Desserts
Purée de Poire et Banane
Pear and Banana Puree
2 large or 3 small soft pears
2 bananas
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup water
Wash and peel the pears and bananas. Cut them into pieces.
In a medium-sized saucepan, cook them with the lemon juice and water for 15 to 20 minutes over low heat. Mix occasionally with a spoon.
Take the mixture off the heat and allow it to cool for a few minutes.
When it’s no longer steaming, pour it into small cups. Cover and refrigerate them until mealtime.
Pomme au Four à la Cannelle
Baked Apple with Cinnamon
4 apples (any cooking apples, including Granny Smith or Golden Delicious)
11⁄3 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 teaspoons sugar
Cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
Wash and core the apples (leave a bit of core at the bottom if you can).
Put a knob of butter and a teaspoon of sugar in the center of each apple. Sprinkle some cinnamon over the top.
Put about 1⁄8 inch of water in a baking dish (to keep the apples from sticking), and place the apples on top.
Cook for 20 to 30 minutes, until the center of the apples melt.
Remove the apples from the water. Serve them warm or cold.
Gâteau Chocolat
Chocolate Cake
Butter and flour to grease the pan
5 ounces dark baking chocolate
7 tablespoons unsalted butter (a bit less than 1 stick)
6 tablespoons powdered sugar
6 tablespoons flour
3 large or 4 small eggs, separated
Salt
Optional: whipped cream or crème fraîche
Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Grease and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.
In a saucepan over very low heat, slowly melt the chocolate and butter.
Remove the chocolate mixture from the heat. While mixing with a wooden spoon, sprinkle in the powdered sugar, then the flour. Add the egg yolks one by one and stir.
In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks.
Slowly fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Do not overmix.
Immediately pour the batter into the pan. Bake for 30 minutes.
Let the cake cool. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream.
sample weekly lunch menu from the parisian crèche
acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, and to Ann Godoff and Virginia Smith Younce at the Penguin Press.
My profound thanks go to Sapna Gupta for her astute reading of the manuscript. Adam Kuper gave me advice and encouragement when I needed it most. Pauline Harris provided expert help with research. Ken Druckerman didn’t just comment on the early chapters; he also accepted packages on my behalf.
Thank you to Marianne Velmans at Transworld, and to Sarah Hutson, Kate Samano, Cathryn Summerhayes, Aislinn Casey, Sofia Groopman, and Jane Fleming Fransson. Merci to my posse of mother readers: Christine Tacconet, Brooke Pallot, Dietlind Lerner, Amelia Relles, Sharon Galant, and the heroic Hannah Kuper, who read the chapters on pregnancy while having contractions herself.
I am grateful to nutritionist Sandra Merle at the Direction des Familles et de la Petite Enfance in Paris, for providing the recipes; to Claire Smith, who worked tirelessly to test them; and to baby Kate and others, who were made to eat them.
I am especially indebted to the many French families who let me hang around with them, and to the people whose introductions made all that hanging around possible: Cécile Agon, Benjamin Benita, Véronique Bouruet-Aubertot, Ingrid Callies, Aurèle Cariès, Christophe Delin, Christophe Dunoyer, Andrea Ipaktchi, Laurence Kalmanson, Solange Martin, Gail Negbaur, William Oiry, Robynne Pendariès, Lucie Porcher, Jonathan Ross, Frédérique Souverain, Hélène Toussaint, Emilie Walmsley, and Esther Zajdenweber.
Thanks to crèche Cour Debille and crèche Enfance et Découverte, especially Marie-Christine Barison, Anne-Marie Legendre, Sylvie Metay, Didier Trillot, Alexandra Van-Kersschaver, and Fatima Abdullarif. Special gratitude goes to the family of Fanny Gerbet.
For their general support, often in the form of food or shelter, thanks to Marsha Druckerman, Shana Druckerman, Adam Ellick, Adelyn Escobar, Joanne Feld, Steve Fleischer, Nancy and Ronald Gelles, Mark Gevisser, Valerie Picard, Lithe Sebesta, Kari Snick, Jeffrey Sumber, Patrick Weil, and Scott Wenger. Thank you to Benjamin Barda and my colleagues on the rue Bleue for their camaraderie, parenting tips, and lessons on how to enjoy lunch.
It’s much easier to write a parenting book when you’re blessed with extraordinary parents—Bonnie Green and Henry Druckerman. It’s also a gift to be married to someone who’s better at what I do than I am. I couldn’t have written this book without the encouragement and tolerance of my husband, Simon Kuper. He critiqued every draft, and in so doing, made me a better writer.
Finally, thank you to Leo, Joel, and Leila (rhymes with sky-la). This is what Mommy was doing in her office. I hope that one day you’ll think it was worth it.
notes
french children don’t throw food
1.French parents are very concerned about their kids In a 2002 survey by the International Social Survey Program, 90 percent of French adults agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Watching children grow up is life’s greatest joy.” In the United States it was 85.5 percent; in the United Kingdom it was 81.1 percent.
2.“more attention to the upbringing of children than can possibly be good for them” Joseph Epstein, “The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin,” The Weekly Standard, June 9, 2008. Epstein may also have coined the word “kindergarchy.”
3.benefit from more stimulation, too Judith Warner describes this in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005).
4.has plunged since its peak in the early 1990s According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the rate of violent crimes in the United States fell 43 percent between 1991 and 2009.
5.when I discover a research study Alan B. Krueger, Daniel Kahneman, Claude Fischler, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone, “Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S.,” Social Indicators Research 93 (2009): 7–18.
6.only the Irish have a higher birth rate According to 2009 figures from the OECD, France’s birth rate is 1.99 per woman; Belgium’s is 1.83; Italy’s is 1.41; Spain’s is 1.4; and Germany’s is 1.36.
Chapter 2: paris is burping
1.in France it’s 1 in 6,900 From a report called Women on the Front Lines of Health Care: State of the World’s Mothers 2010, published by Save the Children in 2010. The figures are from an appendix in the report titled “The Complete Mothers’ Index 2010.”
2.about 87 percent of women have epidurals, on average “Top des Maternités.” www.maman.fr/top_des_maternites-1-1.html.
Chapter 3: doing her nights
1.A meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers Jodi Mindell et al., “Behavioral Treatment of Bedtime Problems and Night Wakings in Young Children: An American Academy of Sleep Medicine Review,” Sleep 29 (2006): 1263–76.
2.The authors of the meta-study point to a paper Teresa Pinella and Leann L. Birch, “Help Me Make It Through the Night: Behavioral Entrainment of Breast-Fed Infants’ Sleep Patterns,” Pediatrics 91, 2 (1993): 436–43.
Chapter 4: wait!
1.Most could wait only about thirty seconds Mischel’s experiments were recounted by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker, May 18, 2009.
2.‘Hold on, I’m talking to Papa’ Walter Mischel cautions that even if young French children are good at waiting, that doesn’t mean that they’ll become successful adults. Many other thin
gs affect them, too. And while Americans typically don’t expect small children to wait well, they trust that the same children will somehow acquire this skill later in life. “I believe an undisciplined child isn’t doomed to become an undisciplined adult,” Mischel says. “Just because a kid is throwing around food at age seven or eight, at a restaurant . . . doesn’t mean that the same child isn’t going to become a superb businessperson or scientist or teacher or whatever fifteen years later.”
3.ended up eating it Mischel found that kids can easily learn to distract themselves. In a subsequent marshmallow test, experimenters told the children that instead of thinking about the marshmallow, they should think about something happy like “swinging on a swing with Mommy pushing” or to pretend it was just a picture of a marshmallow. With this instruction, overall waiting times increased dramatically. Waiting times improved even though kids knew that they were trying to trick themselves. The moment the experimenter walked back into the room, children who had been busy self-distracting for fifteen minutes gobbled up the marshmallow.
4.now includes snacks Jennifer Steinhauer, “Snack Time Never Ends,” The New York Times, January 19, 2010.
5.But the French moms said it was very important Marie-Anne Suizzo, “French and American Mothers’ Childrearing Beliefs: Stimulating, Responding, and Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35, 5 (September 2004): 606–26.
6.an enormous U.S. government study of the effects child care National Instutute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD), Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, 1991–2007. www.nichd .nih.gov/research/supported/seccyd/Pagesoverview.aspx.
7.American kids doing quite a lot of n’importe quoi A 2006 study of white, middle-class Canadian couples found that when the kids were around—which was very often—it was impossible for parents to have quality time together. One participant said that while speaking to his wife, “we would be interrupted on a minute-to-minute basis.” The authors concluded, “For any experience of being a couple together, they simply had to get away from the children.” Vera Dyck and Kerry Daly, “Rising to the Challenge: Fathers’ Role in the Negotiation of Couple Time,” Leisure Studies 25, 2 (2006): 201–17.
8.A French psychologist writes The psychologist is Christine Brunet, quoted in Journal des Femmes, February 11, 2005.
9.“an obligatory passage” Anne-Catherine Pernot-Masson, quoted in Votre Enfant.
Chapter 5: tiny little humans
1.as far away as Normandy or Burgundy Élisabeth Badinter, L’amour en plus: Histoire de l’amour maternel (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 56–63.
2.to replace the mother in the family store Ibid.
3.writes a French social historian Ibid.
4.because doing so gives the children pleasure Marie-Anne Suizzo, “French and American Mothers’ Childrearing Beliefs: Stimulating, Responding, and Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35, 5 (September 2004): 606–26.
5.“I don’t know where she got her answers” Dolto: Une vie pour l’enfance, Télérama hors série, 2008.
6.but that she later created Dolto decided that she wanted a career after seeing formerly well-off women from her neighborhood come begging at her school because they’d lost their husbands in World War I. “I saw the decrepitude of bourgeois widows who didn’t have a profession,” she explained.
7.In a letter to her written in 1934 Françoise Dolto, Lettres de jeunesse: Correspondance 1913–1938 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).
8.she would ask her young patients Recollection of the psychoanalyst Alain Vanier, reported in Dolto: Une vie pour l’enfance, Télérama hors série, 2008.
9.“some of them are small. But they communicate” The psychologist is Muriel Djéribi-Valentin. She was interviewed by Jacqueline Sellem for an article titled “Françoise Dolto: An Analyst Who Listened to Children,” which appeared in l’Humanité in English and was translated by Kieran O’Meara, www.humaniteinenglish.com/article1071.html.
10.give the baby a tour of the house Marie-Anne Suizzo found that 86 percent of Parisian mothers she interviewed “specifically stated that they talk to their infants to communicate with them.” Marie-Anne Suizzo, “Mother-Child Relationships in France: Balancing Autonomy and Affiliation in Everyday Interactions,” Ethos 32, 3 (2004): 292–323.
11.writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom Paul Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies,” The New York Times Magazine, May 3, 2010.
12.that eight-month-olds understand probabilities Alison Gopnik writes that these new studies “demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible.” Gopnik is a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of The Philosophical Baby.
Chapter 6: day care?
1.and turn them into “Americans” Abby J. Cohen, “A Brief History of Federal Financing for Child Care in the United States,” The Future of Children: Financing Child Care 6 (1996).
2.don’t have to work, or can afford nannies. Eventually, the latter part of preschool was assimilated into the American public-school system. But day care remained staunchly private. Middle-class parents and experts believed that mothers should look after young children. The state wasn’t supposed to intrude on that stage of family life, except when “a family—or the country itself—is in crisis,” Abby Cohen writes.
The Great Depression was one such crisis. By 1933, the American government had set up emergency nursery schools, but this was explicitly done to create jobs. Cohen notes that a 1930 report by the White House’s Conference on Children said, “No one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep.” Most of the schools were shut down once the worst of the Depression passed.
When the United States entered World War II, another child-care crisis erupted: Who would look after Rosie the Riveter’s babies? Between 1942 and 1946 the federal government built child-care centers serving children whose mothers had gone to work in the defense industry. Most were in California, where much of the war production was taking place. Initially, the centers charged just fifty cents a day.
When the war ended, the government said that it was shutting down the centers so mothers could go back to keeping house. Some mothers protested. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “Many thought [the centers] were purely a war emergency measure. A few of us had an inkling that perhaps they were a need that was constantly with us, but one that we had neglected to face in the past.” Some centers got funding for a few more years, but most eventually shut down.
A new push for the U.S. government to help parents pay for child care—and even provide some of it—began to galvanize in the 1960s. There was a wave of new research about how disadvantages very early in life persist when kids are older. Head Start was created to fund schools for very poor three- to five-year-olds.
Of course, middle-class mothers wanted their kids to have the advantages of early education, too. And with more women working, child care was increasingly a problem. In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. The act was meant to professionalize the child-care workforce, build lots of new child-care centers, and make quality child care available and affordable. President Nixon vetoed the act, claiming (in a veto written by his adviser Pat Buchanan) that it favored “communal approaches to child-rearing over the family centered approach.” It was a brilliant invocation of both Cold War fears about communism and the long-standing idea that mothers should look after children themselves.
In the 1980s, this ambivalence about day care took on a new form: alleged sex-abuse rings set in home- and center-based day-care facilities. In a series of high-profile cases, day-care owners and employees were charged with pedophilia, sometimes even involving devil worship and journeys into underground labyrinths. Many of these charges turned out to be bunk, and key convictions were overturned because testimony f
rom the children involved had been coerced by overzealous prosecutors. Journalist Margaret Talbot wrote that even the most outrageous charges seemed credible in the early 1980s because Americans were nervous about mothers of young children going to work: “It was as though there were some dark, self-defeating relief in trading niggling everyday doubts about our children’s care for our absolute worst fears—for a story with monsters, not just human beings who didn’t always treat our kids exactly as we would like; for a fate so horrific and bizarre that no parent, no matter how vigilant, could have ever prevented it,” she said.
3.are typically open from six A.M. to six thirty P.M. When there were sex-abuse cases at some CDCs in the 1980s, the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel and Compensation held hearings to investigate the whole system. It found the same problems faced by private-sector day care: high staff turnover, low pay, and sometimes nonexistent inspections, according to Gail L. Zellman and Anne Johansen in “Examining the Implementation and Outcomes of the Military Child Care Act of 1989.” In response, Congress passed the Military Child Care Act in 1989. This contained exactly the sort of rules that American day-care advocates had been clamoring for: specialized training for caregivers, experts overseeing each center, and no-notice inspections four times a year.
4.American parents remain ambivalent about day care In 2003, 72 percent of Americans agreed that “too many children are being raised in day-care centers these days,” up from 68 percent in 1987, according to the Pew Research Center.
5.perfect conviction that the children understand A 2009 report by the Paris mayor’s office said that caregivers shouldn’t speak badly about a child’s parents, origins, or appearance, even if the child is an infant, and even if the remark is made to someone else. “The implicit message in this type of reflection is always perceived intuitively by the children. The younger they are, the more they understand what is contained behind the words,” the report says.
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