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

by Pamela Druckerman

  French parents, however, mean something different than American parents do when they call themselves “strict.” They mean that they’re very strict about a few things and pretty relaxed about everything else. That’s the cadre model: a firm frame, surrounding a lot of freedom.

  “We should leave the child as free as possible, without imposing useless rules on him,” Françoise Dolto says in The Major Stages of Childhood. “We should leave him only the cadre of rules that are essential for his security. And he’ll understand from experience, when he tries to transgress, that they are essential, and that we don’t do anything just to bother him.” In other words, being strict about a few key things makes parents seem more reasonable and thus makes it more likely that children will obey.

  True to Dolto’s spirit, middle-class Parisian parents tell me that they don’t usually get worked up about minor bêtises—those small acts of naughtiness. They assume that these are just part of being a kid. “I think if every misbehavior is treated on the same level, how will they know what’s important?” my friend Esther tells me.

  But these same parents say that they immediately jump on certain types of infractions. Their zero-tolerance areas vary. But almost all the parents I know say that their main nonnegotiable realm is respect for others. They’re referring to all those bonjours, au revoirs, and mercis, and also about speaking respectfully to parents or other adults.

  Physical aggression is another common no-go area. American kids often seem to get away with hitting their parents, even though they know they’re not supposed to. The French adults I know don’t tolerate this at all. Bean hits me once in front of our neighbor Pascal, a bohemian fiftyish bachelor. Pascal is normally an easygoing guy, but he immediately launches into a stern lecture about how “one does not do that.” I’m awed by his sudden conviction. I can see that Bean is awed, too.

  At bedtime you can really see the French balance between being very strict about a few things and very relaxed about most others. A few parents tell me that at bedtime, their kids must stay in their rooms. But within their rooms, they can do what they want.

  I introduce this concept to Bean and she really likes it. She doesn’t focus on the fact that she’s confined to her room. Instead she keeps saying, proudly, “I can do whatever I want.” She usually plays or reads for a while, then puts herself to bed.

  When the boys are about two and they’re sleeping in beds rather than cribs, I introduce this same principle. Since they’re sharing a room, things tend to get a bit more boisterous. I hear a lot of crashing LEGOs. Unless it sounds dangerous, however, I avoid going back in after I’ve said good night. Sometimes, if it’s getting late and they’re still going strong, I come in and tell them that it’s bedtime, and that I’m turning off the lights. They don’t seem to view this as a violation of the do-what-you-want principle. By that point they’re usually exhausted and they climb into bed.

  To pry myself further out of my black-and-white way of looking at authority, I visit Daniel Marcelli. Marcelli is head of child psychiatry at a large hospital in Poitiers and the author of more than a dozen books, including a recent one called Il est permis d’obéir (It Is Permissible to Obey). The book is meant for parents, but typically, it’s also a meditation on the nature of authority. Marcelli develops his arguments in long expositions, quoting Hannah Arendt and delighting in paradoxes.

  His favorite paradox is that in order for parents to have authority, they should say yes most of the time. “If you always forbid, you’re authoritarian,” Marcelli tells me, over coffee and chocolates. He says the main point of parental authority is to authorize children to do things, not to block them.

  Marcelli gives the example of a child who wants an orange or a glass of water or to touch a computer. He says the current French “liberal education” dictates that the child should ask before touchingefoan or taking these things. Marcelli approves of this asking, but he says the parents’ response should almost always be yes.

  Parents “should only forbid him every once in a while . . . because it’s fragile or dangerous. But fundamentally, [the parent’s job] is to teach the child to ask before taking.”

  Marcelli says that embedded in this dynamic is a longer-term goal, with its own paradox: if all is done right, the child will eventually reach a point where he can choose to disobey, too.

  “The sign of a successful education is to teach a child to obey until he can freely authorize himself to disobey from time to time. Because can one learn to disobey certain orders if one has not learned to obey?

  “Submission demeans,” Marcelli explains. “Whereas obedience allows a child to grow up.” (He also says that children should watch a bit of television, so they have a shared culture with other kids.)

  To follow Marcelli’s whole argument about authority, it would help to have been raised in France, where philosophy is taught in high school. What I do understand is that part of the point of building such a firm cadre for kids is that they can sometimes leave the cadre and it will be there when they get back.

  Marcelli is echoing another point I’ve heard a lot in France: without limits, kids will be consumed by their own desires. (“By nature, a human being knows no limits,” Marcelli tells me.) French parents stress the cadre because they know that without boundaries, children will be overpowered by these desires. The cadre helps to contain all this inner turmoil and calm it down.

  That could explain why my children are practically the only ones having tantrums in the park in Paris. A tantrum happens when a child is overwhelmed by his own desires and doesn’t know how to stop himself. The other kids are used to hearing non, and having to accept it. Mine aren’t. My “no” feels contingent and weak to them. It doesn’t stop the chain of wanting.

  Marcelli says that kids with a cadre can absolutely be creative and “awakened”—a state that French parents also describe as “blossoming.” The French ideal is to promote the child’s blossoming within the cadre. He says a small minority of French parents think that blossoming is the only important thing and don’t build any cadre for their kids. It’s pretty clear how Marcelli feels about this latter group. Their children, he says, “don’t do well at all, and despair in every sense.”

  I’m quite taken with this new view. From now on I’m determined to be authoritative but not authoritarian. When I’m putting Bean to bed one evening, I tell her that I know she needs to do bêtises sometimes. She looks relieved. It’s a moment of complicity.

  “Can you tell that to Daddy?” she asks.

  Bean, who, after all, spends her l, adddays in a French school, has a better grasp of discipline than I do. One morning I’m in the lobby of our apartment building. Simon is traveling, I’m alone with the kids, and we’re running late. I need the boys to get into the stroller so I can rush Bean to school and then take them to the crèche. But the boys refuse to get into their double stroller. They want to walk, which will take even longer. What’s more, we’re in the courtyard of our building, so the neighbors can hear and even watch this whole exchange. I summon whatever precoffee authority I can muster and insist that they get in. This has no effect.

  Bean has been watching me, too. She clearly believes that I should be able to galvanize two little boys.

  “Just say ‘one, two, three,’” she says, with considerable irritation. Apparently, this is what her teachers say when they want an uncooperative child to comply.

  Saying one, two, three isn’t rocket science. Some American parents certainly say it, too. But the logic behind it is very French. “This gives him some time, and it’s respectful to the child,” Daniel Marcelli says.1 The child should be allowed to play an active role in obeying, which requires giving him time to respond.

  In It Is Permissible to Obey, Marcelli gives the example of a child who seizes a sharp knife. “His mother looks at him and says to him, her face ‘cold,’ her tone firm and neutral, her eyebrows lightly furrowed: ‘Put that down!’” In this example, the child looks at his mother but doesn�
�t move. Fifteen seconds later, his mother adds, in a firmer tone, “You put it down right away” and then ten seconds later, “Do you understand?”

  In Marcelli’s telling, the little boy then puts the knife on the table. “The mother’s face relaxes, her voice becomes sweeter, and she says to him, ‘That’s good.’ Then she explains to him that it’s dangerous and that you can cut yourself with a knife.”

  Marcelli notes that although the child was obedient in the end, he was also an active participant. There was reciprocal respect. “The child has obeyed, his mother thanks him but not excessively, her child recognizes her authority . . . For this to happen, there must be words, time, patience, and reciprocal recognition. If his mother had rushed over to him and snatched the knife from his hands, he wouldn’t have understood much of anything.”

  It’s hard to strike this balance between being the boss but also listening to a child and respecting him. One afternoon, as I’m getting Joey dressed to leave the crèche, he suddenly collapses in tears. I’m all charged up in my new “It’s me who decides” mode. I have the fervor of a convert. I decide that this is like the incident with Adrien on the doctor’s scale: I’m going to force him to get dressed.

  But Fatima, his favorite caregiver at the crèche, hears the ruckus and comes into the changing room. She takes the opposite tack from me. Joey may throw fits all the time at home, but at the crèche it’s quite unusual. Fatima leans into Joey and starts stroking his forehead.

  " wdiv>

  “What is it?” she keeps asking him gently. She views this tantrum not as some abstract, inevitable expression of the terrible twos but as communication from a very small, blond, rational being.

  After a minute or two, Joey calms down enough to explain—through words and gestures—that he wants his hat from his locker. That’s what this whole scene had been about. (I think he’d tried to grab it earlier.) Fatima takes Joey down from the changing table, then watches as he goes to the locker, opens it, and takes out the hat. After that, he’s sage and ready to go.

  Fatima isn’t a pushover. She has a lot of authority with the kids. She didn’t think that just because she patiently listened to Joey, she was giving in to him. She just calmed him down, then gave him a chance to express what he wanted.

  Unfortunately, there are endless scenarios and no one rule about what to do in every case. The French have a whole bunch of contradictory principles and few hard-and-fast rules. Sometimes you listen carefully to your kid. And sometimes you just put him on the scale. It’s about setting limits, but also about observing your child, building complicity, and then adapting to what the situation requires.

  For some parents, all this probably becomes automatic. But for now, I wonder if this balance will ever come naturally to me. It feels like the difference between trying to learn salsa dancing as a thirty-year-old and growing up dancing salsa as a child with your dad. I’m still counting steps and stepping on toes.

  In some American homes I’ve visited, it’s not uncommon for a child to be sent to his room during practically every meal. In France, there are lots of small reminders about how to behave, but being puni (punished) is a big deal.

  Often, parents send the punished child to his room or to a corner. Sometimes, they spank him. I’ve seen French kids spanked in public only a few times, though friends of mine in Paris say they see it more frequently. At a staging of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the actress playing mommy bear asks the audience what should happen to the baby bear, who’s been acting up.

  “La fessée!” (a spanking) the crowd of little kids shouts in unison. In a national poll,2 19 percent of French parents said they spank their kids “from time to time”; 46 percent said they spank “rarely”; and 2 percent said they spank “often.” Another 33 percent said they never spank their kids.3

  In the past, la fessée probably played a bigger role in French child rearing and in enforcing adults’ authority. But the tide is turning. All the French parenting experts I read about oppose it.4 Instead of spanking, they recommend that parents become adept at saying no. Like Marcelli, they say that “no” should be used sparingly. But once uttered, it must be definitive.

  This idea isn’t new. Insnrenc fact, it comes all the way from Rousseau. “Give willingly, refuse unwillingly,” he writes in Émile. “But let your refusal be irrevocable. Let no entreaties move you; let your ‘no,’ once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it. Thus you will make him patient, equable, calm and resigned, even when he does not get all he wants.”

  In addition to the rapid-movement gene, Leo has also been born with the subversive gene.

  “I want water,” he announces at dinner one night.

  “What’s the magic word?” I ask sweetly.

  “Water!” he says, smirking. (Strangely, Leo—who looks the most like Simon—speaks with a slight British accent. Joey and Bean both sound American.)

  Building a cadre for your kids is a lot of work. In the early years, it requires much repetition and attention. But once it’s in place, it makes life much easier and calmer (or so it seems). In moments of desperation I start telling my kids, in French, “C’est moi qui décide” (It’s me who decides). Just uttering this sentence is strangely fortifying. My back stiffens a bit when I say it.

  The French way also requires a paradigm shift. I’m so used to believing that everything revolves around the kids. Being more “French” means moving the center of gravity away from them and letting my own needs spread out a bit, too.

  Feeling like I have some control also makes having three little kids a lot more manageable. When Simon is traveling one spring weekend, I let the kids drag carpets and blankets out on our balcony and create a kind of Moroccan lounge. I bring them hot chocolate, and they sit around sipping it.

  When I tell Simon about this later, he immediately asks, “Wasn’t it stressful?” It probably would have been a few weeks earlier. I’d have felt overpowered by them or too worried to enjoy it. There would have been shouting, which—since our

  balcony overlooks the courtyard—our neighbors would have heard.

  But now that I’m the decider, at least a little bit, having three kids on the balcony with hot chocolate actually feels manageable. I even sit down and have a cup of coffee with them.

  One morning I’m taking Leo to crèche by himself. (Simon and I have divided the morning duties.) As I’m riding down the elevator with Leo, I feel a sense of dread. I decide to tell him firmly that there will be no shouting in the courtyard. I present this new rule as if it has always existed. I explain it firmly, while looking into Leo’s eyes. I ask him whether he understands, and then pause to give him a chance to reply. After a thoughtful moment, he says yes.

  When we open the glass door and walk out into the courtyard, it’s silent. There’s no shouting or whining. There’s just a very speedy little boy, tugging me along.

  Chapter 14

  let him live his life

  One day, a notice goes up at Bean’s school. It says that parents of students ages four to eleven can register their kids for a summer trip to the Hautes-Vosges, a rural region about five hours by car from Paris. The trip, sans parents, will last for eight days.

  I can’t imagine sending Bean, who’s five, on an eight-day school holiday. She’s never even spent more than a night alone at my mother’s house. My own first overnight class trip, to SeaWorld, was when I was in junior high.

  This trip is yet another reminder that while I can now use the subjunctive in French, and even get my kids to listen to me, I’ll never actually be French. Being French means looking at a notice like this and saying, as the mother of another five-year-old next to me does, “What a shame. We already have plans then.” None of the French parents find the idea of dispatching their four- and five-year-olds for a week of group showers and dormitory life to be at all alarming.

  I soon discover that this school trip is
just the beginning. I didn’t go to sleepaway camp until I was ten or eleven. But in France, there are hundreds of different sleepaway colonies de vacances (vacation colonies) for kids as young as four. The younger kids typically go away for seven or eight days to the countryside, where they ride ponies, feed goats, learn songs, and “discover nature.” For older kids, there are colonies that specialize in things like theater, kayaking, or astronomy.

  It’s clear that giving kids a degree of independence, and stressing a kind of inner resilience and self-reliance, is a big part of French parenting. The French call this autonomie (autonomy). They generally aim to give children as much autonomy as they can handle. This includes physical autonomy, like the class trips. It also includes emotional separation, like letting them build their own self-esteem that doesn’t depend on praise from parents and other adults.

  I admire a lot about French parenting. I’ve tried to absorb the French way of eating, of wielding authority, and of teaching my kids to entertain themselves. I’ve started speaking at length to babies and letting my kids just “discover” things for themselves, instead of pushing them to acquire skills. In moments of crisis and confusion, I often find myself asking: What would a French mother do?

  But I have a harder time accepting certain parts of the French emphasis on autonomy, like the school trips. Of course I don’t want my kids to be too dependent on me. But what’s the rush? Must the push for autonomy start so young? And aren’t the French overdoing it a bit? In some cases, the drive to make kids self-reliant seems to clash with my most basic instincts to protect my kids and to make them feel good.

  Amo perican parents tend to dole out independence quite differently. It’s only after I marry Simon, a European, that I realize I spent much of my childhood acquiring survival skills. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I can shoot a bow and arrow, right a capsized canoe, safely build a fire on someone’s stomach, and—while treading water—convert a pair of blue jeans into an inflated life jacket.