French Children Don't Throw Food (11 page)

On the contrary, ‘If the parent can’t stand the fact of being hated, then he won’t frustrate the child, and then the child will be in a situation where he will be the object of his own tyranny, where basically he has to deal with his own greed and his own need for things. If the parent isn’t there to stop him, then he’s the one who’s going to have to stop himself or not stop himself, and that’s much more anxiety-provoking.’

Thompson’s view reflects what seems to be the consensus in
France
: making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustration turns them into happier, more resilient people. And one of the main ways to gently induce frustration, on a daily basis, is to make children wait a bit. As with the Pause as a sleep strategy, French parents have homed in on this one thing. They treat waiting not just as one important quality among many, but as a cornerstone of raising kids.

I’m still mystified by France’s national baby-feeding schedule. How do French babies all end up eating at the same times, if their mothers don’t make them do it? When I point this out, mothers continue to wax eloquent about rhythms and flexibility, and about how each child is different.

But after a while, I realize that they also take a few principles for granted, even if they don’t always mention them. The first principle is that, after the first few months, a baby should eat at roughly the same time each day. The second is that babies should have a few big feeds rather than a lot of small ones. And the third is that the baby should fit into the rhythm of the family.

So while it’s true that they don’t force their babies on to a schedule, they do nudge them towards it by observing these three principles.
Votre Enfant
says the ideal is to breastfeed on demand for the first few months, and then bring the baby ‘progressively and flexibly, to regular hours that are more compatible with daily life’.

If parents follow these principles and the baby wakes up at seven or eight, and you think he should wait about four hours
between
meals, he is going to be routed on to the national meal plan. He’ll eat in the morning. He’ll eat again around noon. He’ll have an afternoon feed around four, and then eat again at about 8 pm, before bed. When he cries at 10:30 am, you’re going to assume that what’s best for him is to wait until lunchtime and have a big feed then. It might take a while for him to ease into this rhythm. Parents do this gradually, not abruptly. But eventually the baby gets used to it, the same way that grown-ups do. The parents get used to it too.

Martine says that for the first few months she nursed Paulette on demand. Around the third month, to get her to wait three hours between feeds, she took her for walks or put her in a sling, where Paulette would usually quickly stop crying. Martine then did the same when she wanted to space out the feeding times to four hours. Martine says she never let either of her kids cry for very long. Gradually, she says, they just fell into the rhythm of eating four times a day. ‘I was really flexible, I’m just like that,’ she says.

The critical assumption is that while the baby has his own rhythm, the family and the parents have rhythms too. The ideal, in France, is to find a balance between these two. The parenting book
Your Child
explains, ‘You and your baby each have your rights, and every decision is a compromise.’

Bean’s regular paediatrician never mentioned this four-meal-a-day plan to me. But he’s away at Bean’s next appointment. His replacement is a young French woman who has a daughter about Bean’s age. When I ask her about the schedule, she says that –
bien sûr
– Bean should only be eating
four
times a day. Then the doctor grabs some Post-its and scribbles down the Schedule. It’s the same one again: morning, noon, 4 pm and 8 pm. When I later ask Bean’s regular doctor why he never mentioned this, he says he prefers not to suggest schedules to Anglophone parents, because they become too doctrinaire about them.

It takes a few weeks, but we gradually nudge Bean on to this schedule. It turns out that she can take the wait. She just needed a bit of practice.

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celcius. Use vegetable oil to grease a 9-inch round pan (or a loaf tin).

Gently combine the yogurt, eggs, sugar, vanilla and oil. In a separate bowl, mix the flour and baking powder. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients; mix gently until the ingredients are combined, but don’t over-mix. You can add
2
tubs frozen berries, a tub of chocolate chips, or any flavouring you like. Cook for 35 minutes, then 5 minutes more if it doesn’t pass the knife test. It should be almost crispy on the outside, but springy on the inside. Let it cool. The cake is delicious served with tea and a dollop of crème fraîche.

5

Tiny Little Humans

WHEN BEAN IS
a year and a half, we register her at the Centre for the Adaptation of the Young Child to the Aquatic Milieu, known as ‘babies in the water’ –
bébés dans l’eau
. It’s a weekly swimming class organized by our local town hall, and held every Saturday at one of the public pools in our neighbourhood. A month before the first class, the organizers summon parents to a meeting. The other parents seem a lot like us: university-educated, and willing to push buggies in the cold on Saturday mornings in order to teach their kids to swim. Each family is assigned a forty-five-minute swimming slot and reminded that – as in all public pools in Paris – men must wear tight swimming trunks, not shorts. (This is supposedly for hygiene. Swimming shorts could be worn elsewhere, and thus carry dirt into the pool.)

The three of us arrive at the pool, get undressed and put on our swimming gear as discreetly as possible in the unisex changing room. Then we slip into the pool alongside the other kids and their parents. Bean throws around some plastic balls, goes down the slide and jumps off the rafts. At one point an
instructor
paddles up to us and introduces himself, then swims away. Before we know it, our time is up and the next shift of parents and kids is climbing into the pool.

I figure that this must be an introductory class, and that the lessons will begin the following week. But at the next class it’s the same thing: lots of splashing around, no one teaching anyone how to kick, blow bubbles or otherwise begin to swim. In fact, there’s no organized instruction at all. Every so often the same instructor paddles by and makes sure we’re happy.

This time, I corner him in the pool: when is he going to start teaching my daughter how to swim? He smiles indulgently. ‘Children don’t learn how to swim in “babies in the water”,’ he says, as if this is completely obvious. (I find out later that Parisian kids typically don’t learn to swim until they’re six. In the US, they often learn much younger.)

So what are we all doing here? He says the point of these sessions is for children to
discover
the water, and to
awaken
to the sensations of being in it.

Huh? My daughter has already ‘discovered’ water in the bath. I want her to swim! And I want her to swim as early as possible, preferably by age two. That’s what I thought I’d paid for, and why I dragged my family out of bed on a frigid Saturday morning.

I suddenly look around and realize that all those parents at the meeting knew that they were signing up for their kid to merely ‘discover’ and ‘awaken’ to the water, not to learn how to swim. Do their kids ‘discover’ the piano too, instead of learning how to play it?

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 (I think it’s fair to assume that these days it’s a British question too) sums up an essential difference between French and Anglophone parents. We assign ourselves the job of pushing, stimulating and urging our kids from one developmental stage to the next. The better we are at parenting, we think, the faster our kids will move up. 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 they don’t reveal too many details about these activities, so that no one else’s child can do them. These mothers would never admit that there’s competition between us, but it is palpable.

‘When every other helicopter parent is hovering anxiously over their offspring – encouraging them, guiding them and, yes, occasionally pushing them – it feels like a dereliction of duty not to do the same,’ a mother writes in the
Telegraph
.
¹

French parents just don’t seem so anxious for their kids to get ahead. They don’t push them to read, swim or do maths 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 do they hide 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’.

French parents have a different view of what the nature of a child is. When I start to read about this view, I keep coming across two people who lived 200 years apart: the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a French woman I had never previously heard of called 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 much of a parent himself (or, like Piaget, even born French). 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 abandoned his own children to orphanages soon after they were born. He said this was to protect the honour of their mother, a former seamstress whom he’d hired as a servant in Paris.

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. It remains a classic; French friends tell me they read it in high school.
Émile
’s impact is so enduring that passages and catchphrases from it are modern-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.
²
Some of these newborns died en route, bouncing around in the back of cold wagons. 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 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 shop.
³
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.
⁴
‘Taking care of a child was neither amusing, nor
chic
.’

Rousseau tried to upend all of this with
Émile
. He urged mothers to breastfeed 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 boy 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 crèche gushed at the parents’ meeting that the kids go to a local gymnasium on Thursday mornings not to exercise but to ‘discover’ their bodies. The nursery’s mission statement says that kids should
‘discover
the world, in pleasure and gaiety . . .’ Another centre near by is simply called Enfance et Découverte – Childhood and Discovery. The highest compliment anyone seems to pay a baby in France is that he is ‘
éveillé
’ – alert and awakened. Unlike in America, this isn’t a euphemism for ‘ugly’.