French Children Don't Throw Food (12 page)

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 letting him play alone on a blanket. It’s a way of sharpening the child’s senses and preparing him to discern between different experiences. It’s the first step towards teaching him to be a cultivated, discerning adult.

I’m in favour of all this awakening, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I’m just puzzled by the emphasis. We Anglophone 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 crucial. In this light, baby sign language, pre-reading strategies, and picking the right nursery understandably seem critically important. So does the never-ending 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 ABC printed on them, and the Baby Einstein
DVDs
that we’ve gladly received as gifts from English-speaking friends and family. We play Mozart as background music constantly, because we’ve heard it will make her smarter.

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

I later mention to Anne that there is an opening at our local nursery school. Bean could start a year early. This would mean taking her out of her crèche, where she is one of the oldest kids, and 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.’

The 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 believed in exposing children to a variety of tastes, colours and sights, simply because doing so gives the children pleasure.
⁵

This pleasure is ‘the motivation for life’, one of the mothers said. ‘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 (or the pool). But on the other hand, there’s quite strict discipline. Rousseau says the 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 him, the only possible master is the parent. It seems clear that Rousseau is the inspiration behind the
cadre
– or framework – 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 almost 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 brought up – 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 areas. These things are 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 back. 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. Even within these key areas, Fanny tries to give her daughter 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, OK. 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 darker side too. When I take 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 paediatrician scolds me.

‘You don’t say, “I’m sorry,”’ he says. ‘Getting injections, and experiencing pain, is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.’ He seems to be channelling 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 and only gradually gain status persisted into the 1960s. I’ve met French men and women 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’.

This conception of children began changing in France in the late 1960s, and came to a head after the 1968 student protests, which led to a general strike. What many people really wanted was a whole different way of life. France’s religious, socially conservative, male-dominated society, in place for centuries, suddenly seemed dated. The protesters
envisioned
a kind of personal liberation that included different life options for women, less of a rigid class hierarchy, and a daily existence that wasn’t just about ‘
Métro, boulot, dodo
’ – commute, work, sleep. Eventually the French government broke up the protests, sometimes violently. But the revolt had a profound impact on French society. (France is now, for example, one of the least religious countries in Europe.)

The authoritarian model of parenting was a casualty of 1968 too. If everyone was equal, why couldn’t children speak at dinner? The pure Rousseauian model – children as blank slates and obedient subjects – didn’t suit France’s newly emancipated society. And the French were fascinated by psychoanalysis. It suddenly seemed that by shutting kids up, parents might be screwing them up too.

French kids were still expected to be well behaved and to control themselves, but gradually after 1968 they were encouraged to express themselves too. The young French parents I know often use
sage
to mean self-controlled, but also happily absorbed in an activity. ‘Before it was “
sage
like a picture”. Now it’s “
sage
and awakened”, explained the French psychologist and writer Maryse Vaillant, herself a member of the famous ‘Generation of ’68’.

Into this generational upheaval walked Françoise Dolto. Dolto is the other titan of French parenting. French people I speak to – even those without kids – can’t believe that Anglophones haven’t heard of Françoise Dolto, or that only one of her books has ever been translated into English (it’s long out of print).

In France, Dolto is a household name, a bit like Dr Spock used to be in America. The centenary of her birth was celebrated in 2008 with a flood of articles, tributes, and even a made-for-TV movie about her life. UNESCO convened a three-day conference in Paris on Dolto. Her books are for sale in practically every French bookshop.

In the mid-1970s, Dolto was in her mid-sixties and already the most famous psychoanalyst and paediatrician in France. Then, in 1976, a French radio station began broadcasting daily twelve-minute programmes in which Dolto responded to listeners’ letters about parenting. ‘Nobody imagined the immediate and lasting success of the programme,’ recalled Jacques Pradel, then the programme’s 27-year-old host. He describes her responses to readers’ questions as ‘brilliance bordering on premonition’. ‘I don’t know where she got her answers,’
⁶
he says.

When I watch film clips of Dolto from that period, I can see why she appealed to anxious parents. With her thick glasses and matronly outfits, she had the bearing of a wise grandmother. (The famous person she most resembles is Golda Meir.) And like her American counterpart Dr Spock, Dolto had the gift of making everything she said – even her more outrageous claims – sound like common sense.

Dolto may have looked like everyone’s
grand-mère
, but her message about how to treat kids was deliciously radical, and fitting for the new times. In a sort of emancipation of babies, she claimed that children are rational, and indeed that even babies understand language as soon as they’re born. It’s an
intuitive
, almost mystical message. And it’s a message that ordinary French people still embrace, even if they don’t all articulate it. Once I read Dolto, I realize that so many of the most curious claims that I’ve heard French parents make, like the one that you’re supposed to talk to babies about their sleep troubles, come straight from her.

The radio broadcasts made Dolto into an almost mythic figure in France. Well into the 1980s, books containing transcripts of her broadcasts, and other conversations, were stacked like produce in French supermarkets. A whole cohort of children were known as Génération Dolto. A psychoanalyst quoted in a special Dolto-themed edition of
Télérama
magazine in 2008 recalled riding in a taxi whose driver said he never missed a broadcast. ‘He was dumbfounded. He said, “She talks to children like they are human beings!”’

Dolto’s core message isn’t a ‘parenting philosophy’. It doesn’t come with a lot of specific instructions. But if you accept as a first principle that children are rational – as French society does – then many things begin to shift. If babies understand what you’re saying to them, then you can teach them quite a lot, even while they’re very young. That includes, for example, how to eat in a restaurant.

The future Françoise Dolto was born Françoise Marette in 1908, into a large, well-off Catholic family in Paris. On the surface she had a charmed life: violin lessons, a cook in the kitchen, and peacocks prancing around the back yard. She was groomed to marry well.

But Françoise wasn’t the discreet and obedient daughter that her parents expected. She wasn’t ‘
sage comme une image
’. She was wilful, outspoken, and passionately curious about the people around her. In her early letters, the young Dolto seems preternaturally aware of the troubling gap of understanding between herself and her parents. She studied both psychoanalysis and paediatrics, and trained in hospitals around France.

Unusually for a parenting expert, Dolto was apparently an excellent parent to her own three children. Her daughter Catherine writes of her parents: ‘They never made us do our homework, for example. However we did get bawled out, like everyone else, when we had bad grades. I got detention every Thursday for bad behaviour. Mum said to me, “It’s too bad for you, it’s you who has the detention. When you get tired of it, you’ll be able to hold your tongue.”’

Dolto always maintained an unusually lucid memory of how she had seen the world as a child. She rejected the prevailing view that doctors should treat children as merely a collection of physical symptoms. (At the time, bed wetters were still attached to ‘peepee-stops’ that released electric shocks.) Instead, she spoke to children about their lives, and assumed that many of their physical symptoms had psychological origins. ‘And you, what do you think?’ she would ask her young patients.
⁷

Dolto famously insisted that older children ‘pay’ her at the end of each session, with an object like a stone, to emphasize their independence and accountability. This respect for children resonated strongly with Dolto’s students. ‘She
changed
everything, and we, the students, wanted things to change,’ the psychoanalyst Myriam Szejer recalls.

Dolto’s respect extended even to babies. A former student described her dealing with an upset baby who was several months old: ‘All of her senses were on alert, totally receptive to the emotions that the baby aroused in her. It was not to console [the baby], but to understand what the baby was telling her. Or more precisely, what the baby saw.’ There are legendary stories about Dolto approaching previously inconsolable infants in the hospital and simply explaining to them why they were there, and where their parents were. According to legend, the babies suddenly calmed.