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

by Pamela Druckerman

  This incident revealed the enormous cultural gap between Lara and me, as parents. I had assumed that Bean was a very cute, very wild creature with a lot of potential but almost no self-control. If she occasionally behaved well, it was because of a kind of animalistic training, or just luck. After all, she couldn’t talk, and didn’t even ha cn="2eve hair yet.

  But Lara (who at the time was childless, but now has two well-behaved daughters) assumed that, even at ten months old, Bean could understand language and learn to control herself. She believed that Bean could do things doucement if she wanted to. And as a result, Bean did.

  Dolto died in 1988. Some of her intuitions about babies are now being confirmed by scientific experiments. Scientists have figured out that you can tell what babies know by measuring how long they look at one thing versus another. Like adults, babies look longer at things that surprise them. Beginning in the early 1990s, research using this method has shown that “babies can do rudimentary math with objects” and that “babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do,” writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.11 A study at the University of British Columbia found that eight-month-olds understand probabilities.12

  There’s also evidence that babies have a moral sense. Bloom and other researchers showed six- and ten-month-old babies a sort of puppet show in which a circle was trying to roll up a hill. A “helper” character helped the circle go up, while a “hinderer” pushed it down. After the show, the babies were offered the helper and the hinderer on a tray. Almost all of them reached for the h

  elper. “Babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy,” Paul Bloom explains.

  Of course, these experiments don’t prove that—as Dolto claims—babies understand speech. But they do seem to prove her point that, from a very young age, babies are rational. Their minds aren’t a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” At the very least, we should watch what we say to them.

  Chapter 6

  day care?

  When I call my mother to tell her that Bean has been accepted into a day-care center run by the city of Paris, there’s a long pause on her end of the line.

  “Day care?” she asks, finally.

  Friends back home are skeptical, too.

  “It’s just not a situation I want,” sniffs a friend whose son is nine months old, about the same age Bean will be when she starts day care. “I want him to have a little more individual attention.”

  But when I tell my French neighbors that Bean has been accepted to the crèche, as the full-time day cares are known here, they congratulate me and practically crack open the champagne.

  It’s the sharpest difference between the countries I’ve seen so far. Middle-class mothers i f2"2em">

  But middle-class French parents—architects, doctors, fellow journalists—are clawing past one another to get a spot in their neighborhood crèche, which is open five days a week, usually from eight to six. Mothers apply when they’re pregnant, then harangue, cajole, and beg. Crèches are subsidized by the state, and parents are charged sliding fees based on their incomes.

  “I felt that it was a perfect system, absolutely perfect,” gushes my friend Esther, a French lawyer, whose daughter started at the crèche when she was nine months old. Even friends of mine who don’t work try to enroll their kids in the crèche. As a distant second choice, they consider part-time day care or nannies, which are subsidized, too. (Government Web sites give all the options.)

  All this gives me a kind of cultural vertigo. Will day care make my child aggressive, neglected, and insecurely attached, as the scary American headlines say? Or will she be socialized, “awakened,” and skillfully looked after, as French parents assure me?

  For the first time, I worry that we’re taking our little intercultural experiment too far. It’s one thing to start holding a fork in my left hand, and giving blank looks to strangers. It’s quite another to subject my child to a potentially weird and damaging experience for the bulk of her toddlerhood. Are we going a bit too native? Bean can try foie gras, but should she try the crèche?

  I decide to read up on this day care with a funny name. Why is it even called a crèche? I thought that was the name for a nativity scene.

  It turns out that the story of the French crèche began in the 1840s. Jean-Baptiste-Firmin Marbeau, an ambitious young lawyer in search of a cause to champion, was deputy mayor of Paris’s first district. It was the middle of the Industrial Revolution, and cities like Paris were teeming with women who’d arrived from the provinces to work as seamstresses and in factories. Marbeau was charged with writing a study of the salles d’asile, free nursery schools for kids aged two to six.

  He was impressed. “How carefully, I said to myself, society watches over the children of the poor!” he wrote.

  But Marbeau wondered who looked after poor children between birth and age two, while their mothers worked. He consulted the district’s “poor list” and set off to visit several mothers. “At the far end of a filthy backyard, I call out for Madame Gérard, a washerwoman. She comes down, not wanting me to enter her home, too dirty to be seen (those are her words). She holds a new-born baby on her arm, and a child of eighteen months by the hand.”

  Marbeau discovered that when Madame Gérard went off to wash laundry, she left her children with a babysitter. This cost her seventy centimes a day, about a third of her daily wages. And the babysitter was an equally poor woman who, when Marbeau visited, was “at her post, watching over three young children on the floor in a shabby room.”

  That wasn’t bad child care by the day’s standards for the poor. Some mothers locked kids alone in apartments or tied them to bedposts for the day. Slightly older kids were often left to watch their siblings while their mothers worked. Many very young babies still lived at the homes of wet nurses, where conditions could be life-threatening.

  Marbeau was seized with an idea: the crèche! (The name was meant to invoke the cozy manger in the Christmas story.) It would be all-day care for poor children from birth to age two. Funding would come from donations by wealthy patrons, some of whom would also help oversee crèches. Marbeau envisioned a spartan but spotless building, where women called nurses looked after babies and counseled mothers on hygiene and morals. Mothers would pay just fifty cents a day. Those with unweaned infants would return twice a day to breast-feed.

  Marbeau’s idea struck a chord. There was soon a crèche commission to study the matter, and he set off to woo potential donors. Like any good fund-raiser, he appealed to both their sense of charity and to their economic self-interest.

  “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.” The crèche was also supposed to give a mother peace of mind, so she could “devote herself to her work with an easy conscience.”

  In his manual, Marbeau instructs crèches to open from five thirty A.M. to eight thirty P.M., to cover the typical workday for laborers. 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!”

  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.

  After World War II, the French government put crèches under the control of the newly formed Mother and Infant Protection service (PMI) and creat
ed an official degree program for the job of puéricultrice, a person who specialized in caring for babies and young children.

  By the beginning of the 1960s, t k th.

  All kinds of variants on the crèche opened, too. There were part-time day cares, “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 child care that didn’t merely keep kids from getting sick or treat them like potential delinquents. Soon crèches were spouting middle-class values like “socialization” and “awakening.”

  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 college. (In Paris there’s a whole caste of semester-abroad expatriates, who married their junior-year boyfriends or just never got around to leaving.) Dietlind is warm, speaks effortless French, and still charmingly refers to herself as a “feminist.” 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, ages 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 favorite caregiver used to give them haircuts.

  What’s more, Dietlind offers to put in a good word with the directrice. She keeps repeating to me that the crèche isn’t fancy. I’m not sure what this means. Does she think that I require Philippe Stark 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, or the department of motor vehicles. I have visions of faceless bureaucrats rushing past Bean’s bassinet, as she weeps. 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 shows up 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 s kine">Buspect that Adelyn often ends up speaking Tagalog to her at our local McDonald’s, since each time we pass by it, Bean points and shouts. Perhaps the nonfancy 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 a 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 breast-feed Bean and wipe her snot.

  Mostly, though, it’s hard to resist all this 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 “in,” our odds of actually getting in are small. So we go to our local town hall and apply for a spot.

  Why are middle-class Americans so skeptical of day care? The answer has its roots in the nineteenth century, too. By the middle of the 1800s, news of Marbeau’s crèches reached America, which had its own horror stories about poor kids being tied to bedposts. Curious philanthropists and social activists traveled to Paris. They were impressed. Over the following decades, charity-financed crèches opened in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Buffalo for the children of poor, working mothers. A few used the French name, but most were called “day nurseries.” By the 1890s there were ninety American day nurseries. Many cared for the children of recent immigrants. They were supposed to keep these kids off the streets and turn them into “Americans.”1

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a separate “nursery school movement” in America to create private preschools and kindergartens for children aged around two to six. These grew out of new ideas about the importance of early learning and of stimulating kids’ social and emotional development. From the start, they appealed to middle- and upper-middle-class American parents.

  The separate origins of day care and preschool explain why, more than a hundred years later, “day care” still has a working-class connotation in America, while middle-class parents battle to get their two-year-olds into preschool. It also explains why today’s American preschools often last just a few hours a day; it’s presumed that mothers of the students don’t have to work, or can afford nannies.2

  One segment of American society that isn’t ambivalent about day care is the U.S. military. The Department of Defense runs America’s largest day-care system, with about eight hundred child development centers—or CDCs—on military installations around the world. The centers accept kids from the age of six weeks and are typically open from six A.M. to six thirty P.M.3

  dth="2em">The American military’s day-care system looks remarkably like the French crèche. Operating hours wrap around the workday. Fees are scaled according to parents’ combined income. The government subsidizes about half the cost. And like the French crèche, the military’s day-care centers are so popular they usually have long waiting lists.

  But outside the military, middle-class American parents remain ambivalent about day care.4 This is partly an issue of nomenclature. “If you call it ‘early childhood education, zero through five,’ they think it’s worthwhile,” says Sheila Kamerman, a professor at Columbia University who’s been tracking day care for decades. These days it’s often simply called “child care.”

  Americans remain consumed by the question of how even normal day care affects a child’s fragile psyche. There are headlines on whether day care causes learning delays, makes kids more aggressive, or leaves them insecurely attached to their mothers. I know American moms who quit their jobs rather than subject their kids to day care.

  They are often right to worry, since the quality of American day care is extremely uneven. There are no national regulations. Some states don’t require caregivers to have any training. The U.S. Department of Labor says child-care workers earn less than janitors, and that “dissatisfaction with benefits, pay, and stressful working conditions cause many to leave the industry.” Annual turnover rates of 35 percent are common.

  There are some good day-care centers, of course. But these can be extremely expensive, or limited to employees of certain companies. And bad centers are amply in evidence, with poor kids getting especially bad care. Other centers—usually the expensive ones—treat babyhood like a college-prep course. Perhaps to calm nervous parents, a Colorado-based company boasts that, in its centers, children under the age of one are taught “literacy.”

  French mothers are convinced that the crèche is good for their kids. In Paris, about a third of kids under the age of three go to the crèche, and half are in some kind of collective care. (There are still fewer crèches outside Paris.) French mothers do worry about pedophiles, but not at the crèche. They think 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 group that advocates for parent
s. “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. The mother says if she hadn’t gotten a spot in the crèche, she would have quit her job.

  French mothers do worry about the anguish they’ll feel when they drop their children off at a 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 Labor. “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 a crèche. They don’t learn letters or other pr ks ont eliteracy skills. What they do is socialize with other kids. In America, some parents mention this to me as a benefit of day care. 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 a crèche at nine months old.

  French parents take for granted that crèches are of universally high quality and that the members of their staffs 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 to me, saying their regular chef was not there,” she explains. She adds, darkly: “Let’s see what happens the rest of the week.”