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

by Pamela Druckerman

  When I’m at a family luncheon back in cheks the United States, I’m struck that the cousins and stepcousins at the table, who range in age from five to fourteen, don’t say anything at all to me unless I pry it out of them. Some can only muster one-word responses to my questions. Even the teenagers aren’t used to expressing themselves with confidence to a grown-up they don’t know well.

  Part of what the French obsession with bonjour reveals is that, in France, kids don’t get to have this shadowy presence. The child greets, therefore he is. Just as any adult who walks into my house has to acknowledge me, any child who walks in must acknowledge me, too. “Greeting is essentially recognizing someone as a person,” says Benoît, the professor. “People feel injured if they’re not greeted by children that way.”

  These aren’t just social conventions; they’re a national project. In a meeting for parents at Bean’s school, her teacher says that one of the school’s goals is for students to remember the names of adults (Bean calls her teachers by their first names) and to practice saying bonjour, au revoir, and merci to them. The booklet by the French government says that in maternelle kids are supposed to show their grasp of “civility and politeness,” including “greeting the teacher at the beginning and the end of the day, responding to questions, thanking the person who helps him, and not cutting someone off when they’re speaking.”

  French children don’t always succeed in saying bonjour. Often there’s a little ritual in which the parent pushes the child to say it (“Come say bonjour!”). The adult who’s being greeted waits a beat and then tells the parent, in a friendly way, not to worry about it. This seems to satisfy the obligation, too.

  Making kids say bonjour isn’t just for the benefit of grown-ups. It’s also to help kids learn that they’re not the only ones with feelings and needs.

  “It avoids selfishness,” says Esther, who dragged out her daughter—an adorable, doted-on only child—to say good-bye to me. “Kids who ignore people, and don’t say bonjour or au revoir, they just stay in their bubble. Since parents are dedicated to them already, when will they get the sense that they are there to give, not just to receive?”

  Saying “please” and “thank you” puts children in an inferior, receiving role. An adult has either done something for them or the child is asking the adult to do something. But bonjour and au revoir put the child and the adult on more equal footing, at least for that moment. It cements the idea that kids are people in their own right.

  I can’t help thinking that letting an American kid slink in the door without greeting me could set off a chain reaction in which she then jumps on my couch, refuses to eat anything but plain pasta, and bites my foot while I’m having dinner. If she’s exempt from that first rule of civility, she—and everyone else—will be quicker to assume that she’s exempt from many other rules, too, or that she’s not capable of following these rules. Saying bonjour signals to the child, and to everyone else, that she’s capable of behaving well. It sets the tone for the whole interaction between adults and children.

  Parents acknowledge that greeting someone is in some ways an adult act. “I don’t think it’s easy to say hello,” says Denise, a medical ethicist with two girls, ages seven and nine. But Denise says it fortifies kids to know that their greeting matters to the adult. She explains: “I think the child who doesn’t say bonjour cannot really feel confident.”

  Neither can the child’s parents. That’s because saying bonjour is also a strong marker of upbringing. Kids who don’t say the French magic words risk being slapped with the label mal élevé—badly brought up.

  Denise says her younger daughter had a friend over who shouted quite a lot and jokingly called Denise chérie—darling. “I told my husband, I will not invite him back,” she tells me. “I don’t want my child to play with children who are badly brought up.”

  Audrey Goutard, the journalist, has written a book called Le Grand Livre de la Famille, in which she tries to upend some French parenting conventions. But even Goutard doesn’t dare question the importance of bonjour. “Honestly, in France, a child who arrives somewhere and doesn’t say bonjour, monsieur; bonjour, madame is a child that one rejects,” she tells me. “A six-year-old who doesn’t look up from the TV when you come in, at a friend’s house . . . I’m going to say that he is ‘badly raised.’ I won’t say that it’s normal.

  “We’re a society with a lot of codes. And this code, if you don’t follow it, you’re excluded from society. It’s as stupid as that. So you give [your kids] less of a chance to be integrated, to meet people. I say in my book that it’s better that your kids know this code.”

  Yikes. I’d vaguely noticed French kids saying bonjour. But I hadn’t realized how much rests on it. It’s the sort of signifier that having nice teeth is in the United States. When you say bonjour, it shows that someone has invested in your upbringing and that you’re going to play by some basic social rules. Bean’s cohort of three- and four-year-olds has already had several years’ worth of bonjours drilled into them. Bean hasn’t had any. With only “please” and “thank you” in her arsenal, she’s at just 50 percent. She might have already earned the dreaded label “badly brought up.”

  I try to appeal to the tiny anthropologist in her by explaining that bonjour is a native custom she has to respect.

  “We live in France, and for French people it’s very important to say bonjour. So we have to say it, too,” I say. I coach her in the elevator before we arrive at birthday parties and at visits to the homes of French friends.

  “What are you going to say when we walk in?” I ask anxiously.

  “Caca boudin,” she says.

  Usually when we walk in, she says inylenothing at all. So I go through the ritual of, very publicly, telling her to say bonjour. At least I’m acknowledging the convention. Maybe I’m even instilling the habit.

  One day while Bean and I are walking to her school, she spontaneously turns to me and says, “Even if I’m shy, I have to say bonjour.” Maybe it’s something she picked up in school. Anyway, it’s true. And it’s good that she knows it. But I can’t help worrying that she’s internalizing the rules a bit too much. It’s one thing to play at being French. It’s quite another to really go native.

  Although I’m ambivalent about Bean growing up French, I’m thrilled that she’s growing up bilingual. Simon and I speak only English to her. And at school, she speaks only French. I’m sometimes astonished that I’ve given birth to a child who can effortlessly pronounce phrases like carottes rapées and confiture sur le beurre.

  I had thought that young kids just “pick up” languages. But it’s more like a long process of trial and error. A few people tell me that Bean’s French still has an American twang. And though Bean has never lived outside the Paris ring road, thanks to us she evidently radiates some kind of Americanness. When I take her to her Wednesday-morning music class one day (the babysitter usually takes her), I discover that the teacher has been speaking to Bean in pidgin English, though she speaks French to all the other children. Later, a dance teacher tells the class of little girls, in French, to lie down flat on the floor “comme une crêpe”—like a crepe. Then she turns to Bean and says, “comme un pancake.”

  At first, even I can tell that Bean is making lots of mistakes in French and coming up with some bizarre constructions. She usually says the English “for” instead of its French equivalent, “pour.” And she knows only the vocabulary that she’s learned in the classroom, which doesn’t really equip her to talk about cars or dinner. One day she suddenly asks me, “Avion is the same as airplane?” She’s figuring it out.

  I’m not sure which mistakes come from being bilingual and which come from being three or four years old. One day in the metro, Bean leans into me and says, “You smell like vomela.” This turns out to be a combination of “vomit” and “Pamela.”

  A minute later Bean leans into me again.

  “What do I smell like now?” I ask.

  “Like colleg
e,” she says.

  At home, some French expressions edge out the English ones. We start saying coucou instead of peekaboo, and guili-guili when we tickle her, instead of coochi coochi coo. Bean doesn’t play hide-and-seek, she plays cache-cache. We put our garbage in the poubelle; her pacifier is a tétine. No one in our household farts, they make prouts (rhymes with “roots”).

  By the spring of Bean’s first year in maternelle, friends tell me that her American twang ieri"0"s gone. She sounds like a genuine Parisienne. She’s become so confident in French that I overhear her joking around with friends, in French, in an exaggerated American accent (probably mine). She likes to mix up the two accents on purpose, and decides that the French word for “sprinkles” must be “shpreenkels.”

  Me: How do you say d’accord in English?

  Bean: You know! [sounding like an Alabaman] Dah-kord.

  My father finds the idea of having a “French” grandchild charming. He tells Bean to call him grand-père. Bean doesn’t even consider doing this. She knows he’s not French. She just calls him grandpa.

  At night Bean and I look at picture books. She’s excited and relieved to confirm that, as with “airplane,” certain words in French and English refer to the same thing. When we read the famous line in the Madeline books, “Something is not right!” she translates it into colloquial French: “Quelque chose ne va pas!”

  Although Simon has an English accent, Bean’s English sounds mostly American. I’m not sure if that’s my influence or Elmo’s. The other Anglophone kids we know in Paris all have their own accents. Bean’s friend with a dad from New Zealand and a mother who’s half-Irish sounds full-on British. A boy with a Parisian mother and a Californian dad sounds like a French chef from 1970s American television. The little boy around the corner with a Farsi-speaking father and an Australian mom just sounds like a creaky Muppet.

  In English, Bean occasionally emphasizes the wrong syllables of words (the second syllable of “salad,” for example). And she sometimes puts English sentences into a French word order (“Me, I’m not going to have an injection, me”) or translates literally from French to English (“Because it’s like that!”). She tends to say “after” when what she means is “later.” (In French they’re the same word, après.)

  Sometimes Bean just doesn’t know how native English speakers talk. In a weird appropriation of all the Disney princess DVDs she’s been watching, when she wants to know if something looks good on her, she simply asks, “Am I the fairest?” These are all small things. There’s nothing that a summer at an American sleepaway camp won’t fix.

  Another French word that infiltrates our English vocabulary is bêtise (pronounced beh-teeze). It means a small act of naughtiness. When Bean stands up at the table, grabs an unauthorized piece of candy, or pitches a pea on the floor, we say that she’s “doing a bêtise.” Bêtises are minor annoyances. They’re bad, but they’re not that bad. The accumulation of many of them may warrant a punishment. But just one bêtise on its own probably doesn’t.

  We’ve appropriated the French word because there’s no good English translation of bêtise. In English, you wouldn’t tell a child that he’s committed a “small act of naughtiness.” We tend to label the kid rather than the crime, by telling him that he’s being naughty, misbehaving, or just “being bad.”

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  div> These phrases don’t really show the severity of the act. Of course, in English, I know the difference between hitting the table and hitting a person. But being able to label an offense as a misdemeanor—a mere bêtise—helps me, as a parent, to respond appropriately. I don’t have to freak out and crack down every time Bean does something wrong or challenges my authority. Sometimes it’s just a bêtise. Having this word calms me down.

  I acquire much of my new French vocabulary not just from Bean but from the many French kids’ books we somehow end up owning, thanks to birthday parties, impulse purchases, and neighbors’ garage sales. I’m careful not to read to Bean in French if there’s a native speaker within earshot. I can hear my American accent and the way I stumble over the odd word. Usually I’m trying so hard not to mispronounce anything too egregiously that I grasp the story line only on the third reading.

  I soon notice that French and English kids’ books and songs aren’t just in different languages. Often, they have very different story lines and moral messages. In the American books there’s usually a problem, a struggle to fix the problem, and then a cheerful resolution. The spoon wishes that she were a fork or a knife but eventually realizes how great it is to be a spoon. The boy who wouldn’t let the other kids play in his box is then excluded from the box himself and realizes that all the kids should play in the box together. Lessons are learned, and life gets better.

  It’s not just the books. I notice how deliriously hopeful I sound when I sing to Bean about how if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands, and, when we’re watching a DVD of the musical Annie, how the sun’ll come out tomorrow. In the English-speaking world, every problem seems to have a solution, and prosperity is just around the corner.

  The French books I read to Bean start out with a similar structure. There’s a problem, and the characters struggle to overcome that problem. But they seldom succeed for very long. Often the book ends with the protagonist having the same problem again. There is rarely a moment of personal transformation, when everyone learns and grows.

  One of Bean’s favorite French books is about two pretty little girls who are cousins and best friends. Eliette (the redhead) is always bossing around Alice (the brunette). One day Alice decides she can’t take it anymore and stops playing with Eliette. There’s a long, lonely standoff. Finally Eliette comes to Alice’s house, begging her pardon and promising to change. Alice accepts the apology. A page later, the girls are playing doctor and Eliette is trying to jab Alice with a syringe. Nothing has changed. The end.

  Not all French kids’ books end this way, but a lot of them do. The message is that endings don’t have to be tidy to be happy. It’s a cliché about Europeans, but you can see it in the morals of Bean’s French stories: Life is ambiguous and complicated. There aren’t bad guys and good guys. Each of us has a bit of both. Eliette is bossy, but she’s also lots of fun. Alice is the victim, but she also seems to ask for it, and she goes back for more.

  We’re to presume that Elietume gote and Alice keep up their little dysfunctional cycle, because, well, that’s what a friendship between two girls is like. I wish I had known that when I was four, instead of finally figuring it out in my thirties. Writer Debra Ollivier points out that American girls pick the petals off daisies saying, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Whereas little French girls allow for more subtle varieties of affection, saying, “He loves me a little, a lot, passionately, madly, not at all.”2

  Characters in French kids’ books can have contradictory qualities. In one of Bean’s Perfect Princess books, Zoé opens a present and declares that she doesn’t like it. But on the next page, Zoé is a “perfect princess” who jumps up and says merci to the gift giver.

  If there were an American version of this book, Zoé would probably overcome her bad habits and morph fully into the perfect princess. The French book is more like real life: Zoé continues to struggle with both sides of her personality. The book tries to encourage princesslike habits (there’s a little certificate at the end for good behavior) but takes for granted that kids also have a built-in impulse to do bêtises.

  There is also a lot of nudity and love in French books for four-year-olds. Bean has a book about a boy who accidentally goes to school naked. She has another about a romance between the boy who accidentally pees in his pants and the little girl who lends him her pants while fashioning her bandana into a skirt. These books—and the French parents I know—treat the crushes and romances of preschoolers as genuine.

  I get to know a few people who grew up in France with American parents. When I ask whether they feel French or American, they almost all say t
hat it depends on the context. They feel American when they’re in France and French when they’re in America.

  Bean seems headed for something similar. I’m able to transmit some American traits, like whining and sleeping badly, with little effort. But others require a lot of work. I begin picking off certain American holidays, based mainly on the amount of cooking each one requires. Halloween is a keeper. Thanksgiving is out. Fourth of July is close enough to Bastille Day (July 14) that I sort of feel like we’re celebrating both. I’m not sure what constitutes classically “American” food, but I am strangely adamant that Bean should like tuna melts.

  Making Bean feel a bit American is hard enough. On top of that, I’d also like her to feel Jewish. Though I put her on the no-pork list at school, this apparently isn’t enough to cement her religious identity. She keeps trying to get a grip on what this strange, anti-Santa label means and how she can get out of it.

  “I don’t want to be Jewish, I want to be British,” she announces in early December.

  I’m reluctant to mention God. I fear that telling her there’s an omnipotent being everywhere—including, presumably, in her room—would terrify her. (She’s already afraid of witches and wolves.) Instead, in the spring, I prepare an elegant Passover dinner. Halfway through the first benediction, Bean begs to leave the table. Simthewiton sits at the far end with a sullen, “I told you so” look. We slurp our matzo-ball soup, then turn on some Dutch football.

  Hanukah is a big success. The fact that Bean is six months older probably helps. So do the candles and the presents. What really wins Bean over is that we sing and dance the hora in our living room, then collapse in a dizzy circle.

  But after eight nights of this, and eight carefully selected presents, she’s still skeptical.