French Children Don't Throw Food (13 page)

This isn’t Anglo-style talking to babies, where you believe that babies recognize the mother’s voice, or are soothed by a calming sound. Nor is it a method to teach a child to speak, or to prime him to become the next Jonathan Franzen.

Rather, Dolto insisted that the content of what you say to a baby matters tremendously. She said it was crucial that parents tell their babies the truth, in order to gently affirm what the babies already know.

In fact, she thought that babies begin eavesdropping on adult conversations – and intuiting the problems and conflicts swirling around them – from the womb. She envisioned (in the pre-ultrasound days) a conversation between a mother and her minutes-old baby going something like this: ‘You see, we were waiting for you. You’re a little boy. Maybe you heard us saying that we wanted a little girl. But we’re very happy that you’re a little boy.’

Dolto wrote that a child should be included in conversations about his parents’ divorce from the age of six months. When a grandparent dies, she believed that even a young child should briefly attend the funeral. ‘Someone in the family goes with him to say, “
Voilà
, it’s the burial of your grandfather.” It’s something that happens in a society.’ For Dolto, ‘The child’s best interest is not always what will make him or her happy, but rational understanding,’ wrote MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, in an introduction to Dolto’s
When Parents Separate
. Turkle writes that what a child most needs, according to Dolto, is ‘a structured inner life able to support autonomy and further growth’.

Dolto was criticized by some foreign psychoanalysts for relying too much on her own intuitions. But inside France, parents seemed to take both an intellectual and an aesthetic pleasure in her imaginative leaps.

If Dolto’s ideas ever reached English-speaking parents, they probably just sounded strange. American and (to a slightly lesser extent) British parents were under the sway of Dr Benjamin Spock, who was born five years before Dolto and also trained as a psychoanalyst. Spock wrote that a child can only understand that he’s soon to have a baby brother or sister from the age of about eighteen months. His forte was listening carefully to parents, not to babies. ‘Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do,’ is the famous opening salvo of his parenting guide,
Baby and Child Care
.

For Dolto, it was children who knew more than anyone thought. Even into old age, when she was hooked up to an
oxygen
tank, Dolto would get down on the floor with her young patients to see the world as they did. Her view from there was appealingly blunt.

‘. . . If there’s no jealousy when the baby comes . . . it’s a very bad sign. The older child
should
show signs of jealousy, because for him it
is
a problem, the first time that he sees everyone admiring someone younger than him,’ she said.

Dolto insisted that children have rational motives, even when they misbehave, and she said that it’s the job of parents to listen and grasp these motives. ‘The child who has an unusual reaction always has a reason for having it . . . when a child suddenly has an unusual, troubling reaction, our task is to
understand
what has happened,’ Dolto says.

She gives the example of a small child who suddenly refuses to continue walking down the street. To the parent, it seems like stubbornness. But to the child, there’s a reason. ‘We should try to understand him, and say, “There’s a reason. I don’t understand, but let’s think about it.” Above all, don’t suddenly make a drama out of it.’ In one of the centennial tributes to Dolto, a French psychoanalyst summed up her teachings this way: ‘Human beings speak to other human beings. Some of them are big, some of them are small. But they communicate.’
⁸

Whereas Spock’s giant tome
Baby and Child Care
seems like it’s straining to contain every possible scenario involving children, from obstructed tear ducts to (in posthumous editions) gay parenting, Dolto’s books are pocket-sized. Instead of giving lots of specific instructions, she keeps returning to a
few
basic principles, and seems to expect that parents will think things through on their own.

Dolto agreed to do the radio broadcasts on the condition that she could answer letters from parents rather than phone calls. She thought that parents would begin to see solutions simply by writing out their problems. Pradel, the radio host, remembers: ‘She told me, “You’ll see, one day we’ll get a letter from a person who’s going to say to us, ‘I’m sending you these pages, but I think I already understand.’” And we received one, exactly like she predicted.’

Like Spock in the US, Dolto has been blamed in France for unleashing a wave of overly permissive parenting, especially in the 1970s and ’80s. It’s easy to see how Dolto’s advice could be interpreted this way. Some parents surely thought that if they listened to what a child said, they then had to do what he said too.

This wasn’t what Dolto advocated. She thought that parents should listen carefully to their kids, and explain the world to them. But she thought that this world would of course include many limits, and that the child, being rational, could absorb and handle these limits. Dolto didn’t want to upend Rousseau’s
cadre
model. She wanted to preserve it. She just added a huge measure of empathy and respect for the child – something that may have been lacking in France pre-1968.

The parents I see in Paris today really do seem to have found a balance between paying close attention to their kids and being clear that it’s the parents who are in charge (even if they sometimes have to remind themselves of this). French parents
listen
to their kids all the time. But if little Agathe says she wants
pain au chocolat
for lunch, she isn’t going to get it.

French parents have made Dolto (standing on the shoulders of Rousseau) part of their parenting firmament. When a baby has a nightmare, ‘You always reassure him by speaking to him,’ says Alexandra, who works in the Parisian nursery. ‘I’m very much in favour of speech and language with children, even the smallest ones. They understand. For me, they understand.’

The French magazine
Parents
says that if a baby is scared of strangers, his mother should warn him that a visitor will be coming over soon. Then, when the doorbell rings, ‘Tell him that the guest is here. Take a few seconds before opening the door . . . if he doesn’t cry when he sees the stranger, don’t forget to congratulate him.’

I hear of several cases where, upon bringing a baby home from the maternity hospital, the parents give the baby a tour of the house.
⁹
French parents often tell babies what they’re doing to them: I’m picking you up, I’m changing your nappy, I’m going to give you a bath. This isn’t just to make soothing sounds; it’s to convey information. And since the baby is a person like any other, parents are often quite polite about all this. (Plus it’s apparently never too early to start instilling good manners.)

The practical implications of believing that a baby or toddler understands what you say, and can act on it, are considerable. It means you can teach him to sleep through the night early on, not to barge into your room every morning, to
sit
properly at the table, to eat only at mealtimes, and not to interrupt his parents. You can expect him to accommodate – at least a little bit – what his parents need, too.

I get a strong taste of this when Bean is about ten months old. She begins pulling herself up in front of a bookcase in our living room, and pulling down all the books she can reach.

This is irritating, of course. But I don’t think I can stop her. Often I just pick up the books and put them back. But one morning, Simon’s French friend Lara is visiting. When Lara sees Bean pulling the books down, she immediately kneels next to Bean and explains, patiently but firmly, ‘We don’t do that.’ Then she shows Bean how to put the books back on the shelf, and tells her to leave them there. Lara keeps using the word
doucement
– gently. (After this, I start to notice that French parents say
doucement
all the time.) I’m shocked when Bean listens and obeys.

This incident revealed the enormous cultural gap between Lara and me, as parents. I had assumed that Bean was a very cute, very wild creature with a lot of potential but almost no self-control. If she occasionally behaved well, it was because of a kind of animalistic training, or just luck. After all, she couldn’t talk, and didn’t even have hair yet.

But Lara (who at the time was childless, but now has two well-behaved daughters) assumed that, even at ten months old, Bean could understand language and learn to control herself. She believed that Bean could do things
doucement
if she wanted to. And as a result, Bean did.

* * *

Françoise Dolto died in 1988. Some of her intuitions about babies are now being confirmed by scientific experiments. Scientists have figured out that you can tell what babies know by measuring how long they look at one thing versus another. Like adults, babies look longer at things that surprise them. Beginning in the early 1990s, research using this method has shown that ‘babies can do rudimentary maths with objects’ and that ‘babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do’, writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.
¹⁰
A study at the University of British Columbia found that eight-month-olds understand probabilities.
¹¹

There’s also evidence that babies have a moral sense. Bloom and other researchers showed six- and ten-month-old babies a sort of puppet show in which a circle was trying to roll up a hill. A ‘helper’ character helped the circle go up, while a ‘hinderer’ pushed it down. After the show, the babies were offered the helper and the hinderer on a tray. Almost all of them reached for the helper. ‘Babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy,’ Paul Bloom explains.

Of course, these experiments don’t prove that – as Dolto claims – babies understand speech. But they do seem to prove her point that, from a very young age, babies are rational. Their minds aren’t a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. At the very least, we should watch what we say to them.

6

Daycare?

WHEN I CALL
my mother in america to tell her that Bean has been accepted into a state nursery – we call it ‘daycare’ – there’s a long pause on her end of the line.

‘Daycare?’ she asks, finally.

Friends back home are sceptical too.

‘It’s just not a situation I want,’ sniffs a marketing consultant whose son is nine months old, about the same age Bean will be when she starts. ‘I want him to have a little more individual attention.’

But when I tell my French neighbours that Bean has been accepted at the crèche, as the full-time state nurseries are known here, they congratulate me and practically crack open the champagne.

In America, the word ‘daycare’ conjures images of paedophiles and howling babies in dirty, dimly lit rooms. ‘I want him to have a little more individual attention’ is a euphemism for ‘Unlike you, I actually love my child and don’t want to institutionalize him.’ American parents who can afford it tend to hire full-time nannies, then start easing kids
into
preschool when they’re two or three. Those who must send their babies to nurseries do so warily and often full of guilt.

British mothers don’t have the same negative associations. They generally accept that nurseries are necessary, and that they are regulated and OK for kids. But most British nurseries are private. And many mothers hesitate to put their kids in nurseries until they’re at least a year old.

And British parents’ acceptance of nurseries doesn’t compare with the enthusiasm of the French. Middle-class French parents – architects, doctors, fellow journalists – are clawing past each other to get a spot in their neighbourhood crèche. And it’s not just for a few tentative hours a day. The crèche is open five days a week, usually from eight to six. Mothers apply when they’re pregnant, then harangue, cajole and beg for a spot for a year after that. The monthly fees are subsidized by the state, and parents are charged sliding rates based on their incomes.

‘I felt that it was a perfect system, absolutely perfect,’ gushes my friend Esther, a French lawyer, whose daughter started at the crèche when she was nine months old. Even friends of mine who don’t work try to enrol their kids in the crèche. As a distant second choice, they consider shared nannies, or childminders who look after up to three kids in the childminder’s own home. These are subsidized too, through tax credits. Sleek government websites lay out all the childcare options.

All this gives me a kind of cultural vertigo. Will nursery
make
my child aggressive, neglected and insecurely attached, as the scary English-language headlines say? Or will she be socialized, ‘awakened’ and skilfully looked after, as French parents proclaim?

For the first time, I worry that we’re taking our little inter-cultural experiment too far. It’s one thing to start holding a fork in my left hand, and giving blank looks to strangers. It’s quite another to subject my child to a potentially weird and damaging experience for the bulk of her toddlerhood. Are we going a bit too native? She can try
foie gras
, but should she try the crèche?

I decide to calm myself by reading up on the French crèche. Its story begins in the 1840s. Jean-Baptiste-Firmin Marbeau, an ambitious young lawyer in search of a cause to champion, was deputy mayor of Paris’s first district. It was the middle of the industrial revolution, and cities like Paris were teeming with women who’d arrived from the provinces to work as seamstresses and in factories. Marbeau was charged with writing a study of the
salles d’asile
, free nursery schools for kids aged two to six.

He was impressed. ‘How carefully, I said to myself, society watches over the children of the poor!’ he wrote.

But Marbeau wondered who looked after poor children between birth and age two, while their mothers worked. He consulted the district’s ‘poor list’ and set off to visit several mothers. ‘At the far end of a filthy backyard, I call out for Madame Gérard, a washerwoman. She comes down, not
wanting
me to enter her home,
too dirty to be seen
(those are her words). She holds a new-born baby on her arm, and a child of eighteen months by the hand.’