During dinner with her husband and 18-month-old daughter at a restaurant on the coast of France nearly five years ago, Pamela Druckerman noticed something intriguing about the local children.
While her toddler demanded and tore up napkins, children her little girl’s age were eating in a civilized manner, interacting with their parents, consuming fish and vegetables. There was no ring of debris on the floor around the table, no whines and cries for blander food, and fast.
After noting this good behaviour extended beyond mealtimes, Ms. Druckerman, an American journalist who had been living in Paris with her British husband since 2003, began to wonder why the differences between her kid and others appear so pronounced.
“Are French kids just genetically calmer than ours? Have they been bribed (or threatened) into submission? are they on the receiving end of an old-fashioned seen-but-not-heard parenting philosophy?” she asked.
She gets to the bottom of it in Bringing up Bébé: one American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting — a book that feeds the growing fascination among North American parents over how parents from other cultures raise their children. It’s been a year since Yale law professor Amy Chua (a.k.a. Tiger Mom) elicited outrage and admiration with her provocative book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which extolled the benefits of a strict Asian upbringing, and the appetite for this brand of advice has only gotten bigger.
Benjamin Barda/Handout
While the North American parents Ms. Druckerman knows are catering to their child’s every whim and whimper, she’s never seen a French child throw a tantrum. They know how to wait, they greet adults respectfully and play on their own without mom and dad hovering over them. Through interviews with friends, acquaintances, parenting experts and French caregivers, the former Wall Street Journal reporter discovered a child-rearing philosophy that’s so ingrained in French culture, mothers and fathers don’t see the magic they’re working as anything extraordinary.
“It’s not like the French expect children to do brain surgery,” she said in an interview this week from new York City, where she has been working the talk show circuit. “They just think they can sit and enjoy a nice meal, that it’s more fun for the kids if they can do that.”
French babies sleep through the night at two or three months, women don’t breastfeed for long and they actually lose the baby weight. Parents, and mothers especially, are supposed to take time for themselves — a break that can benefit the entire family. They’re not racing to teach their babies ABCs, to speed up child development in the competitive way some North American parents do, she said. Staying at home with the kids is not the norm — mothers are expected to return to work as soon as possible and babies go to a crèche, or daycare, where they eat braised endive without complaint.
The difference is French parents think about children in a completely different way — as tiny, rational beings who have the ability to learn, Ms. Druckerman said.
“There’s a big emphasis on speaking to kids and the importance of language and honestly acknowledging to kids what’s going on in their world,” she said. if parents are divorcing, they’ll tell the child, even if it’s just an infant, what has happened to the marriage.
They want children to blossom, to be “awakened,” and exposed to different foods and experiences. but this is all done within a cadre of strict rules that require children to be respectful, obedient and mindful of others, Ms. Druckerman said.
“It’s rescuing children from what is a very natural self-centredness.”
French parents boast about being “strict,” the way American parents trumpet their children’s achievements, however small.
GLOSSARY: French Parenting Terms
bêtise (beh-teeze): A small act of naughtiness. Labelling an offence a mere bêtise helps parents respond to it with moderation.
caca boudin (caca booh-dah): Literally, “caca sausage.” A curse word used almost exclusively by French preschoolers.
cadre (kah-druh): Frame, or framework. A visual image that describes the French parenting ideal: setting firm limits for children, but giving them tremendous freedom within those limits.
sage (sah-je): Wise and calm. this describes a child who is in control of himself or absorbed in an activity. instead of saying “be good,” French parents say “be sage.”
- Excerpted from Bringing up Bébé: one American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
As Ms. Druckerman began the work of raising her American-British children in Paris, she tried some of the French strategies with her daughter, nicknamed Bean, now 6, and her twin sons Leo and Joel, now 3. She let her children cry for five or 10 minutes before coming to their aid — a strategy she calls “The Pause,” in which parents let the children “cry it out” to train them to self-soothe and sleep through the night. (The strategy actually mimicks an American sleep technique some parents use — Ferberizing, named for its popularizer, Dr. Richard Ferber.) She resisted the urge to give her children snacks throughout the day and got them on the typical French routine of four mealtimes — the fourth being a treat, or “goûter,” at 4:30 p.m.
Other strategies have been more difficult to adopt.
“I would say authority is the area where [me and my husband] have the hardest time,” she said. She’s still practising “les gros yeux” or “big eyes” — a commanding look that, when given with conviction, can instantly turn a little devil into an angel. French parents remember fondly how their own moms and dads sent the behaviour-steering message with a mere glance.
Throughout the book, she finds herself in a constant struggle with her own very American instincts and the desire to adhere to the French principles. While French parents, who don’t obsess anxiously over safety, wouldn’t dream of childproofing their house, she’s unapologetically affixed corner protectors on her dining room table.
Still, it’s clear Ms. Druckerman is concerned that her book be seen as an edict for American parents to follow if they wish to save their children from their very neurotic selves.
It’s easy to see why people could misconstrue it. Headlines and news stories about her book have touted how French parents are “superior.” A new York Times book review headline reads “Raising the Perfect Child, with Time for Smoke Breaks” — a review that goes on to say the parenting advice is “obvious” and relies too heavily on generalizations and impressions from middle-class friends. another American expat raising children in Paris wrote that of course American and French parents raise children differently — the French tend to value tradition and solidarity, the Americans, innovation and individuality.
“I don’t think everything about French parenting is perfect and [that] we should emulate it,” she said. “I just think it’s a very interesting exercise to step outside your culture and see what the invisible assumptions and narratives and expectations are.”
While criticisms have been flicked her way, she hasn’t seen anything like the outrage unleashed on Ms. Chua, whose book on raising her children — in which she talked of making her daughters practise piano for hours on end, and re-draw a picture given as a gift because it appeared to be lazily created — drew accusations of child abuse and cruelty.
Like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Ms. Druckerman calls Bringing up Bébé an answer to the critiques of overbearing parenting that only started in 2005-2006 — the year she became pregnant with Bean.
“I was reading those books when I was pregnant and I was determined not to be one of those parents,” she said. “I think what my book and a number of other books that have come out in response to the critique reflect is a kind of casting about in the culture for an alternative.”
Of course being immersed in French culture helped her children take on these preferred behaviours, said Ms. Druckerman, who says her children are still not as well behaved as French children, but seem better behaved than many American youngsters.
Government support in the form of subsidized daycare is also an important factor.
“It’s easier to not be a frazzled new mom when you have the government subsidizing and providing childcare and nursery school starting when you’re three years old,” she said. “[While] I don’t want to underplay how much those shape French culture, I think there are other things that are very much adaptable, even if there isn’t a creche around your corner.”
One of her favourites? that French value of having guilt-free, child-free time.
“I really like to go to the Hammam [spa], those hot North African baths,” she said. “I can kind of sweat out the guilt.”
• Email: sboesveld@nationalpost.com | Twitter: sarahboesveld
There has been far more interest in child rearing across cultures since Amy Chua introduced her brand of Asian parenting to a surprised North American public. Researchers are also looking at how parenting styles from different cultures intersect and influence one another, and they find it doesn’t always translate well. here, are some examples:
ChinaChinese children are typically raised under the Confucian teaching of being interdependent members of society, said Vicki Ritts, an associate professor of psychology and behavioral science at St. Louis Community College. In China, the elders have the responsibility to train, educate, discipline and govern their children. Parents are known to be tough but show their love through pushing children to get good grades so they can be providers. A Chinese man was forced to defend his parenting tactics this week after a video of his toddler son running laps on a snowy new York street in nothing but his underwear went viral. He earned the title “eagle dad” because he said he was trying to toughen up his boy, who had been born prematurely and was prone to illness. “Like an eagle, I push my child to the limit so he can learn how to fly,” He Liesheng said.
MexicoFamilialism is the core value of a Latino family, said Prof. Ritts, and authoritative and authoritarian parenting strategies are typically employed. some Latino parenting practices have been taken to be abusive in North America, said Jennifer Lansford, a research professor at Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy. Cupping, the practice of applying a hot cup to a child’s body to rid it of toxins, is used in Mexico and other South American countries. “It’s kind of a matter of ‘How do you define abuse in different contexts if the intent is to heal the child, not to harm the child?’ ”
SwedenSome American parents have gotten into hot water in Sweden because they spank their children, Prof. Lansford said. the European country was the first to outlaw corporal punishment in 1979, one of 32 today to have a law against the practice, which is legal in Canada and the United States. “The Swedish legal system tends not to treat those cases in a punitive way but in a supportive way in terms of, ‘Let’s get your family the support services it needs to be able to manage your child rearing in a more appropriate way.’ ”
Sarah Boesveld, National Post
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