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

by Pamela Druckerman

For American mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the Internet or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things. We’re not just selfish. We’ve “paid” for our lapses.

  Here, too, the French are different. French mothers absolutely recognize the temptation to feel guilty. They feel as overstretched and inadequate as we Americans do. After all, they’re working while bringing up small children. And like us, they often aren’t living up to their own standards as either workers or parents.

  The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt. To the contrary, they consider it unhe {sidth="2ealthy and unpleasant, and they try to banish it. “Guilt is a trap,” says my friend Sharon, the literary agent. When she and her Francophone girlfriends meet for drinks, they remind each other that “the perfect mother doesn’t exist . . . we say this to reassure each other.”

  The standards are certainly high for French moms. They’re supposed to be sexy, successful, and have a home-cooked meal on the table each night. But they try not to add guilt to their burden. My friend Danièle, the French journalist, coauthored a book called The Perfect Mother Is You (La mère parfaite, c’est vous).

  Danièle still remembers dropping her daughter off at her crèche at five months old. “I felt sick to leave her, but I would have felt sick to stay with her and not work,” she explains. She forced herself to face down this guilt and then let it go. “Let’s just feel guilty and go on living,” she told herself. Anyway, she adds, reassuring both of us, “The perfect mother doesn’t exist.”

  What really fortifies Frenchwomen against guilt is their conviction that it’s unhealthy for mothers and children to spend all their time together. They believe there’s a risk of smothering kids with attention and anxiety, or of developing the dreaded relation fusionnelle, where a mother’s and a child’s needs are too intertwined. Children—even babies and toddlers—get to cultivate their inner lives without a mother’s constant interference.

  “If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child,” Danièle says.” What happens to the child if he’s the only hope for his mother? I think this is the opinion of all psychoanalysts.”

  This separation can go too far. When French Justice Minister Rachida Dati went back to work five days after giving birth to her daughter, Zohra, there was a collective gasp from the French press. In a survey by the French edition of Elle magazine, 42 percent of respondents described Dati as “too careerist.” (There was less controversy about the fact that Dati was a forty-three-year-old single mother, and that she wouldn’t name the father.)

  When we Americans talk about work-life balance, we’re describing a kind of juggling, where we’re trying to keep all parts of our lives in motion without screwing up any of them too badly.

  The French also talk about l’équilibre. But they mean it differently. For them, it’s about not letting any one part of life—including parenting—overwhelm the rest. It’s more like a balanced meal, where there’s a good mix of proteins, carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, and sweets. In that sense, the “careerist” Rachida Dati had the same problem as stay-at-home moms: a life too heavily weighted toward one element.

  Of course, for some French mothers, l’équilibre is just an ideal. But at least it’s a calming ideal. When I ask my Parisian friend Esther, who works full time as a lawyer, to assess herself as a mother, she says something that I find breathtaking in its simplicity and lack of neurotic tension. “In general I don’t doubt whether I’m good enough, because I really think I am.”

  era="3em" width="0">Inès de la Fressange isn’t an ordinary Frenchwoman. In the 1980s she was Karl Lagerfeld’s muse and main model at Chanel. Then de la Fressange was asked to be the new face of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, who appears on stamps and on busts in town halls. Past Mariannes have included Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. De la Fressange and Lagerfeld parted ways after she accepted. He allegedly said he didn’t want to “dress a monument.”

  Now in her early fifties, de la Fressange is still a doe-eyed, languid brunette whose long legs don’t seem to fit under café tables. She’s had her own eponymous fashion label and occasionally still walks the runway. In 2009, readers of Madame Figaro voted her the best embodiment of the Parisian woman.

  De la Fressange is also a mother. Her two equally leggy and photogenic daughters—the teenaged Nine and tween-aged Violette—have already launched their own fashion and modeling careers. De la Fressange used to make light of her own charms by calling herself the “swarthy asparagus.” She says she’s an imperfect mother, too. “I forget about morning yoga, and I always put on lip gloss and mascara in the car mirror. What’s important is to rid yourself of guilt over not being perfect.”

  Obviously, de la Fressange isn’t typical. But she incarnates a certain French ideal about striking a balance. In an interview with Paris Match, she describe

  s how, three years after her husband died, she met a man at a ski resort in the French Alps, where she was vacationing with her daughters. The man just happened to be the head of one of France’s most important magazines and a recipient of the French Legion of Honor. (De la Fressange wasn’t Lagerfeld’s muse for nothing.)

  She put off her suitor for a few months, explaining that she wasn’t ready. But as she tells Paris Match, “Finally, it was me who called him to say, ‘Okay, I’m a mother and a working girl, but also a woman.’ For the girls, I thought it was good to have a mother in love.”

  Chapter 9

  caca boudin

  When Bean is about three, she starts using an expression I’ve never heard before. At first I think it’s caca buddha, which sounds like it could be vaguely offensive to my Buddhist friends (as in English, caca is a French kid’s term for poop). But after a while I realize she’s saying caca boudin (pronounced boo-dah). Boudin means sausage. My daughter is going around shouting—if you’ll pardon my French—“poop sausage.”

  Like all good curse words, caca boudin is versatile. Bean shouts it gleefully when she’s running through the house with her friends. She also uses it to mean “whatever,” “leave me alone,” and “none of your business.” It’s an all-purpose retort.

  Me: What did you do at school today?

  Bean: Caca boudin. (snortle)

  Me: Would you like some more broccoli?

  Bean: Caca boudin! (hysterical laughter)

  Simon and I aren’t sure what to make of caca boudin. Is it rude or cute? Should we be angry or amused? We don’t understand the social context, and we have no childhood experience of our own in France to draw on. To be safe, we tell her to stop saying it. She compromises by continuing to say it, but then adding, “We don’t say caca boudin. It’s a bad word.”

  Bean’s budding French does have perks. When we go back to America for Christmas, my mother’s friends keep asking her to pronounce the name of her hairdresser, Jean-Pierre, with her Parisian accent. (Jean-Pierre has given her a pixie haircut that they coo is oh-so-French, too.) Bean is happy to sing, on demand, some of the dozens of French songs she’s learned in school. I’m amazed the first time she opens a present and says, spontaneously, oh la la!

  But it’s becoming clear that being bilingual is more than just a party trick or a neutral skill. As Bean’s French improves, she’s starting to bring home not just unfamiliar expressions but also new ideas and rules. Her new language is making her into not just a French speaker but into a French person. And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. I’m not even sure what a “French person” is.

  The main way that France enters our house is through school. Bean has started école maternelle, France’s free public preschool. It’s all day, four days a week, except for Wednesdays. Maternelle isn’t compulsory, and kids can go part-time. But pretty much every three-year-old in France goes to maternelle full time and has a similar experience there. It’s France’s way of turning toddl
ers into French people.

  The maternelle has lofty goals. It is, in effect, a national project to turn the nation’s solipsistic three-year-olds into civilized, empathetic people. A booklet for parents from the education ministry explains that in maternelle kids “discover the richness and the constraints of the group that they’re part of. They feel the pleasure of being welcomed and recognized, and they progressively participate in welcoming their fellow students.”

  Charlotte, who’s been a teacher at maternelle for thirty years (and still charmingly has the kids call her maîtresse—teacher or, literally, mistress), tells me that in the first year the kids are very egotistical. “They don’t realize that the teacher is there for everyone,” she says. Conversely, the pupils only gradually understand that when the teacher speaks to the group, what she’s saying is also intended for each of them individually. Kids typically do activities of their choosing in groups of three or four, at separate tables or parts of the classroom.

  To me, maternelle seems like art school for short people. During Bean’s first year the walls of her classroom are quasse="ickly covered in the students’ drawings and paintings. Being able to “perceive, feel, imagine, and create” are goals of maternelle, too. The children learn to raise their hands à la française, with one finger pointed up in the air.

  I was worried about enrolling Bean. The crèche was a big romper room. Maternelle is a bit more like school. The classes are big. And I’ve been warned that parents get very little information on what goes on. One American mom tells me she stopped asking her daughter’s teacher for feedback after the teacher eventually explained, “If I don’t say anything, that means she’s fine.” Bean’s first-year teacher is a glum woman whose only comment about Bean, the entire year, is that she’s “very calm.” (Bean adores this teacher and loves her classmates.)

  And despite all the painting and drawing, there’s a lot of emphasis on learning to follow instructions. Bean’s first year, I’m jarred to see that the whole class usually paints exactly the same thing. One morning there are twenty-five identical yellow stick figures with green eyes hanging up in the classroom. As someone who can’t write anything without a deadline (or two), I recognize the need for some constraints. But seeing all those nearly identical pictures is unsettling. (Bean’s second-year artwork is more free-form.)

  It takes me a while to realize that in Bean’s classroom the first year, there isn’t even an alphabet on the wall alongside all the artwork. At a meeting for parents, no one mentions reading. There’s more fuss about feeding lettuce to the classroom’s tank of escargots (tiny ones, not to be eaten).

  In fact, as I’ll discover, kids aren’t taught to read in maternelle, which lasts until the year they turn six. They just learn letters, sounds, and how to write their own names. I’m told that some kids pick up reading on their own, though I couldn’t say which ones, since their parents don’t mention it. Learning to read isn’t part of the French curriculum until the equivalent of first grade, the year that kids turn seven.

  This relaxed attitude goes against my most basic American belief that earlier is better. But even the most upwardly mobile parents of Bean’s school friends aren’t in any rush. “I prefer that they don’t spend time learning to read now,” Marion, herself a journalist, tells me. She and her husband say that at this stage it’s much more important for children to learn social skills, how to organize their thoughts, and how to speak well.

  They’re in luck. While reading isn’t taught at maternelle, speaking definitely is. In fact, it turns out that the main goal of maternelle is for kids of all backgrounds to perfect their spoken French. A booklet for parents produced by the French government says this French should be “rich, organized, and comprehensible to others” (that is, they need to speak it much better than I do). Charlotte, the teacher, tells me that children of immigrants typically enter maternelle in September speaking bare-bones French or none at all. By March, they’re usually competent if not fluent.

  The French logic seems to be that if children can speak clearly, they can also think clearly. In addition to polishing their spoken grammar, the government’s booklet says a French child learns to “observe, ask questrve thions, and make his interrogations increasingly rational. He learns to adopt a point of view other than his own, and this confrontation with logical thinking gives him a taste of reasoning. He becomes capable of counting, of classifying, ordering, and describing . . .” All those philosophers and intellectuals I see pontificating on evening television in France apparently began their analytical training in preschool.

  I’m grateful for the maternelle. I haven’t forgotten that my friends back in the United States—even if they’re not buying baby-literacy DVDs—are battling to get their kids into private preschools that can cost twelve thousand dollars a year for just half-day sessions. I meet a mother from New Jersey who drives fifty minutes to drop off her twin daughters at their preschool. By the time she gets home, she has enough time to shower and toss in some laundry before she has to go pick them up. It’s not just the well-off who are overwhelmed by child-care costs. In a study showing how much money an American couple with two young kids needs for basic economic security, child care is the top expense.1

  The French maternelle is far from perfect. Teachers effectively have tenure, whether they’re any good or not. There are chronic funding problems and the occasional shortage of places. Bean’s class has twenty-five kids, which feels like quite a lot but isn’t even the maximum. (There’s a teacher’s assistant who helps with supplies, bathroom runs, and general wrangling.)

  On the plus side, the only thing I regularly pay for at maternelle is lunch. (The cost is on a sliding scale ranging from thirteen cents to five euros per day, based on parents’ income.) The school is a seven-minute walk from our house. And the maternelle makes it very easy for mothers to work. It’s in session from 8:20 to 4:20, four days a week. For another small fee there’s a “leisure center” on the premises that can look after kids until the early evening and all day on Wednesdays. The leisure center is also open on many school holidays and during much of the summer, when they take the kids to parks and museums.

  Maternelle is clearly a big part of what’s turning my little American girl into a French person. It’s even making me more French. Unlike at the crèche, the other parents immediately take an interest in Bean and by association in me. They now seem to view our family as part of the cohort that they’ll be traveling all through school with (whereas after the crèche, the kids scattered to different schools). A few of the mothers from Bean’s class have little babies and are out on maternity leave. When I pick up Bean from school and bring her to the park across the street, I sit with some of these women while our kids play. Gradually, we’re even invited over to their homes for birthday parties, afternoon goûters, and dinners.

  While the maternelle brings us all more into French life, it also makes us realize that French families observe social codes that we don’t. After a dinner at the home of my friend Esther and her husband, who have a daughter Bean’s age, Esther becomes agitated because the little girl won’t come out of her room to say good-bye to us. Esther finally marches into the the girl’s room and drags her out.

  “Au revoir,” the four-year-old says, meekly. Esther is so. Et="othed.

  Of course I’d been making Bean say the magic words, “please” and “thank you.” But it turns out that in French there are four magic words: s’il vous plaît (please), merci (thank you), bonjour (hello), and au revoir (good-bye). Please and thank you are necessary, but not nearly sufficient. Bonjour and au revoir—and bonjour in particular—are crucial. I hadn’t realized that learning to say bonjour is a central part of becoming French.

  “Me, my obsession is that my children know to say merci; bonjour; bonjour, madame,” Audrey Goutard, the French journalist with three kids, tells me. “From the age of one, you can’t imagine, I said it to them fifteen times a day.”

  For some French parents, a simple bo
njour isn’t enough. “They should say it with confidence, it’s the first part of a relationship,” another mother tells me. Virginie, the skinny stay-at-home mom, demands that her kids heighten the politeness by saying “bonjour, monsieur” and “bonjour, madame.”

  My friend Esther insists on bonjours at the threat of punishment. “If she doesn’t say bonjour, she stays in her room, no dinner with guests,” Esther explains. “So she says bonjour. It’s not the most sincere bonjour, but it’s the repetition, I’m hoping.”

  Benoît, a professor and father of two, tells me there was a family crisis when he took his kids to stay with their grandparents. His three-year-old daughter would wake up grumpy and didn’t want to say bonjour to her grandfather until she’d had breakfast. She finally compromised by agreeing to say pas bonjour, papi (not good morning, grandpa) to him on the way to the table. “He was happy with that. In a way, she was acknowledging him,” Benoît explains.

  Adults are supposed to say bonjour to each other, too, of course. I think tourists are often treated gruffly in Parisian cafés and shops partly because they don’t begin interactions with bonjour, even if they switch to English afterward. It’s crucial to say bonjour upon climbing into a taxi, when a waitress first approaches your table in a restaurant, or before asking a salesperson if the pants come in your size. Saying bonjour acknowledges the other person’s humanity. It signals that you view her as a person, not just as someone who’s supposed to serve you. I’m amazed that people seem visibly put at ease after I say a nice solid bonjour. It signals that—although I have a strange accent—we’re going to have a civilized encounter.

  In the United States, a four-year-old American kid isn’t obliged to greet me when he walks into my house. He gets to skulk in under the umbrella of his parents’ greeting. And in an American context, that’s supposed to be fine with me. I don’t need the child’s acknowledgment because I don’t quite count him as a full person; he’s in a separate kids’ realm. I might hear all about how gifted he is, but he never actually speaks to me.