Bringing Up Bebe (10 page)

This conception of children began changing in France in the late 1960s. In March 1968, a student protest at the University of Paris, Nanterre, snowballed into a series of student and worker revolts across the country. Two months later, 11 million French workers were on strike, and President Charles de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly.

Although the protesters had some specific financial demands, what many of them really wanted was a whole different way of life. France’s religious, socially conservative, male-dominated society, in place for centuries, suddenly seemed dated. The protesters envisioned a kind of personal liberation that included different life options for women, less rigid a class hierarchy, and a daily existence that wasn’t just about
“métro, boulot, dodo”
(commute, work, sleep). Eventually the French government broke up the protests, sometimes violently. But the revolt had a profound impact on French society. (France is now, for example, one of the least religious countries in Europe.)

The authoritarian model of parenting was a casualty of 1968, too. If everyone was equal, why couldn’t children speak at dinner? The pure Rousseauian model—children as blank slates—didn’t suit France’s newly emancipated society. And the French were fascinated by psychoanalysis. It suddenly seemed that by shutting kids up, parents might be screwing them up, too.

French kids were still expected to be well behaved and to control themselves, but gradually after 1968 they were encouraged to express themselves, too. The young French parents I know often use
sage
to mean self-controlled but also happily absorbed in an activity. “Before it was ‘
sage
like a picture.’ Now it’s ‘
sage
and awakened,’” explained the French psychologist and writer Maryse Va cter>liillant, herself a member of the famous “Generation of ’68.”

Into this generational upheaval walked Françoise Dolto, the other titan of French parenting. French people I speak to—even those without kids—can’t believe that Americans haven’t heard of Françoise Dolto, or that only one of her books has ever been translated into English (it is long out of print).

In France, Dolto is a household name, a bit like Dr. Benjamin Spock used to be in the United States. The centenary of her birth was celebrated in 2008 with a flood of articles, tributes, and even a made-for-TV movie about her life. UNESCO convened a three-day conference on Dolto in Paris. Her books are for sale in practically every French bookshop.

In the mid-1970s, Dolto was in her late sixti
es and was already the most famous psychoanalyst and pediatrician in France. In 1976, a French radio station began broadcasting daily twelve-minute programs in which Dolto responded to listeners’ letters about parenting. “Nobody imagined the immediate and lasting success” of the program, recalled Jacques Pradel, then its twenty-seven-year-old host. He describes her responses to readers’ questions as “brilliance bordering on premonition.” “I don’t know where she got her answers,” he says.
⁵

When I watch film clips of Dolto from that period, I can see why she appealed to anxious parents. With her thick glasses and matronly outfits, she had the bearing of a wise grandmother. (The famous person she most resembles is Golda Meir.) And like her American counterpart, Dr. Spock, Dolto had the gift of making everything she said—even her more outrageous claims—sound like common sense.

Dolto may have looked like everyone’s
grand-mère
, but her message about how to treat kids was deliciously radical and fitting for the new times. In a sort of emancipation of babies, she claimed that even infants are rational, and indeed that they understand language as soon as they’re born. It’s an intuitive, almost mystical message. And it’s a message that ordinary French people still embrace, even if they don’t all articulate it exactly. Once I read Dolto, I realize that so many of the most curious claims that I’ve heard French parents make, like the one that you’re supposed to talk to babies about their sleep troubles, come straight from her.

Dolto’s radio broadcasts made her into an almost mythic figure in France. Well into the 1980s, books containing transcripts of the broadcasts, and other conversations, were stacked like produce in French supermarkets. A whole cohort of children were known as “
Génération Dolto
.” A psychoanalyst quoted in a special Dolto-themed edition of
Télérama
magazine in 2008 recalled riding in a taxi whose driver said he never missed the radio show. “He was dumbfounded. He said, ‘She talks to children like they are human beings!’”

Dolto’s core message isn’t a “parenting philosophy.” It doesn’t come with a lot of specific instructions. But if you accept that children are rational as a first principle—as French society does—then many things begin to shift. If babies understand what you’re saying to them, then you can teach them quite a lot, even while they’re very young. That includes, for cincand example, how to eat in a restaurant.

The future Françoise Dolto
was born Françoise Marette in 1908, into a large, well-off Catholic family in Paris. On the surface she had a charmed life: violin lessons, a cook in the kitchen, and peacocks prancing around the backyard. She was groomed to marry well.

But Fra
nçoise wasn’t the discreet and obedient daughter that her parents expected. She wasn’t
sage comme une image
. She was willful, outspoken, and passionately curious about the people around her. In her early letters, the young Dolto seems preternaturally aware of the troubling gap of understanding between herself and her parents. At age eight she resolved to become a “doctor of education” who intermediates between adults and children. It was a job that didn’t yet exist, but that she later created.
⁶

Having a profession was suddenly becoming possible for Frenchwomen. Like Simone de Beauvoir, who was also born in 1908, Françoise was part of the first generation of girls allowed to take the French
baccalauréat
, an exam at the end of high school that makes you eligible for university.

After passing
le bac
, Dolto succumbed to her parents’ pressure and settled for a nursing degree. It was only when her younger brother Philippe prepared to enter medical school that her parents allowed her to begin her medical studies, too, chaperoned by him. She also entered psychoanalysis, which was then still quite unusual. Her family seemed to think this would purge Dolto of her unfeminine ambitions. In a letter to her written in 1934,
⁷
Dolto’s father said he hoped that psychoanalysis would “help you to transform your nature, and that you will be as you say, a real woman, which will add charm to your other qualities . . .”

But it was psychoanalysis—under René Laforgue, who founded France’s first psychoanalytic institute—that instead liberated Dolto to finally become a “doctor of education.” She studied both psychoanalysis and pediatrics, and trained in hospitals around France.

Unusually for a parenting expert, Dolto was apparently an excellent parent to her own three children. Her daughter Catherine writes of her parents: “They never made us do our homework, for example. However we did get bawled out, like everyone, when we had bad grades. I got detention every Thursday for bad behavior. Mom said to me, ‘It’s too bad for you, it’s you who has detention. When you get tired of it, you’ll be able to hold your tongue.’”

Dolto always maintained an unusually lucid memory of how she had seen the world as a child. She rejected the prevailing view that children should be treated as a collection of physical symptoms. (At the time, bed wetters were still attached to “peepee-stops” that released electric shocks.) Instead, she spoke to children about their lives and assumed that many of their physical symptoms had psychological origins. “And you, what do you think?” she would ask her young patients.
⁸

Dolto famously insisted that older children at oldeldren “pay” her at the end of each session, with an object, like a stone, to emphasize their independence and accountability. This respect for children resonated strongly with Dolto’s students. “She changed everything, and we, the students, wanted things to change,” the psychoanalyst Myriam Szejer recalls.

Dolto’s respect extended even to babies. A former student described her dealing with an upset infant who was several months old: “All of her senses on alert, totally receptive to the emotions that the baby aroused in her. It was not to console [the baby], but to understand what the baby was telling her. Or more precisely, what the baby saw.” There are legendary stories about Dolto approaching previously inconsolable infants in the hospital and simply explaining to them why they were there and where their parents were. According to legend, the babies suddenly calmed down.

This isn’t American-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 presonogram 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 said 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 intuition. 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 parents were under the sway of Dr. Spock, who was born five years before Dolto and also trained as a psychoanalyst. Spock wrote that a child can understand that he’s about to have a baby brother or sister only 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 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 . . . Our task is to
understand
what has happened,” she says.

Dolto gives the example of a small child who suddenly refuses to continue walking down the street. To the parent, it just seems like sudden 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 Dolto’s teachings this way: “Human beings speak to other human beings. Some of them are big, some of them are small. But they communicate.”
⁹

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. But 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 United States, 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 her 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.