It’s very hard to know where the correct limits lie. By forcing Leo to stay in a playpen or in the sandbox, am I preventing him from one day curing cancer? Where does his free expression end and pointless bad behavior begin? When I let my kids stop and study every manhole cover we pass on the sidewalk, are they following their bliss, or turning into brats?
A lot of Anglophone parents I know find themselves in an awkward in-between zone, where they’re trying to be both dictator and muse to their children. The result is that they end up constantly negotiating. I get my first taste of this when Bean is about three. Our new house rule is that she’s allowed to watch forty-five minutes of television per day. One day, she asks to watch a bit more.
“No. You’ve already had your TV time for today,” I say.
“But when I was a baby I didn’t watch any TV,” she says.
Like us, most Anglophone parents I know have at least some limits. But with so many different parenting philosophies in play, there are other parents who oppose authority altogether. I meet one of them on a visit to the United States.
Liz is a graphic designer in her midthirties, with a five-year-old daughter named Ruby. She easily ticks off her main parenting influences: the pediatrician William Sears, the author Alfie Kohn, and the behaviorist B. F. Skinner.
When Ruby acts up, Liz and her husband try to convince the girl that her behavior is morally wrong. “We want to extinguish unacceptable behaviors without resorting to power plays,” Liz tells me. “I try not to exploit the fact that I’m larger and stronger than she by physically restraining her. Similarly, I try not to resort to the fact that I have all the money by saying, ‘You can have this thing or thong not.’”
I’m touched by the exacting effort that Liz has put into constructing her approach to parenting. She hasn’t merely adopted someone else’s rules; she has carefully digested the work of several thinkers and come up with a thoughtful hybrid. The new way of parenting that she’s created is, she says, a complete break from the way that she herself grew up.
But there are costs. Liz says that this eclectic style, and her desire not to be judged for it, have isolated her from many of her neighbors and peers, and even from her own parents. She says her parents are bewildered and overtly disapproving of how she’s raising Ruby and that she can no longer discuss it with them. Visits home are tense, especially when Ruby acts up.
Nevertheless, Liz and her husband remain determined not to flaunt their authority. Lately Ruby has been hitting them both. Each time, they sit her down and discuss why hitting is wrong. This well-intentioned reasoning isn’t helping. “She still hits us,” Liz says.
France feels like a different planet. Even the most bohemian parents boast about how strict they are and seem unequivocal about being at the top of the family hierarchy. In a country that reveres revolution and climbing the barricades, there are apparently no anarchists at the family dinner table.
“It’s paradoxical,” admits Judith, the art historian and mother of three in Brittany. Judith says she’s “antiauthority” in her political views, but that when it comes to parenting she’s the boss, full stop. “It’s parents, then children,” she says of the family pecking order. In France, she explains, “sharing power with a child doesn’t exist.”
In the French media and among the older generation, there’s talk of that encroaching “child-king” syndrome. But when I talk to parents in Paris, what I hear all the time is “C’est moi qui décide”—It’s me who decides. There’s another slightly more militant variation, “C’est moi qui commande”—it’s me who commands. Parents say these phrases to remind both their kids and themselves who’s the boss.
To Americans, this hierarchy can look like tyranny. Robynne is an American who lives just outside Paris with her French husband and their two kids, Adrien and Lea. Over a family dinner at her apartment one night, she tells me about taking Adrien to the pediatrician when he was a toddler. Adrien cried and refused to step on the scale, so Robynne knelt down to persuade him.
The doctor interrupted. “He said, ‘Don’t explain to him why. Just say ‘That’s why. That’s what you’re doing, you’re going on the scale, that’s it, there’s no discussion.’” Robynne was shocked. She says she eventually changed pediatricians because she found this one too severe.
Robynne’s husband, Marc, has been listening to this story. “No, no, that’s not what he said!” Marc interjects. Marc is a professional golfer who grew up in Paris. He’s one of those French parents who seem to wear their authority quite effortlessly. I notice the way his kids listen carefully when he speaks to them and reso t onpond immediately.
Marc says the doctor wasn’t being wantonly bossy. To the contrary, he was helping with Adrien’s éducation. Marc remembers the incident quite differently:
“He said that you have to be sure of yourself, that you have to take your kid and put him on the scale . . . If you give him too many choices, he doesn’t feel reassured . . . You have to show him that’s the way it is and it’s not a bad way or a good way, it’s just the way.
“It’s a simple gesture but it’s the start of everything,” Marc adds. “You have certain things that don’t need explanation. You need to weigh the kid so you take the kid and put the kid on the scale. Period. Period!”
He says the fact that Adrien found the experience unpleasant was part of the lesson. “Sometimes there are things in life you don’t really like, and you have to do them,” he says. “You don’t always do what you love or what you want to.”
When I ask Marc how he got his authority, it’s clear that it’s not as effortless as it looks. He has put enormous effort into establishing this dynamic with his kids. Having authority is something that he thinks very hard about and considers a priority. All this effort springs from his belief that having a parent who’s confident is reassuring to kids.
“For me it’s better to have a leader, someone who shows the way,” he says. “A kid has to feel like the mom is in control, or the dad.”
“Just like when you’re on a horse,” Adrien, now age nine, chimes in.
“Good comparison!” Robynne says.
Marc adds, “We have a saying in French: it’s easier to loosen the screw than to tighten the screw, meaning that you have to be very tough. If you’re too tough, you loosen. But if you are too lenient . . . afterward to tighten, forget about it.”
Marc is describing the cadre that French parents spend the early years of a child’s life constructing. They construct it in part by establishing their own right to say, sometimes, “Just get on the scale.”
American parents like me just assume that we’ll have to chase our kids around the park all afternoon or spend half a dinner party putting them to bed. It’s irritating, but it’s come to seem normal.
For French parents, living with a child-king seems wildly out of balance and bad for the whole family. They think it would drain much of the pleasure from daily life, for both the parents and the kids. They know that building this cadre requires enormous effort, but they believe that the alternative is unacceptable. It’s obvious to French parents that the cadre is the only thing standing between them and two-hour “good nights.”
is tyle MT Std">“In America, it’s accepted that when you have kids, your time is not your own,” Marc tells me. In his view, “The kids need to understand that they’re not the center of attention. They need to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them.”
So how do parents build this cadre? The process of constructing it does occasionally seem harsh. But it isn’t just about saying no and establishing that “it’s me who decides.” Another way that French parents and educators build the cadre is simply by talking a lot about the cadre. That is, they spend a lot of time telling their kids what’s permissible and what’s not. All this talk seems to will the cadre into existence. It starts to take on an almost physical presence, much like a good mime convinces you there’s actually a wall.
This ongoing conversation
about the cadre is often very polite. Parents say please a lot, even to babies. (They require politeness too, of course, since they understand what’s being said.) In defining limits for kids, French parents often invoke the language of rights. Rather than saying “Don’t hit Jules,” they typically say, “You don’t have the right to hit Jules.” This is more than a semantic difference. It feels different to say it this way. The French phrasing suggests that there’s a fixed and coherent system of rights, which both children and adults can refer to. It also makes clear that the child does have the right to do other things.
Kids pick up this phrase and police each other. A schoolyard chant for little kids is the rhyming “Oh la la, on a pas le droit de faire ça!” (Oh la la, we don’t have the right to do that!)
Another phrase that adults use a lot with children is “I don’t agree,” as in, “I don’t agree with you pitching your peas on the floor.” Parents say this in a serious tone, while looking directly at the child. “I don’t agree” is also more than just “no.” It establishes the adult as another mind, which the child must consider. And it credits the child with having his own view about the peas, even if this view is being overruled. Pitching the peas is cast as something the child has rationally decided to do, so he can decide to do otherwise, too.
This may help explain why mealtimes in France are so calm. Instead of waiting for a big crisis and resorting to dramatic punishments, parents and caregivers focus on making lots of small, polite, preventative adjustments, based on well-established rules.
I see this at the crèche, when I sit in with the eighteen-month-olds for another fabulous, four-course lunch. Six little kids, wearing matching pink terrycloth bibs, are sitting around a rectangular table as Anne-Marie oversees the meal. The atmosphere is extremely calm. Anne-Marie describes the foods in each course and tells the children what’s coming out next. I notice that she also closely watches everything they do and—without raising her voice—comments on small infractions.
“Doucement—gently—we don’t do that with a spoon,” she says to a boy who has started banging his spoon on the table. “No, no, no, we don’t touch the cheese, it’s for later,” she tells another. When she speaks to a child, she always makes eye contact with him.
im. no French parents and caregivers don’t always resort to this level of micromanagement. I’ve noticed that they tend to do it more at mealtimes, when there are more small gestures and rules, and more risk of chaos if things go wrong. Anne-Marie does this combination of conversation and corrections throughout the thirty-minute meal. By the end, the kids’ faces are smeared with food. But there is just a crumb or two on the floor.
Like Marc and Anne-Marie, the French parents and caregivers I meet have authority without seeming like dictators. They don’t aspire to raise obedient robots. To the contrary, they listen and talk to their kids all the time. In fact, the adults I meet who have the most authority all speak to children not as a master to a subject but as one equal to another. “You must always explain the reason” for something that’s forbidden, Anne-Marie tells me.
When I ask French parents what they most want for their children, they say things like “to feel comfortable in their own skin” and “to find their path in the world.” They want their kids to develop their own tastes and opinions. In fact, French parents worry if their kids are too docile. They want them to have character.
But they believe that children can achieve these goals only if they respect boundaries and have self-control. So alongside character, there has to be cadre.
It’s hard to be around so many well-behaved kids and around parents with such high expectations. Day after day, I am embarrassed when the boys start shouting loudly or whining, practically every time we walk through the courtyard between our elevator and the main entrance to our building. It’s like an announcement to the dozens of people whose apartments open onto the courtyard: the Americans have arrived!
Bean and I are invited to one of her schoolmates’ homes for a goûter one afternoon during the Christmas holidays. The kids are served hot chocolate and cookies (I’m given tea). Once we’re all sitting around the table, Bean decides that it’s a good moment to do some bêtises. She takes a swig of her hot chocolate, then spits it back into her mug.
I’m mortified. I’d kick Bean under the table if I could be sure which set of legs was hers. I do hiss at her to stop, but I don’t want to ruin the moment by making too much of a fuss. Meanwhile, our hostess’s three daughters are sitting sagely around the table, nibbling on their cookies.
I see how French parents construct cadres. What I don’t understand is how they calmly keep their kids in the cadre. I can’t help but think of that adage: if you want to keep a man in a ditch, you have to get in the ditch with him. It’s a bit like that at our house. If I send Bean to her room, I have to stay in the room with her, otherwise she’ll come out again.
Empowered by that episode in the park with Leo, I’m trying to be strict all the time. But this doesn’t always work. I’m not sure when to tighten the screw and when to loosen it.
For some guidance, I make a lunch date with Madeleine, a French nanny who worked for Robynne and Marc. She lives in a small city in Brittany, in western France, but is currently working the overnight shift with a new baby in Paris. (The child is “searching for his nights,” Madeleine says.)
Madeleine, sixty-three, is the mother of three boys. She has short graying brown hair and a warm smile. She radiates that total certainty I see in Frederique and other French parents I meet. Like them, she has a calm conviction about her methods.
“The more spoiled a child is, the more unhappy he is,” she tells me, almost as soon as we sit down.
So how does she keep her charges in line?
“Les gros yeux,” she says. This means “the big eyes.” Madeleine demonstrates these for me at the table. As she does, she suddenly morphs from a grandmotherly lady in a matching pink scarf and sweater into a scary-looking owl. Even just for show, she has a lot of conviction.
I want to learn “the big eyes,” too. When our salads arrive, we practice. At first, I have trouble doing the owl without cracking up. But as with Frederique in the park, when I finally hit the point of real conviction, I can feel the difference. Then, I don’t feel like laughing.
Madeleine says that she’s not just trying to frighten children into submission. She says “the big eyes” work best when she has a strong connection with the child, and when there’s mutual respect. Madeleine says the most satisfying part of her job is developing “complicity” with a child, as if they’re seeing the world the same way, and when she almost knows what the child is about to do before he does it. Getting to this point requires carefully observing him, talking with him, and trusting him with certain freedoms.
Indeed, to build a relationship with a child in which the big eyes work, she says strictness must come with flexibility, including giving kids autonomy and choices. “I think you need to leave [kids] a bit of liberty, let their personalities show,” she says.
Madeleine doesn’t see any contradiction between having this strong reciprocal relationship and also being very firm. Her authority seems to come from inside the relationship with children, not from above it. She’s able to balance complicity and authority. “You must listen to the child, but it’s up to you to fix the limits,” she says.
The big eyes are famous in France. Bean was scared of getting them at the crèche. Many French adults still remember being on the receiving end of the big eyes and other similar expressions.
“She had this look,” Clotilde Dusoulier, the Parisian food writer, says of her mother. With both her parents, “There was this tone of voice they used when all of a sudden they felt you had stepped over a line. They had a facial expression that was stern and annoyed and not happy. They would say, ‘No, you don’t say that.’ You would feel chastised and a bit humiliated. It would pass.”
What’s interesting to me is that Clotilde remembers les gros yeux—and t
he cadre the look enforced—very fondly. “She’s always been very clear on what was okay and what wasn’t,” she says of her mother. “She managed to be both affectionate and have authority without ever raising her voice.”
Speaking of voice raising, I seem to do it quite a lot. Shouting does sometimes succeed in getting the kids to brush their teeth, or wash their hands before dinner. But it takes a lot out of me and creates an awful ambience. The louder I yell, the worse I feel about it afterward, and the more tired I am.
French parents do speak sharply to their kids. But they prefer surgical strikes to constant carpet-bombing. Shouting is saved for important moments, when they really want to make a point. When I shout at my kids in the park or at home when we have French friends over, the parents look alarmed, as if they think that there’s been a serious offense.
American parents like me often view imposing authority in terms of discipline and punishment. French parents don’t talk much about these things. Instead, they talk about the éducation of kids. As the word suggests, this is about gradually teaching children what’s acceptable and what’s not.
This idea that you’re teaching, not policing, makes the tone a lot gentler in France. When Leo refuses to use his silverware at dinner, I try to imagine that I’m teaching him to use a fork, much like I’d teach him a letter of the alphabet. This makes it easier for me to be patient and calm. I no longer feel disrespected and angry when he doesn’t immediately comply. And with some of the stress off the situation, he’s more amiable about trying. I don’t yell, and dinner is more pleasant for everyone.
It takes me a while to realize that French and American parents also use the word “strict” quite differently. When Americans describe someone as strict, they typically mean that the person has an all-encompassing authority. The image of a stern, joyless schoolteacher comes to mind. I don’t know many American parents who use this word to describe themselves. But almost all the French parents I know do.
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 24
