[blparent] French Parents

Sun Feb 5 23:19:13 UTC 2012

for those who can not get the link to work.
Artical below

Why French Parents Are Superior
While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising
happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela
Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching
patience and saying 'non' with authority.
By PAMELA DRUCKERMAN

Pamela Druckerman's new book "Bringing Up Bebe," catalogs her
observations about why French children seem so much better behaved
than their American counterparts. She talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen
about the lessons of French parenting techniques.
.When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take
her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that's a few
hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I'm American, he's
British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her,
was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard
could it be?

We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at
the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly
discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler
deserved to be its own circle of hell.

Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes
she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then
she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around
the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly. We ordered while being
seated, then begged the server to rush out some bread and bring us our
appetizers and main courses at the same time. While my husband took a
few bites of fish, I made sure that Bean didn't get kicked by a waiter
or lost at sea. Then we switched. We left enormous, apologetic tips to
compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that
the French families around us didn't look like they were sharing our
mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation.
French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting
for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no
shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I'd lived in France for a few years, I couldn't
explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I
realized it wasn't just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had
lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of
hours I'd clocked at French playgrounds, I'd never seen a child
(except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn't my French friends
ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding
something? Why hadn't their living rooms been taken over by teepees
and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

French Lessons
Children should say hello, goodbye, thank you and please. It helps
them to learn that they aren't the only ones with feelings and needs.
When they misbehave, give them the "big eyes"—a stern look of admonishment.
Allow only one snack a day. In France, it's at 4 or 4:30.
Remind them (and yourself) who's the boss. French parents say, "It's
me who decides."
Don't be afraid to say "no." Kids have to learn how to cope with some
frustration.
.Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents
were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for
family life. When American families visited our home, the parents
usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping
their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on
the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by
contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by
themselves.

By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what
French parents were doing differently. Why didn't French children
throw food? And why weren't their parents shouting? Could I change my
wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?

Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several
years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old
and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren't perfect,
but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

I first realized I was on to something when I discovered a 2009 study,
led by economists at Princeton, comparing the child-care experiences
of similarly situated mothers in Columbus, Ohio, and Rennes, France.
The researchers found that American moms considered it more than twice
as unpleasant to deal with their kids. In a different study by the
same economists, working mothers in Texas said that even housework was
more pleasant than child care.

The Juggle: Are French Parents Better?
.Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au
contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly
don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current
problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn't
follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me.
They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and
reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting
classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without
becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the
constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel
guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one
Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but
it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but
not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin
tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling
around by themselves.

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a
parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed,
critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter
parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to
like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all
parents themselves.

Nicolas Héron for The Wall Street Journal

Delphine Porcher with daughter Pauline. The family's daily rituals are
an apprenticeship in learning to wait.
.Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to
make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don't have
to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for
college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their
bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don't explain all of the differences. The
French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising
kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children,
it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you
mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon
realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment.
Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something
they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to
wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the
night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up
the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall
back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a
restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they
mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently
have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

One Saturday I visited Delphine Porcher, a pretty labor lawyer in her
mid-30s who lives with her family in the suburbs east of Paris. When I
arrived, her husband was working on his laptop in the living room,
while 1-year-old Aubane napped nearby. Pauline, their 3-year-old, was
sitting at the kitchen table, completely absorbed in the task of
plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. She somehow resisted the
temptation to eat the batter.

Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids
patience. But her family's daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship
in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought
Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline
wasn't allowed to eat the candy until that day's snack, even if it
meant waiting many hours.

When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, "Just
wait two minutes, my little one. I'm in the middle of talking." It was
both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly
Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey
her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to
play by themselves. "The most important thing is that he learns to be
happy by himself," she said of her son, Aubane.

It's a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their
kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting
beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the
American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of
average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world's leading expert on how
children learn to delay gratification. As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80
years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in
Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend's apartment. He agreed to
meet me for coffee.

Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the "marshmallow test" in the
late 1960s when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a 4-
or 5-year-old into a room where there is a marshmallow on a table. The
experimenter tells the child he's going to leave the room for a little
while, and that if the child doesn't eat the marshmallow until he
comes back, he'll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the
marshmallow, he'll get only that one.

Most kids could only wait about 30 seconds. Only one in three resisted
for the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was away. The trick, the
researchers found, was that the good delayers were able to distract
themselves.

Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found
that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and
didn't "tend to go to pieces under stress," as their report said.

Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as
middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more
resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids,
who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so
often fall apart under stress?

Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn't performed the
marshmallow test on French children. But as a longtime observer of
France, he said that he was struck by the difference between French
and American kids. In the U.S., he said, "certainly the impression one
has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids."

American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We
encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and
to practice the piano. But patience isn't a skill that we hone quite
as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are
good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents
either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don't.

French parents and caregivers find it hard to believe that we are so
laissez-faire about this crucial ability. When I mentioned the topic
at a dinner party in Paris, my French host launched into a story about
the year he lived in Southern California.

He and his wife had befriended an American couple and decided to spend
a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time
they'd met each other's kids, who ranged in age from about 7 to 15.
Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently
interrupted the adults in midsentence. And there were no fixed
mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took
food whenever they wanted. To the French couple, it seemed like the
American kids were in charge.

"What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said
'no,' " the husband said. The children did "n'importe quoi," his wife
added.

After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American
kids include this phrase "n'importe quoi," meaning "whatever" or
"anything they like." It suggests that the American kids don't have
firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything
goes. It's the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame,
that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very
firm limits about certain things—that's the frame—and that the parents
strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust
their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and
perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an
easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their
kids actually listen to them. French children aren't constantly
dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.

One Sunday morning at the park, my neighbor Frédérique witnessed me
trying to cope with my son Leo, who was then 2 years old. Leo did
everything quickly, and when I went to the park with him, I was in
constant motion, too. He seemed to regard the gates around play areas
as merely an invitation to exit.

Frédérique had recently adopted a beautiful redheaded 3-year-old from
a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she had been a mother
for all of three months. Yet just by virtue of being French, she
already had a whole different vision of authority than I did—what was
possible and pas possible.

Frédérique and I were sitting at the perimeter of the sandbox, trying
to talk. But Leo kept dashing outside the gate surrounding the
sandbox. Each time, I got up to chase him, scold him, and drag him
back while he screamed. At first, Frédérique watched this little
ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she said that if I
was running after Leo all the time, we wouldn't be able to indulge in
the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.

"That's true," I said. "But what can I do?" Frédérique said I should
be sterner with Leo. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo
was inevitable. In her mind, it was pas possible.

I pointed out that I'd been scolding Leo for the last 20 minutes.
Frédérique smiled. She said that I needed to make my "no" stronger and
to really believe in it. The next time Leo tried to run outside the
gate, I said "no" more sharply than usual. He left anyway. I followed
and dragged him back. "You see?" I said. "It's not possible."

Frédérique smiled again and told me not to shout but rather to speak
with more conviction. I was scared that I would terrify him. "Don't
worry," Frederique said, urging me on.

Leo didn't listen the next time either. But I gradually felt my "nos"
coming from a more convincing place. They weren't louder, but they
were more self-assured. By the fourth try, when I was finally brimming
with conviction, Leo approached the gate but—miraculously—didn't open
it. He looked back and eyed me warily. I widened my eyes and tried to
look disapproving.

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He
seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with
the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs
stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed
me as an authority figure.

"See that," Frédérique said, not gloating. "It was your tone of
voice." She pointed out that Leo didn't appear to be traumatized. For
the moment—and possibly for the first time ever—he actually seemed
like a French child.

—Adapted from "Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the
Wisdom of French Parenting," to be published Tuesday by the Penguin
Press.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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On 2/5/12, Veronica Smith <madison_tewe at spinn.net> wrote:
> I tried and couldn't access it, could you copy and paste it here.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blparent-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blparent-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Nikki
> Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2012 9:58 PM
> To: NFBnet Blind Parents Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [blparent] French Parents
>
>     Sorry. I must have copied it wrong.
> here is that article...
>
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.ht
> ml
>
>
> Hope this works.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lea williams
> Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2012 10:29 PM
> To: NFBnet Blind Parents Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [blparent] French Parents
>
> This link is not working for me.
>
> On 2/4/12, Nikki <daizies304 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>         A timely article my mom received on facebook today. She read it to
>> me and all I kept thinking was does everyone think I am not the mom and
>> why
>> do people go through my parents and disregard me. I'm thinking it's
>> because
>> I live with them and I'm not the mom, but like a "sister," to m Y son. But
>> then I thought, well, they're probably just trying to help. Anyway. Here's
>> the article. Enjoy!
>> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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> com
>>
>
>
> --
>
> Lea Williams
>
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> 704-732-4470
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-- 

Lea Williams

Phone;
704-732-4470
Skipe;
Lea.williams738
Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100001775297080
Twitter
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