled in ten years, reaching 32,000 in 1971. Suddenly middle-class mothers got sulky if they couldn’t get a place in a crèche. It started to seem like an entitlement for working mothers.
All kinds of variants on the crèche opened too. There were part-time nurseries, ‘family’ crèches where parents pitched in, and ‘company’ crèches for employees. Guided by Françoise Dolto’s insistence that babies are people too, there was a new interest in childcare that didn’t merely keep kids from getting ill, or treat them like potential delinquents.
Soon crèches were spouting middle-class values like ‘socialization’ and ‘awakening’, and mothers became convinced that the crèche was good for kids. In Paris, about a third of kids under three now go to the crèche, and half are in some kind of collective care. (There are fewer crèches outside Paris.)
French mothers do worry about paedophiles, but not at the crèche. They believe that kids are safer in settings with lots of trained adults looking after them, rather than being ‘alone with a stranger’, according to a report by a national parenting group. ‘If she’s going to be tête-à-tête with someone, I want it to be me,’ the mother of an eighteen-month old at Bean’s crèche tells me. This mother says that if her daughter hadn’t got a place in the crèche, she would have given up her job to look after her.
French parents take it for granted that crèches are of universally high quality, and that their staff are caring and highly skilled. In French parenting chat rooms, the most serious complaint I can find about a crèche is from a mother whose child was served ravioli along with moussaka, a similarly heavy dish.
‘I sent a letter to the crèche, and they responded by saying their regular chef was not there,’ she explains. She adds, darkly: ‘Let’s see what happens the rest of the week.’
I first hear about the crèche when I’m pregnant, from my friend Dietlind. She’s a Chicagoan who’s lived in Europe since she graduated from university. (In Paris there’s a whole caste of expatriates who studied abroad and married their foreign boyfriends or just never got around to leaving.) Dietlind is energetic and warm, and speaks effortless French. She’s one of the few people I know who’s actually striving to make the world a better place. About the only thing wrong with Dietlind is that she can’t cook. Her family subsists almost entirely on food from Picard, the French frozen-food chain. She once tried to serve me defrosted sushi, rice and all.
Despite this, Dietlind is a model mother. So when she tells me that her two sons, aged five and eight, attended the crèche around the corner from me, I take note. She says the crèche was excellent. Years later, she still stops by to greet the directrice and her sons’ old teachers. The boys still talk about their crèche days with joyful nostalgia. Their favourite caregiver used to give them haircuts.
What’s more, Dietlind offers to put in a good word with the directrice. She also keeps repeating that the crèche isn’t fancy. I’m not sure what this means. Does she think that I require Philippe Starck playpens? Is ‘not fancy’ code for ‘dirty’?
Though I’ve put up a brave multicultural front for my mother, the truth is that I share some of her doubts. The fact that the crèche is run by the city of Paris seems kind of creepy. It feels like I’ll be dropping my baby off at the post office. I have visions of faceless bureaucrats rushing past Bean’s Moses basket. Maybe I do want ‘fancy’, whatever that means. Or maybe I just want to look after Bean myself.
Unfortunately, I can’t. I’m midway through writing the book that I was supposed to hand in before Bean was born. I took a few months off after her birth. But now my (already once-extended) deadline looms. We’ve hired a lovely nanny, Adelyn, from the Philippines, who arrives in the morning and looks after Bean all day. The problem is, I work from home in a little alcove office. The temptation to micromanage them both – to the irritation of everyone – is irresistible.
Bean does seem to be developing a decent passive understanding of Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. But I suspect she often ends up speaking Tagalog at our local McDonald’s, since each time we pass by it, she points and shouts. Perhaps the non-fancy crèche is a better option.
I’m also amazed that, thanks to Dietlind, we have an ‘in’ somewhere. I’m used to being out of synch with the rest of the country. Sometimes I don’t know it’s a national holiday until I walk outside and find that all the shops are closed. Having Bean in crèche would connect us more to France.
The crèche is also tantalizingly convenient. There’s one across the street from our house. Dietlind’s is a five-minute walk. Like those nineteenth-century washerwomen, I could pop in to breastfeed Bean, and wipe her snot.
Mostly, though, it’s hard to resist all the French adult peer pressure (I’m glad they’re not trying to get me to smoke). Anne and the other French mothers in our courtyard chime in about the wonders of the crèche too. Simon and I figure that even with our contact, our odds of actually getting in are small. So we go to our local town hall and apply for a place.
Competition for the existing spots in crèches is – as the French say – énergique. A committee of bureaucrats and crèche directors in each of Paris’s twenty arrondissements convenes to dole out their available places. In the well-heeled 16th arrondissement there are 4,000 applicants for 500 places. In our less rarified area of eastern Paris, the odds are one in three.
Scrambling for a spot in a crèche is one of the initiation rituals of new parenting. In Paris, women can officially begin petitioning the town hall when they’re six months pregnant. But magazines urge women to schedule a meeting with the director of their preferred crèche as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test.
Priority goes to single parents, multiple births, adoptees, families with three or more kids, or those with ‘particular difficulties’. How to fit into this last, ambiguous category is the topic of furious speculation in online forums. One mother advises writing to town-hall officials about your urgent need to return to work and your epic but ultimately failed efforts to find any other form of childcare. She suggests copying this letter to the regional governor and the President of France, then request
ing a private audience with the district mayor. ‘You go there with the baby in your arms, looking desperate, and you retell the same story as in the letter,’ she says. ‘I can assure you that this will succeed.’
Simon and I decide to work our only angle: being foreign. In a letter attached to our crèche application, we extol Bean’s budding multilingualism (she doesn’t actually speak yet) and describe how her Anglo-Americanism will enrich the crèche. As promised, Dietlind talks us up to the director of the crèche that her sons went to. I meet this woman, and try to project a mix of desperation and charm. I call the town hall once a month (for some reason, as with French couples, most of the crèche-courting falls to me) to remind them of our ‘enormous interest and need for a spot’. Since I’m not French and can’t vote here, I decide not to bother the President.
Amazingly, these attempts to massage the process actually work. A congratulatory letter arrives from our town hall explaining that Bean has been assigned a spot in crèche for mid-September, when she’ll be nine months old. I call Simon, triumphant: we foreigners have beaten the natives at their own game! We’re amazed, and giddy from the victory. But we also have the feeling that we’ve won a prize that we don’t quite deserve, and aren’t even sure we want.
The main question people in France ask about nurseries is how to get more kids into them. Thanks to France’s current baby boom, you can’t run for public office in France – on the right or the left – without promising to build more crèches or expand existing ones. There’s a new proposal to turn disused baggage areas in railway stations into crèches for the children of commuters (much of the construction cost would go towards sound-proofing).
French mothers do worry about the anguish they’ll feel when they drop their children off at crèche for the first time. But they view this as their own separation issue. ‘In France parents are not afraid of sending their children to the crèche,’ explains Marie Wierink, a sociologist with France’s Ministry of Labour. ‘Au contraire, they fear that if they cannot find a place in the crèche their child will be missing out on something.’
Kids don’t learn to read in crèche. They don’t learn letters, or other ‘pre-literacy’ skills. What they do is socialize with other kids. In America, some parents mention this to me as a benefit of nurseries. In France, all parents do. ‘I knew that it was very good, it was an opening to social life,’ says my friend Esther, the lawyer, whose daughter entered crèche at nine months old.
My friend Hélène, an engineer, didn’t work in the first few years after her youngest daughter was born. But she was never remotely apologetic about sending the little girl to the crèche five days a week. This was in part so that Hélène would have time to herself, but also because she didn’t want her daughter to miss out on the communal experience.
I still have my doubts when we bring Bean to her first day of crèche. It’s at the end of a dead-end street, in a three-storey concrete building with a little Astroturf courtyard in front of it. It looks like a state school in America, but with everything in miniature. I recognize some of the kids’ furniture from the Ikea catalogue. It’s not fancy, but it’s cheerful and clean.
The kids are divided by age into sections called small, medium and large. Bean’s class is in a sunlit room with play kitchens, tiny furniture, and cubbyholes full of age-appropriate toys. Attached to the room is a glassed-in sleeping area where each child has his own cot, stocked with his dummies and the ubiquitous stuffed-animal companions called doudous.
Anne-Marie greets us. She’ll be Bean’s main caregiver and she’s the one who gave haircuts to Dietlind’s sons. Anne-Marie is a grandmother in her sixties, with short blonde hair and a rotating collection of printed T-shirts from places her charges have travelled to (we’ll eventually bring her a T-shirt attesting to her love of Brooklyn). Employees have worked at the crèche for an average of thirteen years. Anne-Marie has been there much longer. She and many of the other caregivers are trained as auxiliaires de puériculture, or childcare assistants.
A paediatrician and a psychologist each visit the crèche regularly. The caregivers chart Bean’s daily naps and poos, and report to me about how she’s eaten. They feed the kids Bean’s age one at a time, with the child either on someone’s lap or in a bouncy seat. They put the kids down to sleep at roughly the same time each day, and claim not to wake them up. For this initial adaptation period, Anne-Marie asks me to bring in a shirt that I’ve worn, so that Bean can sleep with it. This feels a bit canine, but I do it.
I’m struck by the confidence of Anne-Marie and the other caregivers. They’re quite certain about what children of each age need, and they’re equally confident in their abilities to provide it. They convey this without being smug or impatient. My one gripe is that Anne-Marie insists on calling me ‘mother of Bean’ rather than ‘Pamela’; she says it’s too difficult to learn the names of all the parents.
Given our doubts about sending Bean to a crèche, we’ve compromised by enrolling her just four days a week, from about 9:30 to 3:30. Plenty of her classmates will be there five days a week, for much longer each day (the crèche is open from 7:30 to 6 pm).
As in Marbeau’s day, Bean is supposed to arrive with a clean nappy. This becomes an almost Talmudic point of discussion between Simon and me. What constitutes ‘arrival’? If Bean poos on her way in the door, or while we’re saying goodbye, who changes the offending nappy? Is it us, or the auxiliaires?
The first two weeks are an adaptation period, in which she stays for increasingly long periods at the crèche, with and without us. She cries a bit each time I leave, but Anne-Marie assures me that she quiets down soon after I go. Often one of the caregivers holds her up at the window facing the street, so I can wave when I get outside.
If the crèche is damaging Bean, we can’t tell. Pretty soon she’s cheerful when we drop her off, and happy when we pick her up. Once Bean has been at the crèche for a while, I begin to notice that the place is a microcosm of French parenting. That includes the bad stuff. Anne-Marie and the other caregivers are mystified that I’m still breastfeeding Bean when she’s nine months old and especially when I feed her on the premises. They’re not thrilled with my short-lived plan to drop off pumped breast milk before lunch each day, but they don’t try to stop me.
All the big, positive French parenting ideas are in evidence too. Since there’s so much agreement anyway on the best way to do things, the caregivers reinforce the things that French parents do – or at least would like to be doing – at home. They talk to even very young children all the time at the crèche, with what seems like perfect conviction that the children understand.1
There’s a lot of talk about the cadre, or framework. At a parents’ meeting, one of the teachers speaks almost poetically about it: ‘Everything is very encadré – built into a framework – the hour that they arrive and leave, for example. But inside this framework we try to introduce flexibility, fluidity and spontaneity, for the children and also for the [teaching] team.’
Bean spends a lot of the day just ambling around the room, playing with whatever she wants. I’m concerned about this. Where are the music circles? What about organized activities? But I soon realize that all this freedom is by design. It’s the French cadre model yet again: kids get firm boundaries, but lots of freedom within those boundaries. And they’re supposed to learn to cope with boredom and to play by themselves. ‘When the child plays, he constructs himself,’ explains Sylvie, one of Bean’s caregivers when she moves up to grande section.
A mayor’s report on Parisian crèches calls for a spirit of ‘energetic discovery’ in which the children are ‘left to exercise their appetite for experimentation of their five senses, of using their muscles, of sensations, and of physical space.’ As kids get older they do have some organized activities, but no one is obliged to participate.
‘We propose, we don’t force,’ another of Bean’s teachers explains. There’s soothing background music to launch the kids into their naps, and a pile
of books that they can read in bed. The kids gradually wake up to their goûter, the afternoon snack. The crèche isn’t the post office. It’s more like a spa holiday, but with better food.
In the playground there are no rules or structure, also by design. The idea is to give kids as much freedom as possible. ‘When they’re outside, we intervene very little,’ says Mehrie, another of Bean’s caregivers. ‘If we intervene all the time, they go a little nuts.’
The crèche also teaches kids patience. I watch as a two-year-old demands that Mehrie pick her up. But Mehrie is cleaning the table where the children have just had lunch. ‘For the moment I’m not free. You wait two seconds,’ Mehrie says gently to the little girl. Then she turns to me and explains: ‘We try to teach them to wait, it’s very important. They can’t have everything right away.’
The caregivers speak calmly and respectfully to the kids, using the language of rights: you have the right to do this, you don’t have the right to do that. They say it with the same utter conviction that I’ve heard in the voices of French parents. Everyone believes that for the cadre to seem immutable, the rules have to be consistent. ‘The prohibitions are always the same, and we always give a reason for them,’ Sylvie tells me.
I know the crèche is strict about certain things because, after a while, Bean repeats phrases she’s learned. We know they’re crèche phrases because the teachers there are her only source of French. It’s like she’s been wearing a wire all day, and we get to listen to the tape. Most of what Bean repeats is in the command form, like ‘On va pas crier!’ – we’re not going to shout. My rhyming favourites, which I immediately begin using at home, are ‘Couche-toi!’ (go to sleep) and ‘Mouche-toi!’ (blow your nose), said when you’re holding a tissue up to a child’s face.
For a while Bean speaks French only in the command form, or in these declarations of what’s permissible and what isn’t. When she plays ‘teacher’ at home, she stands on a chair, wags her finger and shouts instructions to imaginary children, or occasionally to our surprised lunch guests.
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