6.but must be trained in-house OECD, “Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care,” 2006.
7.the way kids develop and behave later in life NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.
8.One of the study’s researchers Jay Belsky, “Effects of Child Care on Child Development: Give Parents Real Choice.”
Chapter 7: bébé au lait
1.do some breastfeeding OECD, “France Country Highlights, Doing Better for Children,” 2009.
2.a third are still nursing exclusively at four months WHO Global Data Bank on Infant and Young Child Feeding, 2007–2008.
3.weighing yourself daily “The more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you’ll control yourself,” Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney write in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).
4.they will eat those foods later Ibid.
5.there’s no reason to feel bad about that In a 2004 study, when French and American mothers ranked the importance of “always put[ting] the baby’s needs before one’s own,” American mothers gave it 2.89 out of 5; French mothers gave it 1.26 out of 5. 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.a fashion spread in a French mothers’ magazine Violaine Belle-Croix, “Géraldine Pailhas, des visages, des figures,” Milk Magazine, September 13, 2010.
7.is also required to keep her looking and feeling seductive “French women know that an inner life is a sexy thing. It needs to be nurtured, developed, pampered . . . ,” Debra Ollivier writes in What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009).
Chapter 8: the perfect mother doesn’t exist
1.Just 71 percent of Americans and Britons said this Given the baby boom and the shortage of spots in crèches, the French state pays some mothers about five hundred euros a month to look after their own kids until the youngest is three. Mothers are also entitled to work part-time for the first three years.
2.to make child care less pleasant for mothers American mothers found child care twice as unpleasant as French mothers. 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.
3.Annette Lareau observed among white and African American middle-class parents Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
4.she’s also supposed to attend the practices Annette Lareau writes that most of the middle-class families she observed were frenetically busy, with parents working full-time, then shopping, cooking, overseeing baths and homework, and driving kids back and forth to activities. “Things are so hectic that the house sometimes seems to become a holding pattern between activities,” she writes. From “Question and Answers: Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life,” http://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/sociology.sas.upenn.edu/files/Lareau_Question&Answers.pdf.
5.“they might lose!” Elisabeth Guédel Treussard, “Pourquoi les mères françaises sont supérieures,” French Morning, January 24, 2011.
6.more time on child care than parents did in 1965 Robert Pear, “Married and Single Parents Spending More Time with Children, Study Finds,” The New York Times, October 17, 2006.
Chapter 9: caca boudin
1.child care is the top expense The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States 2010, published by Wider Opportunities for Women, 2010, www.wowonline.org/documents/BESTIndexforTheUnitedStates2010.pdf.
2.“passionately, madly, not at all” Debra Ollivier, What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of Heart and Mind (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009).
Chapter 11: i adore this baguette
1.marital satisfaction has fallen Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Craig A. Foster, “Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of Marriage and Family 65, 3 (August 2003): 574–83.
2.mothers find it more pleasant to do housework than to take care of their kids In a well-known 2004 study, working mothers in Texas said child care was one of their most unpleasant daily activities. They preferred housework. Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science, December 3, 2004.
3.their unhappiness increases with each additional child Jean M. Twenge et al., “Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction.”
4.A paper on middle-class Canadians Vera Dyck and Kerry Daly, “Rising to the Challenge: Fathers’ Role in the Negotiation of Couple Time,” Leisure Studies 25, 2 (2006): 201–17.
5.have a bigger gap than we do between what men and women earn In the overall 2010 Global Gender Gap Index, created by the World Economic Forum, the United States ranked nineteenth and France ranked forty-sixth.
6.men doing household work and looking after children According to Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee).
7.and 25 percent more time on child care According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, news release, June 22, 2010, “American Time Use Survey—2009 Results,” www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_ 06222010.pdf.
8.“it’s hard for me to cool back down” In a 2008 study, 49 percent of employed American men said they did as much or more child care as their partners. But just 31 percent of women saw it this way. Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann, and James T. Bond, Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home.
9.leaving Simon in Paris with the boys Alan B. Krueger et al., “Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S.” French women spent about 15 percent less time doing housework than the American women did.
10.about twenty-one more vacation days each year Ibid.
11.A 2006 French study Denise Bauer, Études et Résultats, “Le temps des parents après une naissance,” Direction de la recherche, des études, de l’évaluation et des statistiques (DREES), April 2006, www.drees.sante.gouv.fr/le-temps-des-parents-apres-une-naissance,4413.html.
Chapter 12: you just have to taste it
1.Just 3.1 percent of French five- and six-year-olds are obese Nathalie Guignon, Marc Collet, and Lucie Gonzalez, “La santé des enfants en grande section de maternelle en 2005–2006,” Drees études et resultats, September 2010.
2.10.4 percent of kids between two and five are obese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Prevalence of Obesity Among Children and Adolescents: United States, Trends 1963–1965 Through 2007–2008.”
3.“health is seen as the main reason for eating” Lemangeur-ocha.com, “France, Europe, the United States: What Eating Means to Us: Interview with Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson,” posted online, January 16, 2008.
Chapter 13: it’s me who decides
1.“and it’s respectful to the child,” Daniel Marcelli says In an interview with Enfant Magazine, “Comment réussir à se faire obéir?” October 2009, 78–82.
2.In a national poll “Les Français et la fessée” by the polling agency TNS Sofres/Logica for Dimanche Ouest France, November 11, 2009.
3.said they never spank their kids Fifty-five percent also said that they oppose spanking.
4.All the French parenting experts I read about oppose it Marcel Rufo, a well-known child psychiatrist based in Marseille, says: “There are two generations of parents . . . those of yesterday who were spanked and hit and who say, ‘We weren’t traumatized by it.’ And then there are the parents of today, who I think are much better, because they’re more about understanding the child than about prohibiting things. The role of the parent is to give his view to th
e child, to explain things to him. The child will accept them.” Le Figaro Magazine, November 20, 2009, www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2009/11/20/01016-20091120ARTFIG00670-deux-claques-pour-la-loi-antifessee-.php.
Chapter 14: let him live his life
1.everything in the house—and in society—that concerns him When French and American mothers were asked to rank the importance of “Not let[ting] the baby become too dependent on his or her mother,” American mothers ranked the statement 0.93 out of a possible 5. French mothers ranked it 3.36. 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.
2.“treating each child’s thought as a special contribution” Raymonde Carroll writes in Cultural Misunderstandings that American parents “avoid as much as possible criticizing their children, making fun of their tastes, or telling them constantly ‘how to do things.’”
3.is almost like getting a perfect score Getting 16:20 is a “rare and outstanding achievement,” according to a report prepared by the University of Cambridge exam board for British Universities. Reported in “A Chorus of Disapproval,” The Economist, September 30, 2010, www.economist.com/node/17155766.
4.against an ideal, which practically no one meets This creates a problem for social scientists when they try to compare life in the United States and France. “Americans tend to be more emphatic when reporting their well-being,” say the authors of that study of women in Ohio and Rennes. Americans were more likely to choose extremes like “very satisfied” and “not at all satisfied,” whereas Frenchwomen avoided these. The researchers adjusted their findings to account for this.
5.“because they’re afraid of not succeeding” Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (New York: Twelve, 2009), http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=8433586&page=7.
the future in french
1.that I must bend to their wills “For Françoise Dolto, a desire is not a need, it shouldn’t necessarily be satisfied, but we should listen to it and speak about it, which makes all the difference,” says Muriel Djéribi-Valentin, in “Françoise Dolto: An Analyst Who Listened to Children,” l’Humanité in English.
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