French Children Don't Throw Food

by Pamela Druckerman

  The French believe, as we do, that each baby is beautiful and special. But they also realize that some things about babies are just biological. Before we assume that our own children sleep like no others, we should probably think about science.

  Armed with my revelation about the Pause, I decide to look at some of the scientific literature on babies and sleep. Much of what’s been written is published in English-language journals. What I find really surprises me: Anglophone parents are fighting the ‘baby sleep wars’, but Anglophone sleep researchers aren’t. They mostly agree about the best way to get kids to sleep. And their recommendations sound remarkably French.

  Sleep researchers, like French parents, believe that, beginning very early on, parents should play an active role in teaching their babies to sleep well. They say it’s possible to begin teaching a healthy baby to sleep through the night when he’s just a few weeks old, without the baby ever ‘crying it out’.

  A meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers1 concludes that what’s critical is something called ‘parent education/prevention’. That involves teaching pregnant women and parents of newborns about the science of sleep, and giving them a few basic sleep rules. Parents are supposed to start following these rules from their babies’ birth, or when their babies are just a few weeks old.

  What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper2 in which pregnant women who planned to breast-feed were given a two-page handout. One instruction on the handout was not to hold, rock or nurse the baby to sleep in the evenings, to help him learn the difference between day and night. An additional instruction for week-old babies was that if he cried between midnight and 5 am, parents should re-swaddle, pat, change the nappy or walk the baby around, but that the mother should only offer the breast if the baby continued crying after that.

  And from birth, mothers were instructed to distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a crying baby, they should pause to make sure he’s awake. The researchers explained the scientific basis for these instructions. A ‘control group’ of breastfeeding mothers got no instructions.

  The results are remarkable: from birth to three weeks old, babies in the treatment and control groups had nearly identical sleep patterns. But at four weeks old, 38 per cent of the treatment-group babies were sleeping through the night, versus 7 per cent of the control-group babies. At eight weeks, all of the treatment babies were sleeping through the night, compared to 23 per cent of the control babies. The authors’ conclusion is resounding: ‘The results of this study show that breastfeeding need not be associated with night waking.’

  The Pause isn’t just some French folk wisdom. Neither is the belief that sleeping well, early on, is better for everyone. ‘In general, night wakings fall within the diagnostic category of behavioural insomnia of childhood,’ the meta-study explains.

  It says there’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggression, hyperactivity and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things. They’re more prone to accidents, their metabolic and immune functions are weakened, and their overall quality of life diminishes. And sleep problems that begin in infancy can persist for many years. In the study of breastfeeding mothers, the treatment-group infants were afterwards rated more secure, more predictable and less fussy.

  The studies I read point out that when children sleep badly there’s spillover to the rest of the family, including maternal depression and lower overall family functioning. Conversely, when babies slept better, their parents reported that their marriages improved, and that they became better and less-stressed parents.

  Of course, some French babies miss the four-month window for sleepteaching. When this happens, French experts usually recommend some version of crying it out.

  Sleep researchers aren’t ambivalent about this either. The meta-study found that letting kids do controlled crying, either by going cold turkey (known by the unfortunate scientific term ‘extinction’) or in stages (‘graduated extinction’) both work extremely well, and usually succeed in just a few days. ‘The biggest obstacle associated with extinction is lack of parental consistency,’ the study says.

  Michel Cohen, the French doctor in Tribeca, recommends a rather extreme version of this. He says parents should make the baby feel cosy with his usual night-time bath and songs. Then they should put him in bed at a reasonable hour, preferably while he’s still awake. Then they should come back at 7 am.

  In Paris, crying it out has a French twist. I start to realize this when I meet Laurence, a nanny from Normandy who’s working for a French family in Montparnasse. Laurence has been looking after babies for two decades. She tells me that before letting a baby do controlled crying it’s crucial to explain to him what you’re about to do.

  Laurence walks me through this: ‘In the evening, you speak to him. You tell him that, if he wakes up once, you’re going to give him his dummy once. But after that, you’re not going to get up. It’s time to sleep. You’re not far away, and you’re going to come in and reassure him once. But not all night long.’

  Laurence says that a crucial part of getting a baby to do his nights, at any age, is to truly believe that he’s going to do it. ‘If you don’t believe it, it’s not going to work,’ she says. ‘Me, I always think that the child is going to sleep better the next night. I always have hope, even if he wakes up three hours later. You have to believe.’

  It does seem possible that French babies rise to meet their parents’ and carers’ expectations. Perhaps we all get the sleepers we expect, and the simple fact of believing that babies have a rhythm helps us to find it.

  To believe in the Pause, or in letting an older baby do controlled crying, you also have to believe that a baby is a person who’s capable of learning things (in this case, how to sleep) and coping with some frustration. Michel Cohen spends a lot of time converting parents to this French idea. To the common worry that a four-month-old is hungry at night, he writes: ‘She is hungry. But she does not need to eat. You’re hungry in the middle of the night too; it’s just that you learn not to eat because it’s good for your belly to take a rest. Well, it’s good for hers too.’

  The French don’t believe that babies should withstand biblical-sized trials. But they also don’t think that a bit of frustration will crush kids. On the contrary, they believe it will make children more secure. According to Sleep, Dreams and the Child, ‘To always respond to his demands, and never tell him “no”, is dangerous for the construction of his personality. Because the child won’t have any barrier to push up against, to know what’s expected of him.’

  For the French, teaching a small baby to sleep isn’t a self-serving strategy for lazy parents. It’s a first, crucial lesson for children in self-reliance and in how to enjoy one’s own company. A psychologist quoted in Maman! magazine says that babies who learn to play by themselves during the day – even in the first few months – are less worried when they’re put into their beds alone at night.

  De Leersnyder writes that even babies need some privacy. ‘The little baby learns in his cradle that he can be alone from time to time, without being hungry, without being thirsty, without sleeping, just being calmly awake. At a very young age, he needs time alone, and he needs to go to sleep and wake up without being immediately watched by his mother.’

  De Leersnyder even devotes a portion of her book to what a mother should do while her baby sleeps. ‘She forgets about her baby, to think about herself. She now takes her own shower, gets dressed, puts on make-up, becomes beautiful for her own pleasure, that of her husband and of others. Evening comes, and she prepares herself for the night, for love.’

  As an Anglophone parent, this film-noir scene – with its suggestion of kohl eyeliner and silk stockings – is hard to imagine in anything but the movies. Simon and I just assumed that, for quite a
while, we’d rearrange our lives around Bean’s whims.

  The French don’t think that’s good for anyone. They view learning to sleep as an aspect of learning to be part of the family, and adapting to what other members of the family need too. De Leersnyder tells me: ‘If he wakes up ten times at night, [the mother] can’t go to work the next day. So that makes the baby understand that – voilà – he can’t wake up ten times a night.’

  ‘The baby understands that?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course he understands that,’ she says.

  ‘How can he understand that?’

  ‘Because babies understand everything.’

  * * *

  French parents think the Pause is essential. But they don’t hold it up as a panacea. Instead, they have a bundle of beliefs and habits which, when applied patiently and lovingly, put babies in the mood to sleep well. The Pause works in part because parents believe that tiny babies aren’t helpless blobs. They can learn things. This learning, done gently and at a baby’s own pace, isn’t damaging. To the contrary, parents believe it gives the babies confidence and serenity, and makes them aware of other people. And it sets the tone for the respectful relationship between parents and children that I see later on.

  If only I had known all this when Bean was born. We definitely miss the four-month window for painlessly teaching her to sleep through the night. At nine months old, she still wakes up every night at around 2 am. We brace ourselves to let her do controlled crying. On the first night, she cries for twelve minutes. (I clutch Simon and cry too.) Then she goes back to sleep. The next night she cries for five minutes.

  On the third night, Simon and I both wake up to silence at 2 am. ‘I think she was waking up for us,’ Simon says. ‘She thought that we needed her to do it.’ Then we go back to sleep. Bean has been doing her nights ever since.

  4

  Wait!

  I’M GETTING MORE used to france. One day, I’m feeling so worldly I announce to Simon that we’ve joined the global elite.

  ‘We’re global, but we’re not elite,’ he replies.

  The truth is, I miss America. I miss grocery shopping in tracksuit bottoms, smiling at strangers, and being able to banter. Mostly, I miss my parents. I can’t believe I’m raising a child while they’re 4,500 miles away.

  Neither can my mother. My meeting and marrying a handsome foreigner was the thing she most dreaded when I was growing up. She discussed this fear so extensively that it’s probably what planted the idea. On one visit to Paris, she takes me and Simon out to dinner, and breaks down in tears at the table. ‘What do they have here that they don’t have in America?’ she demands to know. (Had she been eating escargots, I could have pointed at her plate. Unfortunately she had ordered the chicken.)

  Although living in France is easier now, I haven’t really assimilated. On the contrary, having a baby – and speaking better French – makes me realize just how foreign I am. Soon after Bean begins sleeping through the night, we arrive for her first day at France’s state-run day nursery, the crèche. During the intake interview, we sail through questions about her dummy use and favourite sleeping positions. We’re ready with her inoculation records and emergency-contact numbers. But one question stumps us: what time does she have her milk?

  On the matter of when to feed babies, Anglophone parents are once again in sparring camps. You could call it a food fight: one camp believes in feeding babies at fixed times, another says to feed them on demand.

  We’ve drifted into a hybrid. Bean always has milk when she wakes up, and again before bedtime. In between, we just feed her whenever she seems hungry. Simon thinks there isn’t a problem that a bottle or a boob can’t solve. We’ll both do anything to keep her from yowling.

  When I finish explaining our feeding system to the crèche lady, she looks at me like I’ve just said that we let our baby drive the family car. We don’t know when our child eats? This is a problem she will soon solve. Her look says that although we’re living in Paris, we’re raising a child who eats and sleeps – and yes, probably poos – like a foreigner.

  The crèche lady’s look also reveals that on this, too, there are no sparring camps in France. Parents don’t anguish about how often their children should eat. From the age of about four months, most French babies eat at regular times. As with sleep techniques, French parents see this as common sense, not as part of a parenting philosophy or as the dictate of some parenting guru.

  What’s even stranger is that these French babies all eat at roughly the same times. With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about 8 am, 12 pm, 4 pm and 8 pm. Votre Enfant (Your Child), a respected French parenting guide, has just one sample menu for four- or five-month-olds. It’s this same sequence of feeds.

  In French these aren’t even called ‘feeds’, which after all sounds like you’re pitching hay at cows. They’re called ‘meals’. And their sequence resembles a schedule I’m quite familiar with: breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus an afternoon snack. In other words, by about four months old, French babies are already on the same eating schedule that they’ll be on for the rest of their lives (grown-ups usually drop the snack).

  You’d think the existence of this national baby meal plan would be obvious. Instead, it feels like a state secret. If you merely ask French parents if their babies eat on a schedule, they almost always say no. As with sleep, they insist that they’re merely following their babies’ ‘rhythms’. When I point out that French babies all seem to eat at roughly the same times, parents shrug it off as a coincidence.

  The deeper mystery to me is how all these French babies are capable of waiting four hours from one meal to the next. Bean gets anxious if she has to wait even a few minutes for a feed. We get anxious too. But I’m beginning to sense that there’s a lot of waiting going on all around me in France. First there was the Pause, in which French babies wait after they wake up. Now there’s the baby meal plan, in which they wait long stretches from one feed to the next. And of course there are all those toddlers waiting contentedly in restaurants until their food arrives.

  The French seem collectively to have achieved the miracle of getting babies and toddlers not just to wait, but to do so happily. Could this ability to wait explain the difference between French and Anglophone kids?

  To get my head around these questions, I email Walter Mischel, the world’s expert on how children delay gratification. He’s eighty years old, and holds a chair in psychology at Columbia University. I’ve read all about him, and read some of his many published papers on the topic. I explain that I’m in Paris researching French parenting, and ask if he might have time to talk on the phone.

  Mischel replies a few hours later. To my surprise, he says that he’s in Paris too. Would I like to come by for a coffee? Two days later we’re at the kitchen table in his girlfriend’s apartment in the Latin Quarter, just down the hill from the Panthéon.

  Mischel hardly looks seventy, and certainly not eighty. He has a shaved head and the coiled energy of a boxer, but with a sweet, almost childlike face. It’s not hard to envision him as the eight-year-old boy from Vienna who fled Austria with his family after the Nazis annexed the country.

  The family eventually landed in Brooklyn, where adapting to America was a trial. When Walter entered school at age nine, he was assigned to kindergarten to learn English, and remembers ‘trying to walk on my knees to not stick out from the five-year-olds when our class marched through the corridors’. Mischel’s parents – who were cultured and comfortably middle class in Vienna – opened a struggling five-and-dime. His mother, who’d been mildly depressed in Vienna, was energized by America. But his father never recovered from his fall in status.

  This early experience gave Mischel a permanent outsider’s perspective, and helped frame the questions that he has spent his career answering. In his thirties, he upended the whole science of personality by arguing that people’s ‘traits’ aren’t fixed; they depend on context. Despite marrying an American and b
ringing up three daughters in California, Mischel began making annual pilgrimages to Paris. ‘I always felt myself to be European and felt Paris was the capital of Europe,’ he tells me. Mischel, who divorced in 1996, has lived with a Frenchwoman for the past decade. They divide their time between New York and Paris.

  Mischel is most famous for devising the ‘marshmallow test’ in the late 1960s, when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a four- or five-year-old into a room where there’s a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while. If the child manages not to eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll only get that one.

  It’s a very hard test. Of the 653 kids who took it back in the 1960s and ’70s, only one in three managed to resist eating the marshmallow for the full fifteen minutes that the experimenter was away. Some ate it as soon as they were alone. Most could only wait about thirty seconds.1 In the mid-1980s, Mischel revisited the kids from the original experiment, to see if there was a difference between how good and bad delayers were faring as teenagers. He and his colleagues found a remarkable correlation: the longer children had resisted eating the marshmallow as four-year-olds, the higher Mischel and his colleagues assessed them in all sorts of other categories. Among other skills, the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning. And according to a report that Mischel and his colleagues published in 1988, they ‘do not tend to go to pieces under stress’.

  Could it be that making children delay gratification – as French parents do – actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Whereas Anglophone children, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, go to pieces under stress? Are French parents once again doing – by tradition and instinct – exactly what scientists recommend?