When I finish explaining our feeding system to the crèche lady, she looks at me like I’ve just said that we let our baby drive the family car. We don’t know when our child eats? This is a Vks problem she will soon solve. Her look says that while we’re living in Paris, we’re raising a child who eats and sleeps—and yes, probably poops—like an American.
The crèche lady’s look also reveals that on this too there are no sparring camps in France. Parents don’t anguish about how often their children should eat. From the age of about four months, most French babies eat at regular times. As with sleep techniques, French parents see this as common sense, not as part of a parenting philosophy.
What’s even stranger is that these French babies all eat at roughly the same times. With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about eight A.M., twelve P.M., four P.M., and eight P.M. Votre Enfant, a respected French parenting guide, has just one sample menu for four- or five-month-olds. It’s this same sequence of feeds.
In French these aren’t even called “feeds,” which after all sounds like you’re pitching hay to cows. They’re called “meals.” And their sequence resembles a schedule I’m quite familiar with: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus an afternoon snack. In other words, by about four months old, French babies are already on the same eating schedule that they’ll be on for the rest of their lives (grown-ups usually drop the snack).
You’d think the existence of this national baby meal plan would be obvious. Instead, it feels like a state secret. If you merely ask French parents if their babies eat on a schedule, they almost always say no. As with sleep, they insist that they’re merely following their babies’ “rhythms.” When I point out that French babies all seem to eat at roughly the same times, parents shrug this off as a coincidence.
The deeper mystery to me is how all these French babies are capable of waiting four hours from one meal to the next. Bean gets anxious if she has to wait even a few minutes for a feed. We get anxious, too. But I’m beginning to sense that there’s a lot of waiting going on all around me in France. First there was The Pause, in which French parents wait after their baby wakes up. Now there’s the baby meal plan, in which they wait long stretches from one feeding to the next. And of course there are all those toddlers waiting contentedly in restaurants until their food arrives.
The French seem collectively to have achieved the miracle of getting babies and toddlers not just to wait, but to do so happily. Could this ability explain the difference between French and American kids?
To get my head around these questions, I e-mail Walter Mischel, the world’s expert on how children delay gratification. He’s eighty years old and a chaired professor of psychology at Columbia University. I’ve read all about him, and read some of his many published papers on the topic. I explain that I’m in Paris researching French parenting and ask if he might have time to speak with me on the phone.
Mischel replies a few hours later. To my surprise, he says that he’s in Paris, too. Would I like to come by for a coffee? Two days later we’re [laturs at the kitchen table in his girlfriend’s apartment in the Latin Quarter, just down the hill from the Panthéon.
Mischel hardly looks seventy, and certainly not eighty. He has a shaved head and the coiled energy of a boxer, but with a sweet, almost childlike face. It’s not hard to envision him as the eight-year-old boy from Vienna who fled Austria with his family after the Nazis annexed the country.
The family eventually landed in Brooklyn. When Walter entered public school at age nine, he was assigned to kindergarten to learn English and remembers “trying to walk on my knees to not stick out from the five-year-olds when our class marched through the corridors.” Mischel’s parents—who were cultured and comfortably middle class in Vienna—opened a struggling five-and-dime. His mother, who’d been a minor depressive in Vienna, was energized by America. But his father never recovered from his fall in status.
This early experience gave Mischel a permanent outsider’s perspective and helped frame the questions that he has spent his career answering. In his thirties, he upended the science of personality by arguing that people’s traits aren’t fixed; they depend on context. Despite marrying an American and raising their three daughters in California, Mischel began making annual pilgrimages to Paris. “I always felt myself to be European and felt Paris was the capital of Europe,” he tells me. (Mischel, who divorced in 1996, has lived with a Frenchwoman for the last decade. They divide their time between New York and Paris.)
Mischel is most famous for devising the “marshmallow test” in the late 1960s, when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a four- or five-year-old into a room where there’s a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while. If the child manages not to eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll get only that one.
It’s a very hard test. Of the 653 kids who took it back in the sixties and seventies, only one in three managed to resist eating the marshmallow for the full fifteen minutes that the experimenter was away. Some ate it as soon as they were alone. Most could wait only about thirty seconds.1
In the mid-1980s, Mischel revisited the kids from the original experiment, to see if there was a difference between how good and bad delayers were faring as teenagers. He and his colleagues found a remarkable correlation: the longer the children had resisted eating the marshmallow as four-year-olds, the higher Mischel and his colleagues assessed them in all sorts of other categories later on. Among other skills, the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning. And according to a report that Mischel and his colleagues published in 1988, they “do not tend to go to pieces under stress.”
Could it be that making children delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Whereas middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, go to pieces under stress? Are French parents once again doing—by tradition and instinct—exactly what scientists like Mischel [ liiec recommend?
Bean, who usually gets what she wants almost immediately, can go from calm to hysterical in seconds. And whenever I go back to America, I realize that miserable, screaming toddlers demanding to get out of their strollers or pitching themselves onto the sidewalk are part of the scenery of daily life.
I rarely see such scenes in Paris. French babies and toddlers, who are used to waiting longer, seem oddly calm about not getting what they want right away. When I visit French families and hang out with their kids, there’s a conspicuous lack of whining and complaining. Often—or at least much more often than in my house—everyone’s calm and absorbed in what they’re doing.
In France I regularly see what amounts to a minor miracle: adults in the company of small children at home, having entire cups of coffee and full-length adult conversations. Waiting is even part of the parenting vernacular. Instead of saying “quiet” or “stop” to rowdy kids, French parents often just issue a sharp attend, which means “wait.”
Mischel hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on any French children. (He’d probably have to do a version with pain au chocolat.) But as a longtime observer of France, he says he’s struck by the difference between French and American kids.
In America, he says, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.” That’s sometimes true even with his own grandchildren. “I don’t like it when I call a daughter, if she tells me that she can’t talk now because a child is pulling on her and she can’t say, ‘Hold on, I’m talking to Papa.’”2
Having kids who can wait makes family life more pleasant. Children in France “seem much more disciplined and more raised the way I was,” Mischel says. “With French friends coming over with small children, you can still have a French dinner . . . the expectation with French kids is that they’ll behave themselves in an appr
opriate, quiet way and enjoy the dinner.”
“Enjoy” is an important word here. For the most part, French parents don’t expect their kids to be mute, joyless, and compliant. Parents just don’t see how their kids can enjoy themselves if they can’t control themselves.
I often hear French parents telling their kids to be sage. (In French, sage rhymes with the “Taj” in “Taj Mahal.”) Saying “sois sage” is a bit like saying “be good.” But it implies more than that. When I tell Bean to be good before we walk into someone’s house, it’s as if she’s a wild animal who must act tame for an hour but who could turn wild again at any moment. It implies that being good goes contrary to her true nature.
When I tell Bean to be sage, I’m also telling her to behave appropriately. But I’m asking her to use good judgment and to be aware and respectful of other people. I’m implying that she has a certain wisdom about the situation and that she’s in command of herself. [ ofof And I’m suggesting that I trust her.
Being sage doesn’t mean being dull. The French kids I know have a lot of fun. On weekends, Bean and her friends run shouting and laughing through the park for hours. Recess at her day care, and later at her school, are free-for-alls. There’s also a lot of organized fun in Paris, like children’s film festivals, theaters, and cooking classes, which require patience and attention. The French parents I know want their kids to have rich experiences and to be exposed to art and music.
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.
French parents and caregivers don’t think that kids have infinite patience. They don’t expect toddlers to sit through symphonies or formal banquets. They usually talk about waiting in terms of minutes or seconds.
But even these small delays seem to make a big difference. I’m now convinced that the secret of why French kids rarely whine or collapse into tantrums—or at least do so less than American kids—is that they’ve developed the internal resources to cope with frustration. They don’t expect to get what they want instantly. When French parents talk about the “education” of their children, they are talking, in large part, about teaching them how not to eat the marshmallow.
So how exactly do the French turn ordinary children into expert delayers? And can we teach Bean how to wait, too?
Walter Mischel watched videotapes of hundreds of squirming four-year-olds taking the marshmallow test. He eventually figured out that the bad delayers focused on the marshmallow, whereas the good delayers distracted themselves. “The kids who manage to wait very easily are the ones who learn during the wait to sing little songs to themselves, or pick their ears in an interesting way, or play with their toes and make a game of it,” he tells me. The ones who didn’t know how to distract themselves and just fixated on the marshmallow ended up eating it.3
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.
Parents don’t have to specifically teach their kids “distraction strategies.” Mischel says kids learn this skill on their own, if parents just allow them to practice waiting. “I think what’s often underestimated in parenting is how extraordinary . . . the cognitive facilities of very young kids are, if you engage them,” he says.
This is exactly what I’ve been seeing French parents doing. They don’t explicitly teach their kids distraction techniques. Mostly, they just seem to give them lots of opportunities to practice waiting.
On a gray Saturday afternoon, I take a commuter train to Fontenay-sous-Bois, a suburb just east of Paris. A friend has arranged for me to visit a family that lives there. Martine, the mother, is a pretty labor lawyer in her midthirties. She lives with her husband, an emergency-room doctor, and their two kids, in a modern low-rise building set amid a patch of trees.
I’m immediately struck by how much Martine’s apartment resembles my own. Toys line the perimeter of the living room, which is attached to an open kitchen (known in French as a cuisine americaine). We have the same stainless-steel appliances.
But the similarities end there. Despite having two young kids, Martine’s house has a calm that we could only wish for. When I arrive, her husband is working on his laptop in the living room, while one-year-old Auguste naps nearby. Paulette, their three-year-old with a pixie haircut, is sitting at the kitchen table plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. When each wrapper is full, she tops it with colored sprinkles and fresh red gooseberries.
Martine and I sit down to chat at the other end of the table. But I’m transfixed by little Paulette and her cupcakes. Paulette is completely absorbed in her task. She somehow resists the temptation to eat the batter. When she’s done she asks her mother if she can lick the spoon.
“No, but you can have some sprinkles,” Martine says, prompting Paulette to shake out several tablespoons of sprinkles onto the table.
My daughter Bean is the same age as Paulette, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to let her do a complicated task like this all on her own. I’d be supervising, and she’d be resisting my supervision. There would be much stress and whining (mine and hers). Bean would probably grab batter, berries, and sprinkles each time I turned around. I certainly wouldn’t be chatting calmly with a visitor.
The whole scene wouldn’t be something I’d want to repeat a week later. Yet baking seems to be a weekly ritual in France. Practically every time I visit a French family on a weekend, they’re either making a cake or serving the one they made earlier that day.
At first I think this must be because I’m visiting. But I soon realize that it has nothing to do with me. There’s a national bake-off in Paris every weekend. Practically from the time kids can sit up, their moms begin leading them in weekly or biweekly baking projects. These kids don’t just spill some flour and mash a few bananas. They crack eggs, pour in cups of sugar, and mix with preternatural confidence. They actually make the whole cake themselves.
The first cake that most French kids learn to bake is gâteau au yaourt (yogurt cake), in which they use empty yogurt containers to measure out the other ingredients. It’s a light, not-too-sweet cake to which berries, chocolate chips, lemon, or a tablespoon of rum can be added. It’s pretty hard to screw up.
All this baking doesn’t just yield lots of cakes. It also teaches kids how to control themselves. With its orderly measuring and sequencing of ingredients, baki [edis ong is a perfect lesson in patience. So is the fact that French families don’t devour the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven, as I would. They typically bake in the morning or early afternoon, then wait and eat the cake or muffins as a goûter (pronounced goo-tay)—the French afternoon snack.
It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which moms don’t walk around with baggies of Goldfish and Cheerios in their purses to patch over the inevitable moments of angst. Jennifer, a mother and a reporter for the New York Times, complains that every activity her daughter attends, no matter how brief or at what time of day, now includes snacks.4 “Apparently we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes,” she writes.
In France the goûter is the official, and only, snack time. It’s usually at about four thirty P.M., when kids get out of school. It has the same fixed status as other mealtimes and is universally observed for kids.
The goûter helps explain why those French kids I saw at the restaurant were eating so well. They were actually hungry, because they hadn’t been snacking all day. (Adults might have a coffee, but rarely a snack. A friend of mine who was visiting France complained that he had a hard time finding any adult snack food.)
Martine, the mother in the suburbs,
says she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals—which I see reenacted in many other middle-class French homes—are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification.
Martine says she often buys Paulette candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Paulette isn’t allowed to eat the candy until that day’s goûter, even if that means waiting many hours. Paulette is used to this. Martine sometimes has to remind her of the rule, but Paulette doesn’t protest.
Even the goûter isn’t a free-for-all. “The great thing is that there was cake to eat,” recalls Clotilde Dusoulier, a French food writer. “But the flip side of the coin was that my mom would say, ‘that’s enough.’ It was also teaching kids restraint.” Clotilde, who’s now in her early thirties, says that as a kid she baked with her mother “pretty much every weekend.”
It’s not just what and when French families eat that make their meals little capsules of patience training. It’s also how they eat, and with whom. From a very young age, French kids get used to eating meals in courses, with—at a minimum—a starter, a main course, and a dessert. They also get used to eating with their parents, which has to be better for learning patience. According to Unicef, 90 percent of French fifteen-year-olds eat the main meal of the day with their parents several times per week. In the United States and the United Kingdom, it’s about 67 percent.
These meals aren’t rushed affairs. In that study of women in Rennes, France, and in Ohio, the Frenchwomen spent more than twice as much time eating each day. They surely pass [y swom on this pace to their kids.
Fortunately it’s goûter time when the cupcakes come out of the oven at Martine’s. Paulette happily eats two of them. But Martine doesn’t even taste one. She seems to have tricked herself into thinking of cupcakes as child’s food in order not to eat them. (Sadly, I think she assumes I’m doing the same trick and doesn’t offer me one.)
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 7
