Bringing Up Bebe (9 page)

It strikes me that French parents aren’t just doing a few things differently. They have a whole different view of how kids learn and of who they are. I don’t just have a swimming-class problem; I seem to have a philosophical problem, too.

In the 1960s,
the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget came to America to share his theories on the stages of children’s development. After each talk, someone in the audience typically asked him what he began calling The American Question. It was: How can we speed these stages up?

Piaget’s answer was: Why would you want to do that? He didn’t think that pushing kids to acquire skills ahead of schedule was either possible or desirable. He believed that children reach these milestones at their own speeds, driven by their own inner motors.

The American Question sums up an essential difference between French and American parents. We Americans assign ourselves the job of pushing, stimulating, and carrying our kids from one developmental stage to the next. The better we are at parenting, we think, the faster our kids will develop. In my Anglophone playgroup in Paris, some of the mothers flaunt the fact that their kids take music classes or that they go to a separate Portuguese-speaking playgroup. But often these same mothers are cagey about revealing any details of the activities, so that no one else can sign up their kids. These mothers would never admit that they’re being competitive, but the feeling is palpable.

French parents just don’t seem so anxious for their kids to get head starts. They don’t push them to read, swim, or do math ahead of schedule. They aren’t trying to prod them into becoming prodigies. I don’t get the feeling that—surreptitiously or otherwise—we’re all in a race for some unnamed prize. They do sign their kids up for tennis, fencing, and English lessons. But they don’t parade these activities as proof of what good parents they are. Nor are they guarded when talking about the classes, like they’re some sort of secret weapon. In France, the point of enrolling a child in Saturday-morning music class isn’t to activate some neural network. It’s to have fun. Like that swimming instructor, French parents believe in “awakening” and “discovery.”

In fact, French parents have a different view of the nature of a child. When I start to read about what this view is, I keep coming across two people who lived two hundred years apart: the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a Frenchwoman I had never previously heard of named Françoise Dolto. They’re the two great influences on French parenting. And their spirits are very much alive in France today.

The modern French idea of how to parent starts with Rousseau. The philosopher wasn’t himself much of a parent (or, like Piaget, even a native Frenchman). He was born in Geneva in 1712 and didn’t have an ideal childhood. His mother died ten days after he was born. His only sibling, an older brother, ran away from home. Later his father, a watchmaker, fled Geneva because of a business dispute, leaving Jean-Jacques behind with an uncle. Rousseau eventually moved to Paris, where he abandoned his own children to orphanages soon after they were born. He said this was to protect the honor of their mother, a former seamstress whom he’d hired as a servant.

None of this stopped Rousseau from publishing
Émile, or On Education
, in 1762. It describes the education of a fictional boy named Émile (who will, after puberty, meet the lovely and equally fictional Sophie). The German philosopher Immanuel Kant later compared the book’s significance to that of the French Revolution. French friends tell me they read it in high school. Émile’s impact is so enduring that passages and catchphrases from it are mod
ern-day parenting clichés, like the importance of “awakening.” And French parents still take many of its precepts for granted.

Émile
was published during a dire time for French parenting. A Parisian police official estimated that of the 21,000 babies born in Paris in 1780, 19,000 were sent to live with wet nurses as far away as Normandy or Burgundy.
¹
Some of these newborns died en route, bouncing around in the back of cold wago
ns. Many others died in the care of the poorly paid, overburdened wet nurses, who took on too many babies and often kept them tightly swaddled for long periods, supposedly to keep them from hurting themselves.

For working-c
lass parents, wet nurses were an economic choice; it was cheaper to pay a nurse than to hire someone to replace the mother in the family store.
²
For upper-class mothers, however, it was a lifestyle choice. There was social pressure to be free to enjoy a sophisticated social life. The child “interferes not just in his mother’s married life, but also in her pleasures,” writes a French social historian.
³
“Taking care of a child was neither amusing, nor
chic
.”

Rousseau tried to upend all of this with
Émile
. He urged mothers to breast-feed their own babies. He decried swaddling, “padded bonnets,” and “leading strings,” the child-safety devices of his day. “Far from being attentive to protecting Émile from injury, I would be most distressed if he were never hurt and grew up without knowing pain,” Rousseau wrote. “If he grabs a knife he will hardly tighten his grip and will not cut himself very deeply.”

Rousseau thought children should be given space to let their development unfold naturally. He said Émile should be “taken daily to the middle of a field; there let him run and frisk about; let him fall a hundred times a day.” He imagined a child who is free to explore and discover the world and let his senses gradually “awaken.” “In the morning let Émile run barefoot in all seasons,” he wrote. He allows the fictional Émile to read just a single book:
Robinson Crusoe
.

Until I read
Émile
, I was mystified by all the talk among French parents and educators about letting children “awaken” and “discover.” One of the teachers at Bean’s day care gushed at a parents’ meeting that the kids go to a local gymnasium on Thursday mornings, not to exercise but to “discover” their bodies. The day care’s
mission statement says that kids should “discover the world, in pleasure and gaiety . . .” Another center nearby is simply called Enfance et Découverte (Childhood and Discovery). The highest compliment anyone seems to pay a baby in France is that she is
éveillée
(alert and awakened). Unlike in America, this isn’t a euphemism for “ugly.”

Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn’t always require the parent’s active involvement. It can come from staring at the sky, smelling dinner as it’s being prepared, or playing alone on a blanket. It’s a way of sharpening the child’s senses and preparing him to distinguish between different experiences. It’s the first step toward teaching him to be a cultivated adult who knows how to enjoy himself. Awakening is a kind of training for children in how to
profiter
—to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment.

I’m in favor of all this awakening, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I’m just puzzled by the emphasis. We American parents—as Piaget discovered—tend to be more interested in having kids acquire concrete skills and reach developmental milestones.

And we tend to think that how well and how quickly kids advance depends on what their parents do. That means that parents’ choices and the quality of their intervention are extremely important. In this light, baby sign language, prereading strategies, and picking the right preschool understandably seem crucial. So does the never-ending American search for parenting experts and advice.

I see this cultural difference in my little Parisian courtyard. Bean’s room is filled with black-and-white flash cards, baby blocks with the ABCs printed on them, and the (now discredited) Baby Einstein DVDs that we’ve gladly received as gifts from American friends and family. We play Mozart constantly, to stimulate her cognitive development.

But my French neighbor Anne, the architect, had never heard of Baby Einstein. She wasn’t interested when I told her about it. Anne likes to let her little girl sit and play with old toys bought at yard sales or meander around our shared courtyard.

I later mention to Anne that there is an opening at our local preschool. Bean, who is among the oldest kids in her day care, could start a year early. This would mean taking her out of day care, where I fear she isn’t being sufficiently challenged.

“Why would you want to do that?” Anne asks. “There are so few years to just be a child.”

A University of Texas study found that with all this awakening, French mothers aren’t trying to help their kids’ cognitive development or make them advance in school. Rather, they believe that awakening will help their kids forge “inner psychological qualities such as self-assurance and tolerance of difference.” Others believe in exposing children to a variety of tastes, colors, and sights, simply because doing so gives the children pleasure.
⁴

This pleasure is “the motivation for life,” one of the mothers says. “If we didn’t have pleasure, we wouldn’t have any reason to live.”

In the twenty-first-century
Paris of parents and children that I inhabit, Rousseau’s legacy takes two apparently contradictory forms. On the one hand, there’s the frolicking in the fields ( c tht, or the pool). But on the other hand, there’s quite strict discipline. Rousseau says that a child’s freedom should be bound by firm limits and strong parental authority.

“Do you know the surest means of making your child miserable?” he writes. “It is to accustom him to getting everything. Since his desires grow constantly due to the ease of satisfying them, sooner or later powerlessness will force you, in spite of yourself, to end up with a refusal. And this unaccustomed refusal will give him more torment than being deprived of what he desires.”

Rousseau says the biggest parenting trap is to think that because a child can argue well, his argument deserves the same weight as your own. “The worst education is to leave him floating between his will and yours and to dispute endlessly between you and him as to which of the two will be the master.”

For Rousseau, the only possible master is the parent. He often seems to be describing the
cadre
—or frame—that is the model for today’s French parents. The ideal of the
cadre
is that parents are very strict about certain things but very relaxed about most everything else.

Fanny, the publisher with two young children, tells me that before she even had kids, she heard a well-known French actor on the radio talking about being a parent. He put her ideas about the
cadre—
and the way she herself was raised—into words.

“He said, ‘Education is a firm
cadre
, and inside is liberty.’ I really like that. I think the kid is reassured. He knows he can do what he wants, but some limits will always be there.”

Almost all the French parents I meet describe themselves as “strict.” This doesn’t mean that they’re constantly ogres. It means that, like Fanny, they are very strict about a few key things. These form the backbone of the
cadre
.

“I tend to be severe all of the time, a little bit,” Fanny says. “There are some rules I found that if you let go, you tend to take two steps backward. I rarely let these go.”

For Fanny, these areas are eating, sleeping, and watching TV. “For all the rest she can do what she wants,” she tells me about her daughter, Lucie. Even within these key areas, Fanny tries to give Lucie some freedom and choices. “With the TV, it’s no TV, just DVDs. But she chooses which DVD. I just try to do that for everything . . . Dressing up in the morning, I tell her, ‘At home, you can dress however you want. If you want to wear a summer shirt in wintertime, okay. But when we go out, we decide.’ It works for the moment. We’ll see what happens when she’s thirteen.”

The point of the
cadre
isn’t to hem the child in; it’s to create a world that’s predictable and coherent to her. “You need that
cadre
or I think you get lost,” Fanny says. “It gives you confidence. You have confidence in your kid, and your kid feels it.”

The
cadre
feels enlightened and empowering for kids. But Rousseau’s legacy has a da cgaclittlerker side, too. When I bring Bean to get her first inoculations, I cradle her in my arms and apologize to her for the pain she’s about to experience. The French pediatrician scolds me.

“You don’t say ‘I’m sorry,’” he says. “Getting shots is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.” He seems to be channeling Rousseau, who said, “If by too much care you spare them every kind of discomfort, you are preparing great miseries for them.” (I’m not sure what Rousseau thought about suppositories.)

Rousseau wasn’t sentimental about children. He wanted to make good citizens out of impressionable lumps of clay. Many thinkers continued to view babies as tabulae rasae—blank slates—for hundreds of years. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the American psychologist and philosopher William James said that to an infant, the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Well into the twentieth century, it was taken for granted that children only slowly begin understanding the world and the fact of their own presence in it.

In France, the idea that kids are second-class beings who only gradually gain status persisted into the 1960s. I’ve met Frenchmen now in their forties who, as children, weren’t allowed to speak at the dinner table unless they were first addressed by an adult. Children were often expected to be “
sage comme une image
” (quiet as a picture), the equivalent of the old English dictum that children should be seen but not heard.