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

by Pamela Druckerman

Still, when I travel around France I see that middle-class Parisians’ basic views on how to raise kids would sound familiar to a working-class mother in the French provinces. Indeed, I’m struck that while French parents may not know exactly what they do, they all seem to be doing more or less the same thing. Well-off lawyers, caregivers in French day-care centers, public-school teachers, and old ladies who chastise me in the park, all spout the same basic principles. So does practically every French baby book and parenting magazine I read. It quickly becomes clear that having a child in France doesn’t require choosing a parenting philosophy. Everyone takes the basic rules for granted. That fact alone makes the mood less anxious.

  Why France? I certainly don’t suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I’m not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don’t want my kids growing up into sniffy Parisians. But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. On the one hand, middle-class French parents have values that look very familiar to me. Parisian parents are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature, and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes, and interactive science museums.

  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. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother tells me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

  And the French are doing a lot of parenting. While its neighbors are suffering from population declines, France is having a baby boom. In the European Union, only the Irish have a higher birth rate.6

  The French have all kinds of public services that surely help make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance, or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

  But these public services don’t explain the differences I see. The French seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I ask French parents how they discipline their children, it takes them a few beats just to understand what I mean. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they ask. “Discipline,” I soon realize, is a narrow, seldom-used category that deals with punishment. Whereas “educatStyas “eing” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagine themselves to be doing all the time.

  For years now, headlines have been declaring the demise of the current style of American child rearing. There are dozens of books offering Americans helpful theories on how to parent differently.

  I haven’t got a theory. What I do have, spread out in front of me, is a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents. I’m starting with that outcome and working backward to figure out how the French got there. It turns out that to be a different kind of parent, you don’t just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually

  is.

  Chapter 1

  are you waiting for a child?

  It’s ten in the morning when the managing editor summons me to his office and tells me to get my teeth cleaned. He says my dental plan will end on my last day at the newspaper. That will be in five weeks, he says.

  More than two hundred of us are laid off that day. The news briefly boosts our parent company’s stock price. I own some shares and consider selling them—for irony rather than profit—to cash in on my own dismissal.

  Instead, I walk around lower Manhattan in a stupor. Fittingly, it’s raining. I stand under a ledge and call the man I’m supposed to see that night.

  “I’ve just been laid off,” I say.

  “Aren’t you devastated?” he asks. “Do you still want to have dinner?”

  In fact, I’m relieved. I’m finally free of a job that—after nearly six years—I hadn’t had the guts to quit. I was a reporter for the foreign desk in New York, covering elections and financial crises in Latin America. I’d often be dispatched on a few hours’ notice, then spend weeks living out of hotels. For a while, my bosses were expecting great things from me. They talked about future editorships. They paid for me to learn Portuguese.

  Only suddenly they aren’t expecting anything. And strangely, I’m okay with that. I really liked movies about foreign correspondents. But actually being one was different. Usually I was all alone, shackled to an unending story, fielding calls from editors who just wanted more. I sometimes pictured the news as a mechanical rodeo bull. The men working the same beat as I managed to pick up Costa Rican and Colombian wives, who traveled around with them. At least they had dinner on the table when they finally slogged home. The men I went out with were less portable. And anyway, I rarely stayed in a city long enough to reach the third date.

  Although I’m relieved to be leaving the paper, Iy su>

  I’m suddenly clear about two things: I don’t want to write about politics or money anymore. And I want a boyfriend. I’m standing in my three-foot-wide kitchen, wondering what to do with the rest of my life, when Simon calls. We met six months earlier at a bar in Buenos Aires, when a mutual friend brought him to a foreign correspondents’ night out. He’s a British journalist who was in Argentina for a few days to write a story about soccer. I’d been sent to cover the country’s economic collapse. Apparently, we were on the same flight from New York. He remembered me as the lady who’d held up boarding when, already on the gangway, I realized that I’d left my duty-free purchase in the departure lounge and insisted on going back to fetch it. (I did most of my shopping in airports.)

  Simon was exactly my type: swarthy, stocky, and smart. (Though he’s of average height, he later adds “short” to this list, since he grew up in Holland among blond giants.) Within a few hours of meeting him, I realized that “love at first sight” just means feeling immediately and extremely calm with someone. Though all I said at the time was, “We definitely must not sleep together.”

  I was smitten, but wary. Simon had just fled the London real-estate market to buy a cheap apartment in Paris. I was commuting between South America and New York. A long-distance relationship with someone on a third continent seemed a stretch. After that meeting in Argentina, we exchanged occasional e-mails. But I didn’t let myself take him too seriously. I hoped that there were swarthy, smart men in my time zone.

  Fast-forward seven months. When Simon calls out of the blue and I tell him that I’ve just been sacked, he doesn’t emote or treat me like damaged goods. To the contrary, he seems pleased that I suddenly have some free time. He says he feels that we have “unfinished business,” and that he’d like to come to New York.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” I say. What’s the point? He can’t move to America because he writes about European soccer. I don’t speak French, and I’ve never considered living in Paris. Though I’m suddenly quite portable myself, I’m wary of being pulled into someone else’s orbit before I have one of my own again.

  Simon arrives in New York wearing the same beat-up leather jacket he wore in Argentina and carrying the bagel and smoked salmon that he’d picked up at the deli near my apartment. A month later I meet his parents in London. Six months later I sell most of my possessions and ship the rest to France. My friends all tell me that I’m being rash. I ignore them and walk out of my rent-stabilized studio apartment in New York with three giant suitcases and a box of stray South American coins, which I give to the Pakistani driver who takes me to the airport.

  And poof, I’m a Parisian. I move into Simon’s two-room bachelor pad in a former carpentry district in eastern Paris. With my unemployment checks still arriving, I ditch financial journalism and begin research
ing a book. Simon and I each work in one of the rooms during the day.

  The shine comes off our new romance almost immediately, mostly because of interior design issues. I once read in a book about feng shui that having piles of stuff on the floor is a sign of depression. For Simon, it just seems to signal an aversion to shelves. He has cleverly invested in an enormous unfinished wooden table that fills most of the living room, and a primitive gas-heating system, which ensures that there’s no reliable hot water. I’m especially irked by his habit of letting spare change from his pockets spill onto the floor, where it somehow gathers in the corners of each room. “Get rid of the money,” I plead.

  I don’t find much comfort outside our apartment either. Despite being in the gastronomic capital of the world, I can’t figure out what to eat. Like most American women, I arrive in Paris with extreme food preferences. (I’m an Atkins-leaning vegetarian.) Walking around, I feel besieged by all the bakeries and meat-heavy restaurant menus. For a while I subsist almost entirely on omelets and goat-cheese salads. When I ask waiters for “dressing on the side,” they look at me like I’m nuts. I don’t understand why French supermarkets stock every American cereal except my personal favorite, Grape-Nuts, and why cafés don’t serve fat-free milk.

  I know it sounds ungrateful not to swoon for Paris. Maybe I find it shallow to fall for a city just because it’s so good-looking. The cities I’ve had love affairs with in the past were all a bit, well, swarthier: São Paulo, Mexico City, New York. They didn’t sit back and wait to be admired.

  Our part of Paris isn’t even that beautiful. And daily life is filled with small disappointments. No one mentions that “springtime in Paris” is so celebrated because the preceding seven months are overcast and freezing. (I arrive, conveniently, at the beginning of this seven-month stretch.) And while I’m convinced that I remember my eighth-grade French, Parisians have another name for what I’m speaking to them: Spanish.

  There are many appealing things about Paris. I like it that the doors of the metro open a few seconds before the train actually stops, suggesting that the city treats its citizens like adults. I also like that, within six months of my arrival, practically everyone I know in America comes to visit, including people I’d later learn to categorize as “Facebook friends.” Simon and I eventually develop a strict admissions policy and rating system for houseguests. (Hint: If you stay a week, leave a gift.)

  I’m not bothered by the famous Parisian rudeness. At least that’s interactive. What gets me is the indifference. No one but Simon seems to care that I’m here. And he’s often off nursing his own Parisian fantasy, which is so uncomplicated it has managed to endure. As far as I can tell, Simon has never visited a museum. But he describes reading the newspaper in a café as an almost transcendent experience. One night at a neighborhood restaurant, he swoons when the waiter sets down a cheese plate in front of him.

  “This is why I live in Paris!” he declares. I realize that, by the transitive property of love and cheese, I must live in Paris for that smelly plate of cheese, too.

  To be fair, I’m starting to think that it’s not Paris, it’s me. New York likes its women a bit neurotic. They’re encouraged to create a brainy, adorable, conflicted bustle around themselves—à la Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Despite having nothing more serious than boy troubles, many of my friends in New York were spending more on therapy than on rent.

  That persona doesn’t fly in Paris. The French do like Woody Allen’s movies. But in real life, the ideal Parisian woman is calm, discreet, a bit remote, and extremely decisive. She orders from the menu. She doesn’t blather on about her childhood or her diet. If New York is about the woman who’s ruminating about her past screwups and fumbling to find herself, Paris is about the one who—at least outwardly—regrets nothing. In France “neurotic” isn’t a self-deprecating, half boast; it’s a clinical condition.

  Even Simon, who’s merely British, is perplexed by my self-doubt and my frequent need to discuss our relationship.

  “What are you thinking about?” I ask him periodically, usually when he’s reading a newspaper.

  “Dutch football,” he invariably says.

  I can’t tell if he’s serious. I’ve realized that Simon is in a state of perpetual irony. He says everything, including “I love you,” with a little smirk. And yet he almost never actually laughs, even when I’m attempting a joke. (Some close friends don’t know that he has dimples.) Simon insists that not smiling is a British habit. But I’m sure I’ve seen Englishmen laugh. And anyway, it’s demoralizing that when I finally get to speak English with someone, he doesn’t seem to be listening.

  The not laughing also points to a wider cultural gulf between us. As an American, I need things to be spelled out. On the train back to Paris after a weekend with Simon’s parents, I ask him whether they liked me.

  “Of course they liked you, couldn’t you tell?” he asks.

  “But did they say they liked me?” I demand to know.

  In search of other company, I trek across town on a series of “friend blind dates,” with friends of friends from back home. Most are expatriates, too. None seem thrilled to hear from a clueless new arrival. Quite a few seem to have made “living in Paris” a kind of job in itself, and an all-purpose answer to the question “What do you do?” Many show up late, as if to prove that they’ve gone native. (I later learn that French people are typically on time for one-on-one meetings. They’re only fashionably late for group events, including children’s birthdays.)

  My initial attempts to make French friends are even less successful. At a party, I hit it off reasonably well with Cbly1" an art historian who’s about my age and who speaks excellent English. But when we meet again for tea at her house, it’s clear that we observe vastly different female bonding rituals. I’m prepared to follow the American model of confession and mirroring, with lots of comforting “me-toos.” She pokes daintily at her pastry and discusses theories of art. I leave hungry, and not even knowing whether she has a boyfriend.

  The only mirroring I get is in a book by Edmund White, the American writer who lived in France in the 1980s. He’s the first person who affirms that feeling depressed and adrift is a perfectly rational response to living in Paris. “Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.”

  Despite my doubts about Paris, I’m still pretty sure about Simon. I’ve become resigned to the fact that “swarthy” inevitably comes with “messy.” And I’ve gotten better at reading his micro-expressions. A flicker of a smile means that he’s gotten the joke. The rare full smile suggests high praise. He even occasionally says “that was funny” in a monotone.

  I’m also encouraged by the fact that, for a curmudgeon, Simon has dozens of devoted, longtime friends. Perhaps it’s that, behind the layers of irony, he is charmingly helpless. He can’t drive a car, blow up a balloon, or fold clothes without using his teeth. He fills our refrigerator with unopened canned goods. For expediency’s sake, he cooks everything at the highest temperature. (College friends later tell me he was known at school for serving drumsticks that were charred on the outside and still frozen on the inside.) When I show him how to make salad dressing using oil and vinegar, he writes down the recipe and still pulls it out years later whenever he makes dinner.

  Also to Simon’s credit, nothing about France ever bothers him. He’s in his element being a foreigner. His parents are anthropologists who raised him all over the world and trained him from birth to delight in local customs. He’d lived in six countries (including a year in the United States) by the time he was ten. He acquires languages the way I acquire shoes.

  I decide that, for Simon’s sake, I’ll give France a real go. We ge
t married outside Paris at a thirteenth-century château, which is surrounded by a moat. (I ignore the symbolism.) In the name of marital harmony, we rent a larger apartment. I order bookshelves from Ikea and position spare-change bowls in every room. I try to channel my inner pragmatist instead of my inner neurotic. In restaurants, I start ordering straight from the menu and nibbling at the occasional hunk of foie gras. My French starts to sound less like excellent Spanish and more like very bad French. Before long I’m almost settled: I have a home office, a book deadline, and even a few new friends.

  Simon and I have talked about babies. We both want one. I’d like three, in fact. And I like the idea of having them in Paris, where they’ll be effortlessly bilingual and authentically international. Even if they grow up to be geeks, they can mention “growing up in Paris” and be instantly cool.

  I’m worried about getting pregnant. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying, very successfully, not to, so I have no idea whether I’m any good at the reverse. This turns out to be as whirlwind as our courtship. One day I’m Googling “How to get pregnant.” The next, it seems, I’m looking at two pink lines on a French pregnancy test.

  I’m ecstatic. But alongside my surge of joy comes a surge of anxiety. My resolve to become less Carrie Bradshaw and more Catherine Deneuve immediately collapses. This doesn’t seem like the moment to go native. I’m possessed by the idea that I’ve got to oversee my pregnancy and do it exactly right. Hours after telling Simon the good news, I go online to scour American pregnancy Web sites and rush to buy some pregnancy guides at an English-language bookstore near the Louvre. I want to know, in plain English, exactly what to worry about.

  Within days I’m on prenatal vitamins and addicted to BabyCenter’s online “Is It Safe?” column. Is it safe to eat nonorganic produce while pregnant? Is it safe to be around computers all day? Is it safe to wear high heels, binge on Halloween candy, or vacation at high altitudes?