Dominique arrived in New York as a 22-year-old student. She planned to study English for six months, then go home. But New York quickly became home. ‘I felt really good and stimulated and had great energy, something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time in Paris,’ she says. She married an American musician.
Beginning when she first got pregnant, Dominique was also enchanted with American parenting. ‘There’s a great sense of community that, in a way, you don’t have as much in France … If you like yoga and you’re pregnant, boom! You get into this group of pregnant women doing yoga.’
She also started to notice the way kids are treated. At a big dinner with her husband’s family, she was astonished to see that when a three-year-old girl arrived, all twenty adults at the table stopped talking and focused on the little girl.
‘I thought, oh, this is incredible, this culture. It’s like the kid is a god, it’s really amazing. I’m like, no wonder Americans are so confident and so happy, and the French are so depressed. Here we are – just look at the attention.’
But over time Dominique started to view this type of attention differently. She noticed that the same three-year-old girl who’d stopped conversation at that family dinner was developing an oversized sense of entitlement.
‘I was like, “That’s it, this kid really annoys me.” She’s thinking that because she’s here, everyone has to stop their life and pay attention.”’
Dominique, whose own kids are eleven, eight and two, says her doubts grew when she overheard kids at her children’s nursery responding to teachers’ instructions with: ‘You are not the boss of me.’ (‘You would never see that in France, never,’ Dominique says.) When she and her husband were invited for dinner at the homes of American friends with young kids, she often ended up doing most of the cooking, because the hosts were busy trying to make their kids stay in bed.
‘Instead of just being firm, and saying, “No more of that, I’m not giving you more attention, this is bedtime, and this is parents’ time. Now it’s my time as an adult with my friends. Go to bed, that’s it” – well, they don’t do that. I don’t know why they don’t do that, but they don’t do that. They can’t do it. They keep just serving the kids. And I see that and I’m just blown away.’
Dominique still adores New York, and much prefers American schools to French ones. But in matters of parenting, she has increasingly reverted to French habits, with their clear rules and boundaries.
‘The French way sometimes is too harsh. They could be a little more gentle and friendly with kids, I think,’ she says. ‘But I think the American way takes it to the extreme, of raising kids as if they are ruling the world.’
I find it hard to argue with my would-be doppelgänger. I can picture those dinner parties she’s describing. American parents – myself included – are often deeply ambivalent about being in charge. In theory, we believe that ‘kids need limits’. This is a truism of American parenting. However, in practice we’re often unsure where these limits should be, or we’re uncomfortable policing them.
‘I feel more guilty for getting angry than I feel angry,’ is how a college friend of Simon’s justifies his three-year-old daughter’s bad behaviour. A girlfriend of mine says her three-year-old son bit her, but she ‘felt bad’ yelling at him, because she knew that it would make him cry. So she let it go.
Anglophone parents worry that being too strict will break their kids’ creative spirits. A visiting American mother was shocked when she saw a playpen in our apartment in Paris. Apparently, back home, even playpens are now seen as too confining. (We didn’t know. In Paris they’re de rigueur.)
A mother from Long Island tells me about her badly behaved nephew, whose parents were – in her view – alarmingly permissive. But she says the nephew has since grown up to become head of oncology at a major American medical centre, vindicating the fact that he was an unbearable child. ‘I think kids who are very intelligent and not much disciplined are insufferable when they’re kids. But I think they are less stifled creatively when they’re older,’ she says.
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 behaviour begin? When I let my kids stop and study every manhole cover we pass on the pavement, 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 with their kids. 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 some parents who oppose authority altogether. I meet one of them on a visit to America.
Liz is a graphic designer in her mid-thirties, with a five-year-old daughter named Ruby. She easily ticks off her main parenting influences: the paediatrician William Sears, the author Alfie Kohn and the behaviourist B. F. Skinner.
When Ruby acts up, Liz and her husband try to convince the girl that her behaviour is morally wrong. ‘We want to extinguish unacceptable behaviours without resorting to power plays,’ Liz tells me. ‘I try not to exploit the fact that I’m larger and stronger than her 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 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.
Liz says that this eclectic style, and her desire not to be judged for it, have isolated her from many of her neighbours and peers. She says her own parents are bewildered and overtly disapproving of how she’s bringing up Ruby, and that she can no longer discuss it with them. Visits home are tense, especially when Ruby acts up.
But 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 ‘anti-authority’ 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 gives the orders. Parents say these phrases to remind both their kids and themselves who’s the boss.
To Anglophones, 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 Léa. Over a family dinner at her apartment one night, she tells me about taking Adrien to the paediatrician when he was a toddle
r. Adrien cried and refused to step on the scales, so Robynne knelt down to convince 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 scales, that’s it, there’s no discussion.”’ Robynne was shocked. She says she eventually changed paediatricians 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!’ he interjects. Marc, a professional golfer who grew up in Paris, is one of those French parents who seems to wear his authority quite effortlessly. I notice the way his kids listen carefully when he speaks to them, and respond immediately.
Marc says the doctor wasn’t being wantonly bossy. On the contrary, he was helping with Adrien’s éducation. Tellingly, Marc’s recollection of the conversation goes like this:
‘He said that you have to be sure of yourself, you have to take your kid and put him on the scales … If you give him too many choices, he doesn’t feel reassured. You have to show him a way … 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. 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 scales. 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,’ Marc 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’s 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 mum is in control, or the dad.’
‘Just like when you’re on a horse,’ Adrien, now aged nine, chips 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 … afterwards, to tighten, forget about it.’
Marc is describing the cadre that I’ve heard so much about. French parents seem to spend the early years of a child’s life constructing this cadre. They do it in part by establishing their own right to say, sometimes, ‘Just get on the scales.’
We American and British parents 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’.
For Anglophones, ‘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 centre 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 can convince you there’s actually a wall. This ongoing conversation about the cadre is often very polite. Parents say ‘please’ a lot, even to babies.
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 playground chant for little kids is the rhyming, Oh là là, 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 throwing 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. It makes throwing the peas seem like something the child has rationally decided to do, so he can decide to do otherwise too.
This may help explain why mealtimes are so calm in France. Instead of waiting for a big crisis and resorting to dramatic punishments, parents and carers 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 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.
French parents and carers 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 gentle-but-firm 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. On 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 caractère.
But they believe that children can only achieve these goals if they respect boundaries and have self-control. So alongside caractère, 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 mortified that the boys start shouting loudly or whining, practically every time we walk through the courtyard between our lift and the main entrance to our building. It’s like an announcement to the dozens of people whose apartments open on to the courtyard: the Anglos have arrived!
Bean and I are invited to a
schoolmate’s home for goûter one afternoon, during the Christmas holidays. Once we’re all sitting around the table (I’m served tea), 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 embarrassed. I’d kick her under the table if I could be sure which set of legs was hers. I do tell 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. They’re apparently not even tempted to imitate Bean.
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 an adage I once heard: 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 herself the mother of three boys. She has short, greying brown hair and a warm smile, and radiates that total certainty I see in Frédérique and other French parents I meet. Like them, she has a calm conviction that her methods really do work.
‘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’ – the big eyes – she says. Madeleine demonstrates these for me at the table. As she does so, 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.
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