French Children Don't Throw Food (19 page)

Whatever your view on whether this intensive supervision is good for kids, it seems to make childcare less pleasant for
mothers
.
³
Just watching it is exhausting. And it continues outside the playground. ‘We might not stay up nights worried about how to keep our whites whiter, but you can bet we’re losing sleep over why little Jasper isn’t yet out of diapers,’ Katie Allison Granju writes on
Babble.com
. She describes a mother she knows with an MA in biology who spent the previous week – the
whole
week – teaching her child to use a spoon.

That biologist surely questioned her own sanity too. We Anglophone mothers know that parenting this intensively has its costs (but we keep going). Like the parents who asked Piaget the American Question – how can we speed up the stages of a child’s development? – we believe that the pace at which our kids advance hinges on the choices we make, and on how actively we engage with them. So the cost of not spoon training or narrating a trip down the slide seems unacceptably high, especially when others are doing it.

The standard for how much mothers should engage with their kids seems to have risen. Narrated play – and intensive spoon training – are expressions of the ‘concerted cultivation’ that the sociologist Annette Lareau observed among white and African-American middle-class parents.
⁴

‘Middle-class parents … see their children as a project,’ Lareau explains. ‘They seek to develop their talents and skills through a series of organized activities, through an intensive process of reasoning and language development, and through close supervision of their experiences in school.’

My decision to live in France is arguably one giant act of concerted cultivation. My project is to make my kids bilingual,
international
, and lovers of fine cheese. But at least in France I have other role models, and there are no special kindergartens for gifted children. In America – and to a slightly lesser extent in Britain – doing ‘concerted cultivation’ doesn’t feel like a choice. On the contrary, its demands seem to have crept upward. A friend of mine, who works full-time, complained to me that she’s not just expected to go to her daughter’s football games any more; she’s also supposed to attend
the practices
.
⁵

The push to excel often begin before kids can walk. I hear about a mother in New York whose one-year-old twins had at-home tutors in French, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. At two years old the mother dropped the French but added lessons in art, music, swimming and – according to my source, who’s a family member – some sort of maths. Meanwhile the mother, who’d given up her job as a corporate executive to raise the twins, was spending most of her time applying to two dozen nursery schools.

Such stories aren’t just the province of a few extreme New Yorkers. On a trip to Miami I have lunch with a particularly sane American mother I know, named Danielle. I had thought that if anyone could resist the lure of the frenetic family, she could. She’s level-headed, warm and – in a city where people tend to closely follow trends in jewellery – decidedly non-materialistic.

Danielle dislikes overzealous parenting. She’s horrified by a mother in her neighbourhood whose four-year-old son already takes tennis, football, French and piano lessons. Danielle says
this
mother is extreme, but simply having her around makes everyone anxious.

‘You start getting nervous, you start thinking: this kid’s doing all that stuff. How is my kid going to compete? And then you have to check yourself and say: that’s not the point. We don’t want him competing with someone like that.’

Nevertheless, Danielle has found herself sliding into a practically non-stop schedule with her own four kids (the youngest are twins). In a typical week her seven-year-old, Juliana, has football on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Communion class on Wednesday, Brownies every other Thursday (after football) and a play date on Fridays. Once Juliana gets home, she has two hours of homework.

‘Last night she had to write a folk tale, she had to write a mini-essay on how Martin Luther King changed America, and she had to study for a Spanish test,’ Danielle says.

Recently Juliana said she wanted to do an after-school ceramics class too. ‘And I, feeling guilty because there’s no art at the school, said, “OK, let’s do ceramics.” The only day she had free was Monday.’ Juliana’s whole week is now booked. And Danielle has three more kids.

‘The logistics of making sure everyone gets to where they need to be at the correct time has been the best use of the skills I acquired in Operations Management class in business school,’ she says.

Danielle acknowledges that she could simply cut out all these activities, except for football (her husband is the coach). But what would her kids do at home? She says there’d be no
other
children around in the neighbourhood, since they’re all out doing activities too.

The net result is that Danielle hasn’t gone back to work. ‘I always thought that when my kids got to elementary school I could get a full-time job again,’ she says. Then she apologizes and rushes off to her car.

The fact that the French state provides and subsidizes child-care certainly makes life easier for French mothers. But when I get back to France, I’m struck by how French mothers make their own lives a lot easier too. The French equivalent of a ‘play date’ is that I drop off Bean at her friend’s house, then I leave. (My Anglophone friends assume I’ll stay the whole time.) French parents aren’t curt, they’re practical. They correctly assume that I have other stuff to do. I sometimes stay for a cup of coffee when I return to pick Bean up.

It’s the same at birthday parties. American and British mothers expect me to stick around and socialize, often for several hours. No one ever says it, but I think part of why we’re there is to make sure our kids are comforted and OK.

But from about three, French birthday parties are drop-offs. We’re supposed to trust that our kids will be OK without us. Parents are usually invited to come back at the end for a glass of champagne and some hobnobbing with the other mums and dads. Simon and I are thrilled whenever we get invitations: it’s free babysitting, followed by a cocktail party.

In France, there’s an expression for mothers who spend all their free time schlepping their kids around: ‘
maman-taxi
’. This
isn’t
a compliment. Nathalie, a Parisian architect, tells me that she hires a babysitter to take her three kids to all their activities on Saturday mornings. Then she and her husband go out to lunch. ‘When I’m there I give them 100 per cent, but when I’m off, I’m off,’ Nathalie tells me.

Virginie, my diet guru, gets together most mornings after school drop-offs with a group of mums from her son’s elementary school. I join the group at their café one morning, and mention extracurricular activities. The temperature at the table immediately rises. Virginie sits up and speaks for the group. ‘You have to leave kids alone, they need to be a bit bored at home, they must have time to play,’ she says.

Virginie and her friends aren’t slackers. They all have university degrees and good CVs. They’re devoted mothers. Their homes are full of books. Their kids take lessons in fencing, guitar, tennis, piano and wrestling (the latter is weirdly called ‘
catch
’ in French). But they don’t do all of these activities at once. Most choose just one per school term.

One of the mums at the café, a pretty, zaftig publicist (like me, she’s trying to ‘pay more attention’), says she stopped sending her kids to tennis lessons, or anything else, because she found the lessons ‘constraining’.

‘Constraining for whom?’ I ask.

‘Constraining for me,’ she says.

She explains: ‘You bring them, and you wait for an hour, then you have to go back and pick them up. For music you have to make them practise in the evenings … It’s a waste of time for me. And the children don’t need it. They have a lot
of
homework, they have the house, they have other games at the house, and there are two of them so they can’t get bored. They’re together. And we go away every weekend.’

I’m struck by how these small decisions and assumptions make daily life so different for French mothers. When they have moments to spare, French mothers pride themselves on being able to detach and relax. At the hairdresser, I tear out an article from an issue of French
Elle
in which a mother says that she loves taking her two boys to the old-fashioned merry-go-round near the Eiffel Tower.

‘While Oscar and Léon try to catch the wooden rings … I spend thirty minutes in pure relaxation. I usually turn off my cellphone and just space out while I’m waiting for them … it’s like a deluxe babysitter!’ I know that merry-go-round well. I usually spend my half-hour there waiting to wave at Bean each time she comes round.

It’s no coincidence that so many French mothers seem to parent this way. The let-him-be principle comes straight from Françoise Dolto, the patron saint of French parenting. Dolto very clearly argued for leaving a child alone, safely, to muddle about and figure things out for himself.

‘Why does a mother do everything for her child?’ Dolto asks in
The Major Stages of Childhood
, a collection of her remarks. ‘He’s so content to deal with things himself, to pass the morning getting dressed by himself, to put on his shoes, so happy to put on his sweater backwards, to get tangled up in his pants, to play, to rummage around in his corner. So he doesn’t go to
the
market with his mother? Well too bad, or even better!’

On Bastille Day, I take Bean for a picnic in the grassy field in our neighbourhood park. It’s filled with parents and their young kids. I’m not narrating Bean’s play but I don’t really expect to have a chance to read the three-week-old magazine that I’ve brought along for myself, along with a giant sack of books and toys for her. I spend a lot of the day helping her play with the toys and reading to her.

On the next blanket over is a French mother. She’s a thin, auburn-haired woman who’s chatting with a girlfriend while her year-old daughter plays with, well, not much of anything. The mother seems to have brought just one ball to amuse her daughter for the entire afternoon. They have lunch, and then the little girl plays with the grass, rolls around a bit, and checks out the scene. Meanwhile her mother, from the look of it, is having a full adult conversation with her friend.

It’s the same sun, and the same grass. But I’m having an Anglo picnic and –
voilà
– she’s having a French one. Not unlike those mothers back in New York, I’m trying to cheer Bean on to the next stage of development. And I’m willing to sacrifice my own pleasure to do that. The French mum – who looks like she could buy a fancy handbag if she wanted to – seems content to let her daughter ‘awaken’ all by herself. And her little girl evidently doesn’t mind at all.

All this goes a long way towards explaining the mysteriously calm air of the French mothers I see all around me. But it still doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a crucial missing piece.
That
ghost in the French mothering machine is, I think, how French mothers cope with guilt.

Today’s Anglophone mothers spend much more time on childcare than parents did in 1965.
⁶
To do this, they have cut back on housework, relaxing and even sleeping. Even so, today’s Anglophone parents believe they should be spending even more time with their kids.

The result is enormous guilt. I see this when I visit Emily, who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter. After I’ve been with Emily for a few hours, it dawns on me that she has said ‘I’m a bad mother’ a half-dozen times. She says it when she caves in to her daughter’s demand for extra milk, or when she doesn’t have time to read her more than two books. She says it again when she’s trying to make the little girl sleep on a schedule, and to explain why she occasionally lets her cry a bit at night.

I hear other British and American mums say ‘I’m a bad mother’ too. The phrase has become a kind of verbal tic. Emily says ‘I’m a bad mother’ so often that – though it sounds negative – I realize that she must find the phrase soothing.

For Anglophone mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the web or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things. We’ve ‘paid’ for our lapses.

Here too, the French are different. French mothers absolutely recognize the temptation to feel guilty. They feel as overstretched and inadequate as we Anglophones do. After
all
, they’re working while bringing up small children. And like us, they often aren’t living up to their own standards as either workers or parents.

The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt. On the contrary, they consider it unhealthy and unpleasant, and they try to banish it. ‘Guilt is a trap,’ says my friend Sharon, the literary agent. When she and her Francophone girlfriends meet for drinks, they reassure each other that ‘The perfect mother doesn’t exist.’

The standards are certainly high for French mums. They’re supposed to be sexy, successful, and have a home-cooked meal on the table each night. But they try not to add guilt to their burden. My friend Danièle, the French journalist, co-authored a book called
La mère parfaite, c’est vous
(
The Perfect Mother Is You
).

Danièle still remembers dropping her daughter off at crèche at five months old. ‘I felt sick to leave her, but I would have felt sick to stay with her and not work,’ she explains. She forced herself to face down this guilt, and then let it go. ‘Let’s just feel guilty and go on living,’ she told herself. Anyway, she adds, reassuring both of us, ‘The perfect mother doesn’t exist.’

What really fortifies French women against guilt is their belief that it’s unhealthy for mothers and children to spend all their time together. They believe there’s a risk of smothering kids with attention and anxiety, or of developing the dreaded
relation fusionnelle
, where a mother’s and a child’s needs are too intertwined. French children – even babies and toddlers – get
to
cultivate their inner lives without a mother’s constant interference.