As a European, Simon didn’t have this survivalist upbringing. He never learned how to pitch a tent or steer a kayak. He’d be hard-pressed to know which end of a sleeping bag to crawl into. In the wild he’d survive about fifteen minutes—and that’s only if he had a book.
The irony is, while I have all these faux pioneering skills, I learned them in tightly scheduled summer camps after my parents had signed disclaimers drawn up by lawyers in case I drowned. And that was before there were Webcams in classrooms and vegan, nut-free birthday cakes.
Despite their scouting badges and killer backhands, middle-class American kids are famously quite protected. “The current trend in parenting is to shield children from emotional or physical discomfort,” the American psychologist Wendy Mogel writes in The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. Instead of giving kids freedom, the well-heeled parents Mogel counsels “try to armor [their kids] with a thick layer of skills by giving them lots of lessons and pressuring them to compete and excel.”
It’s not simply that Americans don’t emphasize autonomy. It’s that we’re not sure it’s a good thing. We tend to assume that parents should be physically present as much as possible, to protect kids from harm and to smooth out emotional turbulence for them. Simon and I have joked since Bean was born that we’ll just move with her to wherever she attends college. Then I see an article saying that some American colleges now hold “parting ceremonies” for the parents of incoming freshmen, to signal that the parents need to leave.
French parents don’t seem to have this fantasy of control. They want to protect their kids, but they aren’t obsessed with far-flung eventualities. When they’re traveling they don’t, as I do, e-mail their husband once a day to remind him to bolt the front door and to make sure that all the toilet lids are closed (so a child can’t fall in).
In France, the social pressure goes in the opposite direction. If a parent hovers too much or seems to micromanage his child’s experiences, someone else is apt to urge him to back off. My friend Sharon, the literary agent with two kids, explains: “Here there’s an argument about pushing a child to the max. Everyone will say, ‘You have to let children live their lives.’”
The French emphasis on autonomy comes all the way from Françoise Dolto. “The most important thing is that a child will be, in full security, autonomous as early as possible,” Dolto says in The Major Stages of Childhood. “The trap of the relationship between parents and children is not recognizing the true needs of the child, of which freedom is one . . . The child has the need to feel ‘loved in what he is becoming,’ sure of himself in a space, day by day more freely left to his own exploration, to his personal experience, and in his relations with those of his own ageof su.”
Dolto is talking, in part, about leaving a child alone, safely, to figure things out for himself. She also means respecting him as a separate being who can cope with challenges. In Dolto’s view, by the time a child is six years old, he should be able to do everything in the house—and in society—that concerns him.1
The French way can be tough for even the most integrated Americans to accept. My friend Andi, an artist who’s lived in France for more than twenty years, says that when her older son was six she found out that he had an upcoming class trip.
“Everyone tells you how great it is, because in April there’ll be a classe verte (literally, a green class). And you say to yourself, ‘Hmm, what’s that? Oh, a field trip. And it’s a week? It lasts a week?’” At her son’s school, the trips are optional until first grade. After that, the whole class of twenty-five kids is expected to go on a weeklong trip with the teacher each spring.
Andi says that by American standards, she isn’t a particularly clingy mother. However, she couldn’t get comfortable with the “green class”—which was to be held near some salt marshes off the western coast of France. Her son had never even gone on a sleepover. Andi still corralled him into the shower each night. She couldn’t imagine him going to bed without her tucking him in. She liked his teacher, but she didn’t know the other adults who’d be supervising the trip. One was the teacher’s nephew. Another was a supervisor from the playground. The third, Andi recalls, was just “this other person [the teacher] knows.”
When Andi told her three sisters in the United States about the trip, “they completely freaked out. They said, ‘You don’t have to do that!’ One’s a lawyer, and she’s like, ‘Did you sign anything?’” Andi says they were mainly worried about pedophiles.
At an informational meeting about the trip, another American mom from the class asked the teacher how she would cope with a scenario in which an electrical wire accidentally fell in the water and a child then walked into the water. Andi says the French parents snickered. She was relieved that she hadn’t asked the question, but she admits that it reflected her own “hidden neuroses.”
Andi’s own main concern—which she didn’t dare raise at the meeting—was what would happen if her son became sad or upset during the trip. When this happens at home, “I try to help him identify his emotions. If he started crying and he didn’t know why, I would say, ‘Are you scared, frustrated, are you angry?’ That was my thing. I was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to go through this together.’”
The French emphasis on autonomy extends beyond school trips. My heart regularly jumps when I’m walking around my neighborhood, because French parents will often let small kids race ahead of them on the sidewalk. They trust that the kids will stop at the corner and wait for them. Watching this is particularly terrifying when the kids are on scooters.
I live in a world of worst-case scenarst-ularios. When I run into my friend Hélène on the street and we stop to chat, she lets her three girls wander off a bit, toward the edge of the sidewalk. She trusts that they won’t suddenly dash into the street. Bean probably wouldn’t do that either. But just in case, I make her stand next to me and hold my hand. Simon reminds me that I once wouldn’t let Bean sit in the stands to watch him play soccer, in case she got hit by the ball.
There are many small moments in France when I’d expect to help my kids along, but they’re supposed to go it alone. By accident, I often run into the caregivers from the boys’ crèche leading a group of toddlers down the street to buy the day’s baguettes. It’s not an official outing; it’s just taking a few kids for a walk. Bean has been on school trips to the zoo or to a big park on the outskirts of Paris, which I learn about only by accident weeks later (when I happen to take her to the same zoo). I am rarely asked to sign waivers. French parents don’t seem to worry that anything untoward might be happening on these trips.
When Bean has a recital for her dance class, I’m not even allowed backstage. I make sure she has a pair of white leggings, which is the only instruction that’s been communicated to parents. I never speak to the teacher. Her relationship is with Bean, not with me. When we get to the theater, I just hand Bean over to an assistant, who shuttles her backstage.
For weeks Bean has been telling me, “I don’t want to be a marionette.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it becomes clear as soon as the curtains open. Bean comes onstage in full costume and makeup, with a dozen other little girls, doing deliberately jolty arm and leg movements to a song called “Marionetta.” Not deliberately, the girls are way out of synch with each other. They look like escaped marionettes who’ve had too much cognac.
But it’s clear that Bean, without my knowledge, has memorized an entire ten-minute dance routine. When she comes out from backstage after the show, I gush about what a wonderful job she did. But she looks disappointed.
“I forgot to not be a marionette,” she says.
French kids aren’t just more independent in their extracurricular activities. They also have more autonomy in their dealings with each other. French parents seem slower to intervene in playground disputes or to mediate arguments between siblings. They expect kids to work these situations out for themselves. French schoolyards are famously free-for-alls, with teachers mostly watching from the si
delines.
When I pick up Bean from preschool one afternoon, she has just come from the schoolyard and has a red gash on her cheek. It’s not deep, but it’s bleeding. She won’t tell me what happened (though she doesn’t seem concerned, and she isn’t in pain). Her teacher claims not to know what happened. I’m practically in tears by the time I question the director of the school, but she doesn’t know anything about it either. They all seem surprised that I’m making such a fuss.
My mother happens to be visiting, and she can’t believe this nonchalance. She says that a similar injury in America would prompt official inquiries, calls home, and lengthy explanations.font>
For French parents, such events are upsetting, but they aren’t Shakespearean tragedies. “In France we like it when kids brawl a bit,” the journalist and author Audrey Goutard tells me. “It’s the part of us that’s a bit French and a bit Mediterranean. We like that our children know how to defend their territory and quarrel a bit with other children . . . We’re not bothered by a certain violence between children.”
Bean’s reluctance to say how she got the gash probably reflects another aspect of the autonomy ethos. “Telling” on another child—known in French as rapporter contre—is viewed very badly. People theorize that this is because of all the lethal informing on neighbors that went on during World War II. At the annual meeting of my apartment’s building association, many of whose members were alive during the war, I ask if anyone knows who’s been tipping over our stroller in the lobby.
“We don’t rapporter,” an older woman says. Everyone laughs.
Americans don’t like tattletales, either. However, in France, even among kids, having the inner resolve to suffer some scrapes and keep your lips sealed is considered a life skill. Even within families, people are entitled to their secrets.
“I can have secrets with my son that he can’t tell his mother,” Marc, the French golfer, tells me. I see a French movie in which a well-known economist picks up his teenage daughter at a Parisian police station after she’s been brought in for shoplifting and possessing marijuana. On the drive home, she defends herself by saying that at least she didn’t rat on the friend who was with her.
This don’t-tell culture creates solidarity among kids. They learn to rely on one another and on themselves, rather than rushing to parents or school authorities for backup. There certainly isn’t the same reverence for truth at any cost. Marc and his American wife, Robynne, tell me about a recent case in which their son Adrien, who’s now ten, saw another student setting off firecrackers at school. There was a big inquiry. Robynne urged Adrien to tell the school authorities what he’d seen. Marc advised him to consider the other boy’s popularity and whether he could beat Adrien up.
“You have to calculate the risks,” Marc says. “If the advantage is not to do anything, he should do nothing. I want my son to analyze things.”
I see this emphasis on making kids learn their own lessons when I’m renovating our apartment. Like all the American parents I know, I’m eager for everything to be rigorously childproof. I choose rubber flooring for the kids’ bathroom, lest they slip on wet tile. I also insist that every appliance has a kidproof lock and that the oven door is the type that doesn’t get hot.
My contractor, Régis, an earthy, roguish fellow from Burgundy, thinks I’m nuts. He says the way to “childproof” an oven is to let the kid touch it once and realize that it’s hot. Régis refuses to install rubber floors in the bathroom, saying that they would look terrible. I concede, but only when he also mentions the apartmentg kiapaRés resale value. I don’t budge on the oven.
On the day that I read an English story to Bean’s class at maternelle, the teacher gives a brief English lesson beforehand. She points to a pen and asks the kids to say the pen’s color in English. In response, a four-year-old boy says something about his shoes.
“That has nothing to do with the question,” the teacher tells him.
I’m taken aback by this response. I would have expected the teacher to find something positive to say, no matter how far off the subject the answer is. I come from the American tradition of, as the sociologist Annette Lareau describes it, “treating each child’s thought as a special contribution.”2 By crediting kids for even the most irrelevant comments, we try to give them confidence and make them feel good about themselves.
In France, that kind of parenting is very conspicuous. I see this when I take the kids to the inground trampolines in the Tuileries gardens, next to the Louvre. Each child jumps on his own trampoline inside a gated area while parents watch from the surrounding benches. But one mom has brought a chair inside the gates and parked it directly in front of her son’s trampoline. She shouts “Whoa!” each time he jumps. I know, even before I approach to eavesdrop further, that she must be an Anglophone like me.
I know this because, although I manage to restrain myself at the trampolines, I feel compelled to say “Whee!” each time one of my kids goes down a slide. This is shorthand for “I see you doing this! I approve! You’re wonderful!” Likewise, I praise even their worst drawings and artwork. I feel that I must, to boost their self-esteem.
French parents also want their kids to feel good about themselves and “bien dans leur peau” (comfortable in their own skin). But they have a different strategy for bringing this about. It’s in some ways the opposite of the American strategy. They don’t believe that praise is always good.
The French believe that kids feel confident when they’re able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don’t praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well. Sociologist Raymonde Carroll says French parents want to teach their children to verbally “defend themselves well.” She quotes an informant who says, “In France, if the child has something to say, others listen to him. But the child can’t take too much time and still retain his audience; if he delays, the family finishes his sentences for him. This gets him in the habit of formulating his ideas better before he speaks. Children learn to speak quickly, and to be interesting.”
Even when French kids do say interesting things—or just give the correct answer—French adults are decidedly understated in response. They don’t act like every job well done is an occasion to say “good job.” When I take Bean to the free health clinic for a checkup, the pediatrician asks her to do a wooden puzzle. Bean does it. The doctor looks at the finished puzzle and then does something I’m not constitutionally ctittheapable of: practically nothing. She mutters the faintest “bon”—more of a “let’s move on” than a “good”—then proceeds with the checkup.
Not only don’t teachers and authority figures in France routinely praise children to their faces but, to my great disappointment, they also don’t routinely praise children to their parents. I had hoped this was a quirk of Bean’s rather sullen first-year teacher. The following year she has two alternating teachers. One is a dynamic, extremely warm young woman named Marina, with whom Bean has an excellent rapport. But when I ask Marina how things are going, she says that Bean is “très compétente.” (I type this into Google Translate, to make sure I haven’t missed some nuance of compétente that might suggest brilliance. It just means “competent.”)
It’s good that my expectations are low when Simon and I have a midsemester meeting with Agnès, Bean’s other teacher. She, too, is lovely and attentive. And yet she also seems reluctant to label Bean or make any general statements about her. She simply says, “Everything is fine.” Then she shows us the one worksheet—out of dozens—that Bean had trouble finishing. I leave the meeting having no idea of how Bean ranks against her peers.
After the meeting, I’m miffed that Agnès didn’t mention anything that Bean has done well. Simon points out that in France, that’s not a teacher’s job. Rather, Agnès’s role is to discover problems. If the child is struggling, the parents need to know. If the child is coping, there’s nothing more to say.
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This focus on the negative, rather than on trying to boost kids’—and parents’—morales with positive reinforcement, is a well-known (and often criticized) feature of French schools. It’s almost impossible to get a perfect score on the French baccalauréat, the final exams at the end of high school. A score of 14:20 (14 out of a possible 20) is considered excellent, and 16:20 is almost like getting a perfect score.3
Through friends I meet Benoît, who’s a father of two and a professor at one of France’s elite universities. Benoît says his high-school-aged son is an excellent student. However, the most positive comment a teacher ever wrote on one of his papers was des qualités (some good qualities). Benoît says French teachers don’t grade their students on a curve, but rather against an ideal, which practically no one meets.4 Even for an outstanding paper, “the French way would be to say ‘correct, not too bad, but this and this and this and this are wrong.’”
By high school, Benoît says there’s little value placed on letting students express their feelings and opinions. “If you say, ‘I love this poem because it makes me think of certain experiences I had,’ that’s completely wrong . . . What you’re taught in high school is to learn to reason. You’re not supposed to be creative. You’re supposed to be articulate.”
When Benoît took a temporary posting at Princeton, he was surprised when students accused him of being a harsh grader. “I learned that you had to say some positive things about even the worst essays,” he recaysigh alls. In one incident, he had to justify giving a student a D. Conversely, I hear that an American who taught at a French high school got complaints from parents when she gave grades of 18:20 and 20:20. The parents assumed that the class was too easy and that the grades were “fake.”
