Bringing Up Bébé

by Pamela Druckerman

  Dolto may have looked like everyone’s grand-mère, but her message about how to treat kids was deliciously radical and fitting for the new times. In a sort of emancipation of babies, she claimed that even infants are rational, and indeed that they understand language as soon as they’re born. It’s an intuitive, almost mystical message. And it’s a message that ordinary French people still embrace, even if they don’t all articulate it exactly. Once I read Dolto, I realize that so many of the most curious claims that I’ve heard French parents make, like the one that you’re supposed to talk to babies about their sleep troubles, come straight from her.

  Dolto’s radio broadcasts made her into an almost mythic figure in France. Well into the 1980s, books containing transcripts of the broadcasts, and other conversations, were stacked like produce in French supermarkets. A whole cohort of children were known as “Génération Dolto.” A psychoanalyst quoted in a special Dolto-themed edition of Télérama magazine in 2008 recalled riding in a taxi whose driver said he never missed the radio show. “He was dumbfounded. He said, ‘She talks to children like they are human beings!’”

  Dolto’s core message isn’t a “parenting philosophy.” It doesn’t come with a lot of specific instructions. But if you accept that children are rational as a first principle—as French society does—then many things begin to shift. If babies understand what you’re saying to them, then you can teach them quite a lot, even while they’re very young. That includes, for example, how to eat in a restaurant.

  • • •

  The future Françoise Dolto was born Françoise Marette in 1908, into a large, well-off Catholic family in Paris. On the surface she had a charmed life: violin lessons, a cook in the kitchen, and peacocks prancing around the backyard. She was groomed to marry well.

  But Françoise wasn’t the discreet and obedient daughter that her parents expected. She wasn’t sage comme une image. She was willful, outspoken, and passionately curious about the people around her. In her early letters, the young Dolto seems preternaturally aware of the troubling gap of understanding between herself and her parents. At age eight she resolved to become a “doctor of education” who intermediates between adults and children. It was a job that didn’t yet exist, but that she later created.6

  Having a profession was suddenly becoming possible for Frenchwomen. Like Simone de Beauvoir, who was also born in 1908, Françoise was part of the first generation of girls allowed to take the French baccalauréat, an exam at the end of high school that makes you eligible for university.

  After passing le bac, Dolto succumbed to her parents’ pressure and settled for a nursing degree. It was only when her younger brother Philippe prepared to enter medical school that her parents allowed her to begin her medical studies, too, chaperoned by him. She also entered psychoanalysis, which was then still quite unusual. Her family seemed to think this would purge Dolto of her unfeminine ambitions. In a letter to her written in 1934,7 Dolto’s father said he hoped that psychoanalysis would “help you to transform your nature, and that you will be as you say, a real woman, which will add charm to your other qualities . . .”

  But it was psychoanalysis—under René Laforgue, who founded France’s first psychoanalytic institute—that instead liberated Dolto to finally become a “doctor of education.” She studied both psychoanalysis and pediatrics, and trained in hospitals around France.

  Unusually for a parenting expert, Dolto was apparently an excellent parent to her own three children. Her daughter Catherine writes of her parents: “They never made us do our homework, for example. However we did get bawled out, like everyone, when we had bad grades. I got detention every Thursday for bad behavior. Mom said to me, ‘It’s too bad for you, it’s you who has detention. When you get tired of it, you’ll be able to hold your tongue.’”

  Dolto always maintained an unusually lucid memory of how she had seen the world as a child. She rejected the prevailing view that children should be treated as a collection of physical symptoms. (At the time, bed wetters were still attached to “peepee-stops” that released electric shocks.) Instead, she spoke to children about their lives and assumed that many of their physical symptoms had psychological origins. “And you, what do you think?” she would ask her young patients.8

  Dolto famously insisted that older children “pay” her at the end of each session, with an object, like a stone, to emphasize their independence and accountability. This respect for children resonated strongly with Dolto’s students. “She changed everything, and we, the students, wanted things to change,” the psychoanalyst Myriam Szejer recalls.

  Dolto’s respect extended even to babies. A former student described her dealing with an upset infant who was several months old: “All of her senses on alert, totally receptive to the emotions that the baby aroused in her. It was not to console [the baby], but to understand what the baby was telling her. Or more precisely, what the baby saw.” There are legendary stories about Dolto approaching previously inconsolable infants in the hospital and simply explaining to them why they were there and where their parents were. According to legend, the babies suddenly calmed down.

  This isn’t American-style talking to babies, where you believe that babies recognize the mother’s voice or are soothed by a calming sound. Nor is it a method to teach a child to speak or to prime him to become the next Jonathan Franzen.

  Rather, Dolto insisted that the content of what you say to a baby matters tremendously. She said it was crucial that parents tell their babies the truth in order to gently affirm what the babies already know.

  In fact, she thought that babies begin eavesdropping on adult conversations—and intuiting the problems and conflicts swirling around them—from the womb. She envisioned (in the presonogram days) a conversation between a mother and her minutes-old baby going something like this: “You see, we were waiting for you. You’re a little boy. Maybe you heard us saying that we wanted a little girl. But we’re very happy that you’re a little boy.”

  Dolto wrote that a child should be included in conversations about his parents’ divorce from the age of six months. When a grandparent dies, she said that even a young child should briefly attend the funeral. “Someone in the family goes with him to say, ‘Voilà, it’s the burial of your grandfather.’ It’s something that happens in a society.” For Dolto, “the child’s best interest is not always what will make him or her happy, but rational understanding,” wrote MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle in an introduction to Dolto’s When Parents Separate. Turkle writes that what a child most needs, according to Dolto, is “a structured inner life able to support autonomy and further growth.”

  Dolto was criticized by some foreign psychoanalysts for relying too much on her own intuition. But inside France, parents seemed to take both an intellectual and an aesthetic pleasure in her imaginative leaps.

  If Dolto’s ideas ever reached English-speaking parents, they probably just sounded strange. American parents were under the sway of Dr. Spock, who was born five years before Dolto and also trained as a psychoanalyst. Spock wrote that a child can understand that he’s about to have a baby brother or sister only from the age of about eighteen months. His forte was listening carefully to parents, not to babies. “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do,” is the famous opening salvo of his parenting guide Baby and Child Care.

  For Dolto, it was children who knew more than anyone thought. Even into old age, when she was hooked to an oxygen tank, Dolto would get down on the floor with her young patients to see the world as they did. Her view from there was appealingly blunt.

  “If there’s no jealousy when the baby comes . . . it’s a very bad sign. The older child should show signs of jealousy, because for him it is a problem, the first time that he sees everyone admiring someone younger than him,” she said.

  Dolto insisted that children have rational motives, even when they misbehave, and she said that it’s the job of parents to listen and
grasp these motives. “The child who has an unusual reaction always has a reason for having it. . . . Our task is to understand what has happened,” she says.

  Dolto gives the example of a small child who suddenly refuses to continue walking down the street. To the parent, it just seems like sudden stubbornness. But to the child, there’s a reason. “We should try to understand him, and say, ‘There’s a reason. I don’t understand, but let’s think about it.’ Above all, don’t suddenly make a drama out of it.”

  In one of the centennial tributes to Dolto, a French psychoanalyst summed up Dolto’s teachings this way: “Human beings speak to other human beings. Some of them are big, some of them are small. But they communicate.”9

  Spock’s giant tome Baby and Child Care seems like it’s straining to contain every possible scenario involving children, from obstructed tear ducts to (in posthumous editions) gay parenting. But Dolto’s books are pocket-sized. Instead of giving lots of specific instructions, she keeps returning to a few basic principles and seems to expect that parents will think things through on their own.

  Dolto agreed to do the radio broadcasts on the condition that she could answer letters from parents rather than phone calls. She thought that parents would begin to see solutions simply by writing out their problems. Pradel, the radio host, remembers: “She told me, ‘you’ll see, one day we’ll get a letter from a person who’s going to say to us, “I’m sending you these pages, but I think I already understand.”’ And we received one, exactly like she predicted.”

  Like Spock in the United States, Dolto has been blamed in France for unleashing a wave of overly permissive parenting, especially in the 1970s and ’80s. It’s easy to see how her advice could be interpreted this way. Some parents surely thought that if they listened to what a child said, they then had to do what he said.

  This wasn’t what Dolto advocated. She thought that parents should listen carefully to their kids and explain the world to them. But she thought that this world would of course include many limits, and that the child, being rational, could absorb and handle these limits. She didn’t want to upend Rousseau’s cadre model. She wanted to preserve it. She just added a huge measure of empathy and respect for the child—something that may have been lacking in France pre-1968.

  The parents I see in Paris today really do seem to have found a balance between listening to their kids and being clear that it’s the parents who are in charge (even if they sometimes have to remind themselves of this). French parents listen to their kids all the time. But if little Agathe says she wants pain au chocolat for lunch, she isn’t going to get it.

  • • •

  French parents have made Dolto (standing on the shoulders of Rousseau) part of their parenting firmament. When a baby has a nightmare, “You always reassure him by speaking to him,” says Alexandra, who works in the Parisian day care. “I’m very much in favor of speech and language with children, even the smallest ones. They understand. For me, they understand.”

  The French magazine Parents says that if a baby is scared of strangers, his mother should warn him that a visitor will be coming over soon. Then, when the doorbell rings, “Tell him that the guest is here, take a few seconds before opening the door . . . if he doesn’t cry when he sees the stranger, don’t forget to congratulate him.”

  I hear of several cases where, upon bringing a baby home from the maternity hospital, French parents give the baby a tour of the house.10 French parents often just tell babies what they’re doing to them: I’m picking you up; I’m changing your diaper; I’m getting ready to give you a bath. This isn’t just to make soothing sounds; it’s to convey information. And since the baby is a person, like any other, parents are often quite polite to him. (Plus it’s apparently never too early to start instilling good manners.)

  The practical implications of believing that a baby or toddler understands what you say and can act on it are considerable. It means you can teach him to sleep through the night early on, to not barge into your room every morning, to sit properly at the table, to eat only at mealtimes, and to not interrupt his parents. You can expect him to accommodate—at least a little bit—what his parents need, too.

  I get a strong taste of this when Bean is about ten months old. She begins pulling herself up in front of a bookcase in our living room and pulling down all the books she can reach.

  This is irritating, of course. But I don’t think I can stop her. Often I just pick up the books and put them back. But one morning, Simon’s French friend Lara is visiting. When Lara sees Bean pulling the books down, she immediately kneels next to her and explains, patiently but firmly, “We don’t do that.” Then she shows Bean how to put the books back on the shelf and tells her to leave them there. Lara keeps using the French word doucement—gently. (After this, I start to notice that French parents say doucement all the time.) I’m shocked when Bean listens to Lara and obeys.

  This incident revealed the enormous cultural gap between Lara and me, as parents. I had assumed that Bean was a very cute, very wild creature with a lot of potential but almost no self-control. If she occasionally behaved well, it was because of a kind of animalistic training, or just luck. After all, she couldn’t talk, and didn’t even have hair yet.

  But Lara (who at the time was childless, but now has two well-behaved daughters) assumed that, even at ten months old, Bean could understand language and learn to control herself. She believed that Bean could do things doucement if she wanted to. And as a result, Bean did.

  • • •

  Dolto died in 1988. Some of her intuitions about babies are now being confirmed by scientific experiments. Scientists have figured out that you can tell what babies know by measuring how long they look at one thing versus another. Like adults, babies look longer at things that surprise them. Beginning in the early 1990s, research using this method has shown that “babies can do rudimentary math with objects” and that “babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do,” writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.11 A study at the University of British Columbia found that eight-month-olds understand probabilities.12

  There’s also evidence that babies have a moral sense. Bloom and other researchers showed six- and ten-month-old babies a sort of puppet show in which a circle was trying to roll up a hill. A “helper” character helped the circle go up, while a “hinderer” pushed it down. After the show, the babies were offered the helper and the hinderer on a tray. Almost all of them reached for the helper. “Babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy,” Paul Bloom explains.

  Of course, these experiments don’t prove that—as Dolto claims—babies understand speech. But they do seem to prove her point that, from a very young age, babies are rational. Their minds aren’t a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” At the very least, we should watch what we say to them.

  Chapter 6

  day care?

  When I call my mother to tell her that Bean has been accepted into a day-care center run by the city of Paris, there’s a long pause on her end of the line.

  “Day care?” she asks, finally.

  Friends back home are skeptical, too.

  “It’s just not a situation I want,” sniffs a friend whose son is nine months old, about the same age Bean will be when she starts day care. “I want him to have a little more individual attention.”

  But when I tell my French neighbors that Bean has been accepted to the crèche, as the full-time day cares are known here, they congratulate me and practically crack open the champagne.

  It’s the sharpest difference between the countries I’ve seen so far. Middle-class mothers in the United States generally aren’t fans of day care. The very words “day care” conjure images of pedophiles and howling babies in dirty, dimly lit rooms. “I want him to have a little more individual attention” is a euphemism for, “Unlike you, I actually love my child
and don’t want to institutionalize him.” American parents who can afford it tend to hire full-time nannies, then start easing their kids into preschool when they’re two or three. Those who must send their kids to day care do so warily and often full of guilt.

  But middle-class French parents—architects, doctors, fellow journalists—are clawing past one another to get a spot in their neighborhood crèche, which is open five days a week, usually from eight to six. Mothers apply when they’re pregnant, then harangue, cajole, and beg. Crèches are subsidized by the state, and parents are charged sliding fees based on their incomes.

  “I felt that it was a perfect system, absolutely perfect,” gushes my friend Esther, a French lawyer, whose daughter started at the crèche when she was nine months old. Even friends of mine who don’t work try to enroll their kids in the crèche. As a distant second choice, they consider part-time day care or nannies, which are subsidized, too. (Government Web sites give all the options.)

  All this gives me a kind of cultural vertigo. Will day care make my child aggressive, neglected, and insecurely attached, as the scary American headlines say? Or will she be socialized, “awakened,” and skillfully looked after, as French parents assure me?

  For the first time, I worry that we’re taking our little intercultural experiment too far. It’s one thing to start holding a fork in my left hand, and giving blank looks to strangers. It’s quite another to subject my child to a potentially weird and damaging experience for the bulk of her toddlerhood. Are we going a bit too native? Bean can try foie gras, but should she try the crèche?

  • • •