I decide to read up on this day care with a funny name. Why is it even called a crèche? I thought that was the name for a Nativity scene.
It turns out that the story of the French crèche began in the 1840s. Jean-Baptiste-Firmin Marbeau, an ambitious young lawyer in search of a cause to champion, was deputy mayor of Paris’s first district. It was the middle of the Industrial Revolution, and cities like Paris were teeming with women who’d arrived from the provinces to work as seamstresses and in factories. Marbeau was charged with writing a study of the salles d’asile, free nursery schools for kids aged two to six.
He was impressed. “How carefully, I said to myself, society watches over the children of the poor!” he wrote.
But Marbeau wondered who looked after poor children between birth and age two, while their mothers worked. He consulted the district’s “poor list” and set off to visit several mothers. “At the far end of a filthy backyard, I call out for Madame Gérard, a washerwoman. She comes down, not wanting me to enter her home, too dirty to be seen (those are her words). She holds a new-born baby on her arm, and a child of eighteen months by the hand.”
Marbeau discovered that when Madame Gérard went off to wash laundry, she left her children with a babysitter. This cost her seventy centimes a day, about a third of her daily wages. And the babysitter was an equally poor woman who, when Marbeau visited, was “at her post, watching over three young children on the floor in a shabby room.”
That wasn’t bad child care by the day’s standards for the poor. Some mothers locked kids alone in apartments or tied them to bedposts for the day. Slightly older kids were often left to watch their siblings while their mothers worked. Many very young babies still lived at the homes of wet nurses, where conditions could be life-threatening.
Marbeau was seized with an idea: the crèche! (The name was meant to invoke the cozy manger in the Christmas story.) It would be all-day care for poor children from birth to age two. Funding would come from donations by wealthy patrons, some of whom would also help oversee crèches. Marbeau envisioned a spartan but spotless building, where women called nurses looked after babies and counseled mothers on hygiene and morals. Mothers would pay just fifty cents a day. Those with unweaned infants would return twice a day to breastfeed.
Marbeau’s idea struck a chord. There was soon a crèche commission to study the matter, and he set off to woo potential donors. Like any good fund-raiser, he appealed to both their sense of charity and to their economic self-interest.
“These children are your fellow citizens, your brothers. They are poor, unhappy and weak: you should rescue them,” he wrote in a crèche manual published in 1845. Then he added, “If you can save the lives of 10,000 children, make haste: 20,000 extra arms a year are not to be disdained. Arms are work and work creates wealth.” The crèche was also supposed to give a mother peace of mind, so she could “devote herself to her work with an easy conscience.”
In his manual, Marbeau instructs crèches to open from five thirty A.M. to eight thirty P.M., to cover the typical workday for laborers. The life Marbeau describes for mothers isn’t too different from that of a lot of working mothers I know today: “She gets up before 5 o’clock, dresses her child, does some housework, runs to the Crèche, runs to work . . . at 8 o’clock she hastens back, fetches her child with the day’s dirty linen, rushes home to put the poor little creature to bed, and to wash his linen so it will be dry the next day, and every day the whole process is repeated! . . . how on earth does she manage!”
Evidently Marbeau was quite persuasive. The first crèche opened in a donated building on the rue de Chaillot in Paris. Two years later there were thirteen crèches. The number continued to grow, especially in Paris.
After World War II, the French government put crèches under the control of the newly formed Mother and Infant Protection service (PMI) and created an official degree program for the job of puéricultrice, a person who specialized in caring for babies and young children.
By the beginning of the 1960s, the French poor were less desperate, and there were fewer of them. However, more middle-class mothers were working, so the crèche began attracting middle-class families, too. The number of spots nearly doubled in ten years, reaching 32,000 in 1971. Suddenly, middle-class mothers got sulky if they couldn’t get a place in a crèche. It was starting to seem like an entitlement for working mothers.
All kinds of variants on the crèche opened, too. There were part-time day cares, “family” crèches where parents pitched in, and “company” crèches for employees. Guided by Françoise Dolto’s insistence that babies are people, too, there was a new interest in child care that didn’t merely keep kids from getting sick or treat them like potential delinquents. Soon crèches were spouting middle-class values like “socialization” and “awakening.”
• • •
I first hear about the crèche when I’m pregnant, from my friend Dietlind. She’s a Chicagoan who’s lived in Europe since she graduated from college. (In Paris there’s a whole caste of semester-abroad expatriates, who married their junior-year boyfriends or just never got around to leaving.) Dietlind is warm, speaks effortless French, and still charmingly refers to herself as a “feminist.” She’s one of the few people I know who’s actually striving to make the world a better place. About the only thing wrong with Dietlind is that she can’t cook. Her family subsists almost entirely on food from Picard, the French frozen-food chain. She once tried to serve me defrosted sushi, rice and all.
Despite this, Dietlind is a model mother. So when she tells me that her two sons, ages five and eight, attended the crèche around the corner from me, I take note. She says the crèche was excellent. Years later, she still stops by to greet the directrice and her sons’ old teachers. The boys still talk about their crèche days with joyful nostalgia. Their favorite caregiver used to give them haircuts.
What’s more, Dietlind offers to put in a good word with the directrice. She keeps repeating to me that the crèche isn’t fancy. I’m not sure what this means. Does she think that I require Philippe Starck playpens? Is “not fancy” code for “dirty”?
Though I’ve put up a brave multicultural front for my mother, the truth is that I share some of her doubts. The fact that the crèche is run by the city of Paris seems kind of creepy. It feels like I’ll be dropping off my baby at the post office, or the department of motor vehicles. I have visions of faceless bureaucrats rushing past Bean’s bassinet, as she weeps. Maybe I do want “fancy,” whatever that means. Or maybe I just want to look after Bean myself.
Unfortunately, I can’t. I’m midway through writing the book that I was supposed to hand in before Bean was born. I took a few months off after her birth. But now my (already once extended) deadline looms. We’ve hired a lovely nanny, Adelyn, from the Philippines, who shows up in the morning and looks after Bean all day. The problem is, I work from home in a little alcove office. The temptation to micromanage them both—to the irritation of everyone—is irresistible.
Bean does seem to be developing a decent passive understanding of Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. But I suspect that Adelyn often ends up speaking Tagalog to her at our local McDonald’s, since each time we pass by it, Bean points and shouts. Perhaps the nonfancy crèche is a better option.
I’m also amazed that, thanks to Dietlind, we have an “in” somewhere. I’m used to being out of sync with the rest of the country. Sometimes I don’t know it’s a national holiday until I walk outside and find that all the shops are closed. Having Bean in a crèche would connect us more to France.
The crèche is also tantalizingly convenient. There’s one across the street from our house. Dietlind’s is a five-minute walk. Like those nineteenth-century washerwomen, I could pop in to breastfeed Bean and wipe her snot.
Mostly, though, it’s hard to resist all this French adult peer pressure. (I’m glad they’re not trying to get me to smoke.) Anne and
the other French mothers in our courtyard chime in about the wonders of the crèche, too. Simon and I figure that even with our “in,” our odds of actually getting in are small. So we go to our local town hall and apply for a spot.
• • •
Why are middle-class Americans so skeptical of day care? The answer has its roots in the nineteenth century, too. By the middle of the 1800s, news of Marbeau’s crèches reached America, which had its own horror stories about poor kids being tied to bedposts. Curious philanthropists and social activists traveled to Paris. They were impressed. Over the following decades, charity-financed crèches opened in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Buffalo for the children of poor, working mothers. A few used the French name, but most were called “day nurseries.” By the 1890s there were ninety American day nurseries. Many cared for the children of recent immigrants. They were supposed to keep these kids off the streets and turn them into “Americans.”1
At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a separate “nursery school movement” in America to create private preschools and kindergartens for children aged around two to six. These grew out of new ideas about the importance of early learning and of stimulating kids’ social and emotional development. From the start, they appealed to middle- and upper-middle-class American parents.
The separate origins of day care and preschool explain why, more than a hundred years later, “day care” still has a working-class connotation in America, while middle-class parents battle to get their two-year-olds into preschool. It also explains why today’s American preschools often last just a few hours a day; it’s presumed that mothers of the students don’t have to work, or can afford nannies.2
One segment of American society that isn’t ambivalent about day care is the U.S. military. The Department of Defense runs America’s largest day-care system, with about eight hundred child development centers—or CDCs—on military installations around the world. The centers accept kids from the age of six weeks and are typically open from six A.M. to six thirty P.M.3
The American military’s day-care system looks remarkably like the French crèche. Operating hours wrap around the workday. Fees are scaled according to parents’ combined income. The government subsidizes about half the cost. And like the French crèche, the military’s day-care centers are so popular they usually have long waiting lists.
But outside the military, middle-class American parents remain ambivalent about day care.4 This is partly an issue of nomenclature. “If you call it ‘early childhood education, zero through five,’ they think it’s worthwhile,” says Sheila Kamerman, a professor at Columbia University who’s been tracking day care for decades. These days it’s often simply called “child care.”
Americans remain consumed by the question of how even normal day care affects a child’s fragile psyche. There are headlines on whether day care causes learning delays, makes kids more aggressive, or leaves them insecurely attached to their mothers. I know American moms who quit their jobs rather than subject their kids to day care.
They are often right to worry, since the quality of American day care is extremely uneven. There are no national regulations. Some states don’t require caregivers to have any training. The U.S. Department of Labor says child-care workers earn less than janitors, and that “dissatisfaction with benefits, pay, and stressful working conditions cause many to leave the industry.” Annual turnover rates of 35 percent are common.
There are some good day-care centers, of course. But these can be extremely expensive, or limited to employees of certain companies. And bad centers are amply in evidence, with poor kids getting especially bad care. Other centers—usually the expensive ones—treat babyhood like a college-prep course. Perhaps to calm nervous parents, a Colorado-based company boasts that, in its centers, children under the age of one are taught “literacy.”
• • •
French mothers are convinced that the crèche is good for their kids. In Paris, about a third of kids under the age of three go to the crèche, and half are in some kind of collective care. (There are still fewer crèches outside Paris.) French mothers do worry about pedophiles, but not at the crèche. They think kids are safer in settings with lots of trained adults looking after them, rather than being “alone with a stranger,” according to a report by a national group that advocates for parents. “If she’s going to be tête-à-tête with someone, I want it to be me,” the mother of an eighteen-month-old at Bean’s crèche tells me. The mother says if she hadn’t gotten a spot in the crèche, she would have quit her job.
French mothers do worry about the anguish they’ll feel when they drop off their children at a crèche for the first time. But they view this as their own separation issue. “In France parents are not afraid of sending their children to the crèche,” explains Marie Wierink, a sociologist with France’s Ministry of Labor. “Au contraire, they fear that if they cannot find a place in the crèche their child will be missing out on something.”
Kids don’t learn to read in a crèche. They don’t learn letters or other preliteracy skills. What they do is socialize with other kids. In America, some parents mention this to me as a benefit of day care. In France, all parents do. “I knew that it was very good, it was an opening to social life,” says my friend Esther, the lawyer, whose daughter entered a crèche at nine months old.
French parents take for granted that crèches are of universally high quality and that the members of their staffs are caring and highly skilled. In French parenting chat rooms, the most serious complaint I can find about a crèche is from a mother whose child was served ravioli along with moussaka, a similarly heavy dish. “I sent a letter to the crèche, and they responded to me, saying their regular chef was not there,” she explains. She adds, darkly: “Let’s see what happens the rest of the week.”
This certainty that the crèche is good for kids erases a lot of maternal guilt and doubt. My friend Hélène, an engineer, didn’t work during the first few years after her youngest daughter was born. But she was never remotely apologetic about sending the little girl to the crèche five days a week. This was in part so that Hélène could have time to herself, but also because she didn’t want her daughter to miss out on the communal experience.
The main question people in France ask about day care is how to get more kids into it. Thanks to France’s current baby boom, you can’t run for public office in France—on the right or the left—without promising to build more crèches or expand existing ones. I read about a program to turn disused baggage areas in train stations into crèches for the children of commuters (much of the construction cost would go toward soundproofing).
Competition for the existing spots in a crèche is—as the French say—énergique. A committee of bureaucrats and crèche directors in each of Paris’s twenty arrondissements convenes to dole out their available spots. In the well-heeled 16th arrondissement there are four thousand applicants for five hundred spots. In our less rarefied area in eastern Paris the odds of getting a spot are one in three.
Scrambling for a spot in a crèche is one of the initiation rituals of new parenting. In Paris, women can officially begin petitioning the town hall when they’re six months pregnant. But magazines urge women to schedule a meeting with the director of their preferred crèche as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test.
Priority goes to single parents, multiple births, adoptees, households with three or more kids, or families with “particular difficulties.” How to fit into this last, ambiguous category is the topic of furious speculation in online forums. One mother advises writing to town hall officials about your urgent need to return to work and your epic but ultimately failed efforts to find any other form of child care. She suggests copying this letter to the regional governor and the president of France, then requesting a private audience with the district mayor. “You go there with the baby in your arms, looking desperate, and you retell the same story as in the le
tter,” she says. “I can assure you that this will work.”
Simon and I decide to work our only angle: being foreign. In a letter attached to our crèche application, we extol Bean’s budding multilingualism (she doesn’t actually speak yet) and describe how her Anglo-Americanism will enrich the crèche. As promised, Dietlind talks us up to the director of the crèche that her sons went to. I meet with this woman and try to project a mix of desperation and charm. I call the town hall once a month (for some reason, as with French couples, most of the crèche courting falls to me) to remind them of our “enormous interest and need for a spot.” Since I’m not French and can’t vote here, I decide not to bother the president.
Amazingly, these attempts to massage the process actually work. A congratulatory letter arrives from our town hall explaining that Bean has been assigned a spot in a crèche for mid-September, when she’ll be nine months old. I call Simon, triumphant: we foreigners have beaten the natives at their own game! We’re amazed and giddy from the victory. But we also have the feeling that we’ve won a prize that we don’t quite deserve and aren’t even sure we want.
• • •
I still have my doubts when we take Bean to her first day of crèche. It’s at the end of a dead-end street, in a three-story concrete building with a little Astroturf courtyard out front. It looks like a public school in America but with everything in miniature. I recognize some of the kids’ furniture from the IKEA catalog. It’s not fancy, but it’s cheerful and clean.
The kids are divided by age into sections called small, medium, and large. Bean’s class is in a sunlit room with play kitchens, tiny furniture, and cubbyholes full of age-appropriate toys. Attached to the room is a glassed-in sleeping area where each child has his own crib, stocked with his pacifier and stuffed-animal companion, called a doudou.
Anne-Marie, who’ll be Bean’s main caregiver, greets us. (She’s the same lady who gave haircuts to Dietlind’s sons.) Anne-Marie is a grandmother in her sixties, with short blond hair and a rotating collection of printed T-shirts from places her charges have traveled to. (We’ll eventually bring her one attesting to her love of Brooklyn.) Employees have worked at the crèche for an average of thirteen years. Anne-Marie has been there much longer. She and most of the other caregivers are trained as auxiliaires de puériculture, which has no exact American equivalent.
Bringing Up Bébé Page 12
