[blparent] Why French Parents Are Superior (article)

[Veronica Smith]

Jo elizabeth, thanks for the article. It was quite interesting.  This is
exactly how my husband is, strict.  His voice is anyway.  When I used to say
things like don't, she would test her independence but when my husband said
the same word, she'd not take any chances that dad was kidding. V  

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From: blparent-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blparent-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
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Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2012 4:10 PM
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Subject: [blparent] Why French Parents Are Superior (article)

Why French Parents Are Superior
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

  a.. 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. 
  b.. When they misbehave, give them the "big eyes"-a stern look of
admonishment. 
  c.. Allow only one snack a day. In France, it's at 4 or 4:30. 
  d.. Remind them (and yourself) who's the boss. French parents say, "It's
me who decides." 
  e.. 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.


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.


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

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and
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contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

www.djreprints.com


Jo Elizabeth

"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of
the weak and the strong.  Because someday in life you will have been all of
these."--George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, American scientist
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