The French believe, as we do, that their children are beautiful and special. But they also realize that some things about them 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 The Pause, I decide to look at some of the scientific literature on babies and sleep. What I find shocks me: American parents may be fighting the “baby sleep wars,” but American sleep researchers aren’t. The researchers 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.” This 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 birth or when their babies are just a few weeks old.
What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper that tracked pregnant women who planned to breastfeed.2 Researchers gave some of the women a two-page handout with instructions. One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that.
An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.
The researchers explained the scientific basis for these instructions. A “control group” of breastfeeding mothers had gotten no instructions. The results were 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 percent of the treatment-group babies were sleeping through the night, versus 7 percent of the control-group babies. At eight weeks, all of the treatment babies were sleeping through the night, compared with 23 percent of the control babies. The authors’ conclusion is resounding: “The results of this study show that breast-feeding 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 behavioral insomnia of childhood,” the meta-study explains.
The study says there’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggressiveness, hyperactivity, and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things. They are 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 breast-feeding mothers, the treatment-group infants were afterward 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 sleep teaching. 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 cry it out, either by going cold turkey (known by the unfortunate scientific term “extinction”) or in stages (“graduated extinction”), works extremely well and usually succeeds 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 for parents who miss the four-month window. He says they should make the baby feel cozy with his usual nighttime bath and songs. Then they should put him in bed at a reasonable hour, preferably while he’s still awake, and come back at seven A.M.
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 cry it out, 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 pacifier 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 adds 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 caregivers’ 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 cry it out, 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. To 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 crucial first lesson for children in self-reliance and enjoying 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 makeup, 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 American parent, this film noir s
cene—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 part 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 that, 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 two A.M. So we brace ourselves to let her cry it out. 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 two A.M. “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.
Chapter 4
wait!
I’m getting more used to living in France. After a march around the local parks one morning, I announce to Simon that we’ve finally joined the global elite.
“We’re global, but we’re not elite,” he replies.
Though I’ve made some inroads in France, I miss the United States. I miss grocery shopping in sweatpants, 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 escargot, I could have pointed at her plate. Unfortunately, she had ordered the chicken.)
Although living in France has gotten easier, I haven’t really assimilated. To 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-care center, called the crèche. During the intake interview, we sail through questions about her pacifier use and favorite 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, American 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 whenever they seem hungry. The American Web site BabyCenter gives eight different sample schedules for five- and six-month-olds, including one in which the baby eats ten times a day.
We’ve drifted into a hybrid. Bean always has milk when she wakes up and again before bedtime. In between, we 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 while we’re living in Paris, we’re raising a child who eats and sleeps—and yes, probably poops—like an American.
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.
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 eight A.M., twelve P.M., four P.M., and eight P.M. 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 to 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 this 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 parents wait after their baby wakes up. Now there’s the baby meal plan, in which they wait long stretches from one feeding 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 explain the difference between French and American kids?
• • •
To get my head around these questions, I e-mail Walter Mischel, the world’s expert on how children delay gratification. He’s eighty years old and a chaired professor of 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 speak with me 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. When Walter entered public 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 st
ruggling five-and-dime. His mother, who’d been a minor depressive 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 science of personality by arguing that people’s traits aren’t fixed; they depend on context. Despite marrying an American and raising their 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 last 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 get only that one.
It’s a very hard test. Of the 653 kids who took it back in the sixties and seventies, 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 wait only 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 the children had resisted eating the marshmallow as four-year-olds, the higher Mischel and his colleagues assessed them in all sorts of other categories later on. 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.”
Bringing Up Bébé Page 7
