Bringing Up Bebe (13 page)

I sometimes photograph these menus and e-mail them to my mother. They read like the chalkboard menus at Parisian brasser kisi">Iies. Lunch is served in four courses: a cold vegetable starter, a main dish with a side of grains or cooked vegetables, a different cheese each day, and a dessert of fresh fruit or fruit puree. There’s a slightly modified version for each age group; the youngest kids mostly have the same foods, but pureed.

A typical menu starts with hearts of palm and tomato salad. This is followed by sliced turkey
au basilic
accompanied by rice in a Provençal cream sauce. The third course is a slice of St. Nectaire cheese with a slice of fresh baguette. Dessert is fresh kiwi.

An in-house cook at each crèche prepares lunch from scratch each day. A truck arrives several times a week with seasonal, fresh, sometimes even organic ingredients. Aside from the occasional can of tomato paste, nothing is processed or precooked. A few vegetables are frozen, but never precooked.

I have trouble imagining two-year-olds sitting through a meal like this, so the crèche lets me sit in on lunch one Wednesday, when Bean is home with a babysitter. I’m stunned when I realize how my daughter eats lunch most days. I sit quietly with my reporter’s notebook while her classmates assemble in groups of four at square toddler-sized tables. One of her teachers wheels up a cart filled with covered serving plates and bread wrapped in plastic to keep it fresh. There’s a teacher at each table.

First, the teacher uncovers and displays each dish. The starter is a bright-red tomato salad in vinaigrette. “This is followed by
le poisson,
” she says, to approving glances, as she displays a flaky white fish in a light butter sauce and a side dish of peas, carrots, and onions. Next she previews the cheese course: “Today it’s
le bleu
,” she says, showing the kids a crumbly blue cheese. Then she shows them dessert: whole apples, which she’ll slice at the table.

The food looks simple, fresh, and appetizing. Except for the melamine plates, the bite-sized pieces, and the fact that some of the diners have to be prodded to say “
merci
,” I might be in a high-end restaurant.

Just who are the people
taking care of Bean? To find out, I show up one windy fall morning at the annual entrance examination for ABC Puériculture, one of the schools that train crèche workers. There are hundreds of nervous women (and a few men) in their twenties, who are looking shyly at one another or doing last-minute practice questions in thick workbooks.

They’re understandably anxious. Of the more than five hundred people who sit for this test, just thirty will be admitted to the training school. Applicants are grilled on reasoning, reading comprehension, math, and human biology. Those who advance to the second round face a psychological exam, an oral presentation, and interrogation by a panel of experts.

The thirty winners then do a year of coursework and internships, following a curriculum set by the government. They learn the basics of child nutrition, sleep, and hygiene, and practice mixing bab
y formula and changing diapers. They’ll do additional weeklong trainings throughout their careers.

In France, workin kranrainig in day care is a career. There are schools all over the country with similarly rigorous entrance standards, creating an army of skilled workers to staff the crèches
.
Just half of caregivers at a crèche must be
auxiliaires
or have a
similar degree. A quarter must have degrees related to health, leisure, or social work. A quarter are exempt from any qualifications but must be trained in-house.
⁶
At Bean’s crèche, thirteen of the sixteen caregivers are
auxiliaires
or similar.

I start to see Anne-Marie and other caregivers at Bean’s crèche as the Rhodes Scholars of baby care. And I understand their confidence. They’ve mastered a field and earned the respect of parents. And I’m indebted to them. During nearly three years that Bean is at the crèche, they potty-train her, teach her table manners, and give her a French immersion course.

By Bean’s third year at the crèche, I suspect that the days are starting to feel long and that perhaps she’s not being stimulated enough. I’m ready for her to move on to preschool. But Bean still seems to like the crèche. She chatters all the time about Maky and Lila (pronounced Lee-lah), her two best friends. (Interestingly, she’s gravitated to other children of foreigners: Lila’s parents are Moroccan and Japanese. Maky’s dad is from Senegal.) She has definitely been socialized. When Simon and I take Bean to Barcelona for a long weekend, she keeps asking where the other children are.

The kids in Bean’s section
spend a lot of time running around and shouting in the Astroturf courtyard, which is stocked with little scooters and carts. Bean is usually out there when I pick her up. As soon as she spots me, she bolts over and bursts happily into my arms, shouting the news of the day.

On Bean’s last day at the crèche, after the good-bye party and the clearing-out of her locker, Bean gives a big hug and kiss good-bye to Sylvie, who’s been her main caregiver. Sylvie has been the model of professionalism all year. But when Bean embraces her, Sylvie begins to cry. I cry, too.

By the end
of crèche, Simon and I feel that Bean has had a good experience. But we did often feel guilty dropping her off each day. And we can’t help but notice the drip of alarming headlines in the American press about how day care affects kids.

Continental Eu
ropeans aren’t really asking about that anymore. Sheila Kamerman at Columbia says that Europeans pretty much take for granted that high-quality day care, with small groups and warm, well-trained caregivers who have made the job a career, are good for kids. And conversely, they assume that bad day care is bad for kids.

Americans have too many misgivings about day care to take this for granted. So the U.S. government has funded the largest-ever study of how early child-care arrangements correlate with the way kids develop and behave later in life.
⁷

Many of the headlines on day care in America come out of data from this giant study. One of its principal findings is that early child-care arrangements just aren’t very significant. “Parenting k nt quality is a much more important predictor of child development than type, quantity or quality of child care,” explains a back
grounder. Children fared better when their parents were more educated and wealthier, when they had books and play materials at home, and when they had “enhancing experiences” like going to the library. This was the same whether the child went to day care for thirty or more hours a week, or had a stay-at-home mother.

And as I mentioned earlier, the study found that what’s especially crucial is the mother’s “sensitivity”—how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world. This is also true at day care. One of the study’s researchers
⁸
writes that kids get “high-quality” day care when the caregiver is “attentive to [the child’s] needs, responsive to her verbal and non-verbal signals and cues, stimulating of his curiosity and desire to learn about the world, and emotionally warm, supportive and caring.”

Kids fared better with a caregiver who was sensitive, whether it was a nanny, a grandparent, or a day-care worker. “It would not be possible to go into a classroom and with no additional information, pick out which children had been in center care,” the researcher writes.

I realize that what we Americans should be fretting about isn’t just whether bad day care has bad outcomes (of course it does), but how unpleasant it is for kids to be in bad day care. We’re so concerned about cognitive development that we’re forgetting to ask whether children in day care are happy and whether it’s a positive experience for them while it’s happening. That’s what French parents are talking about.

Even my mother
gets used to the crèche. She starts calling it “the crèche
,
” instead of “day care,” which probably helps. The crèche certainly has benefits for us. We feel more like we’re part of France, or at least part of our neighborhood. Thankfully, we put our ongoing “to stay or not to stay in Paris” conversation on pause. We can’t really imagine moving someplace where we’d struggle to find decent, affordable child care. And we can see the next excuse for staying in France coming down the pike: the
école maternelle
, free public preschool, with spots for just about everyone.

Mostly, we like the French crèche because Bean likes it. She eats blue cheese, shares her toys, and plays “
tomate, ketchup
” (a French version of “duck, duck, goose”). Also, she has mastered the command form of French. She is a bit too aggressive: she likes to k
ick me in the shins. But I suspect that her anger comes from her father, anyway. I don’t think I can blame day care for any of her faults.

Maky and Lila are still Bean’s dear friends. Occasionally we even take Bean back to the crèche to stare through the gates at the children who are now playing in the courtyard. And every once in a while, out of nowhere, Bean turns to me and says, “Sylvie cried.” This was a place where she mattered.

Chapter 7

nOyle MT bébé au lait

W
arming up to the crèche turned out to be easy. Warming up to the other mothers there wasn’t. I’m aware that American-style instant bonding between women doesn’t happen in France. I’ve heard that female friendships here start out slowly and can take years to ramp up. (Though once you’re finally “in” with a Frenchwoman, you’re supposedly stuck with her for life. American insta-friends can drop you anytime.)

I have managed to befriend a few Frenchwomen in the time I’ve now lived in Paris. But most either don’t have kids or live across town. I’d just assumed that I’d also meet some other moms in my neighborhood with kids the same age as Bean. In my fantasy, we’d swap recipes, organize picnics, and complain about our husbands. That’s how it happens in America. My own mother is still close with women she met in the playground when I was small.

So I’m unprepared when the French mothers at the crèche
—
who all live in my neighborhood and have age-appropriate kids—are practically indifferent to me. They barely say
bonjour
when we plop our toddlers down next to one another in the morning. I eventually learn the names of most of the kids in Bean’s classes. But even after a year or so, I don’t think any of the mothers know Bean’s name. They certainly don’t know mine.

This initial stage, if that’s what it is, doesn’t feel like a ramp up to friendship. Mothers I see several days a week at the crèche seem not to recognize me when we pass each other in the supermarket. Perhaps, as the cross-cultural books claim, they’re giving me privacy; to speak would be to forge a relationship and thus create obligations. Or perhaps they’re just stuck up.

It’s the same at the playground. The Canadian and Australian mothers I occasionally meet there treat the playground like I do: as a place to mingle, and perhaps make friends for life. Within minutes of spotting one another, we’ve each revealed our hometown, marital status, and views on bilingual schooling. Soon we’re mirroring like nobody’s business: “You trek to Concorde to buy Grape-Nuts cereal? Me too!”

But usually it’s just me and the French mothers. And they don’t do “me-toos.” In fact, they barely exchange glances with me, even when our kids are sparring over sandbox toys. When I try icebreakers like “How old is he?” they usually mutter a number, then eye me like I’m a stalker. They rarely ask any questions back. When they do, they turn out to be Italian.

Granted, I’m in the middle of Paris, surely one of the world’s least friendly places. The sneer was probably invented here. Even people from the rest of France tell me that they find Parisians cold and distant.

I should probably just ignore these women. But I can’t help it: they intrigue me. For starters, many of them look so much better than we Americans do. I drop Bean off at the crèche in the morning wearing a ponytail and whatever was on the floor next to my bed. They arrive fully coiffed and perfumed. I don’t even gawk anymore when French mothers prance into the park dressed in high-heeled boots and skin sootd any jeans, while pushing strollers with tiny newborns in them. (Moms do get a bit fatter as you get farther from central Paris.)

These mothers aren’t just chic; they’re also strangely collected. They don’t shout the names of their children across the park or rush out with a howling toddler. They have good posture. They don’t radiate that famous combination of fatigue, worry, and on-the-vergeness that’s bursting out of most American moms I know (myself included). Except for the actual child, you wouldn’t know that they’re mothers.

Part of me just wants to force-feed these women some spoonfuls of fatty pâté. But another part of me is dying to know their secrets. Having kids who sleep well, wait, and don’t whine surely helps them stay so calm. But there must be more to it. Are they secretly struggling with anything? Where’s their belly fat? Are French mothers really perfect? And if so, are they happy?

After the baby is born,
the first obvious difference between French and American moms is breastfeeding. For us Anglophone mothers, the length of time that we breast-feed—like the size of a Wall Street bonus—is a measure of performance. One former businesswoman in my Anglophone playgroup regularly sidles up to me and asks, faux innocently, “Oh, are you still nursing?”

It’s faux because we all know that our breastfeeding “number” is a concrete way to compete with one another. A mother’s score is reduced if she mixes in formula, relies too heavily on a breast-milk pump, or actually breast-feeds for too long (at which point she starts to seem like a crazed hippie).

In middle-class circles in the United States, many mothers treat infant formula as practically a form of child abuse. The fact that breastfeeding requires endurance, inconvenience, and in some cases physical suffering only increases its status.

You get bonus points from American moms for nursing in France, where breastfeeding isn’t encouraged and many people find the sight of it disturbing. “The breastfeeding mother is regarded, if not as an interesting oddity, then as someone who is performing above and beyond the call of duty,” explains the parenting guide published by Message, the organization for Anglophone mothers in Paris.

We expatriates exchange horror stories about French doctors who—when confronted with the occasional cracked nipple or blocked duct—blithely tell mothers to switch to formula. To combat this, Message has its own army of volunteer “breastfeeding supporters.” Before I delivered Bean, one of them warned me never to hand my baby over to the hospital staff while I slept, lest they defy my instructions and give her a bottle when she cried. This woman made “nipple confusion” sound scarier than autism.

All this adversity makes Anglophone mothers in Paris feel like lactating superheroes, battling the evil doctors and strangers who wo
uld like to steal antibodies from our babies. In chat rooms, expatriate mothers list the strangest places they’ve nursed in Paris: inside Sacré-Coeur cathedral, on a tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery, and at a cocktail party at the Four Seasons Hotel George V. One mother says she breast-fed her baby “while standing and complaining at the e sninrtyasyJet co
unter in Charles de Gaulle Airport. I sort of laid him on the counter.” I pity the poor clerk.

Given our zeal, we can’t fathom why French mothers barely breast-feed. About 63 percent of French mothers do some breastfeeding.
¹
A bit more than half are still nursing when they leave the maternity hospital, and most abandon it altogether soon after that. Long-term nursing is extremely rare. In the United States, 74 percent of mothers do at least some breastfeeding, and a third are still nursing exclusively at four months.
²

It’s harder still for us Anglophones to understand why even a certain type of middle-class French mother—the ones who steam and puree organic leeks for their seven-month-olds and send their three-year-olds to the same African drumming classes that we do—don’t breast-feed much either.

“Don’t they have the same medical information we have?” one incredulous American mother asks me. Among Anglophone mothers, the reigning theories about why Frenchwomen don’t nurse include: they can’t be bothered; they care more about their boobs than about their babies (though apparently it’s pregnancy, not breastfeeding, that stretches out breasts); and they just don’t know how important it is.

Locals tell me that breastfeeding still has a peasant image, from the days when babies were farmed out to rural wet nurses. Others say that artificial-milk companies pay off hospitals, give away free samples in maternity wards, and advertise mercilessly. Olivier, who’s married to my journalist friend Christine, theorizes that nursing demystifies the female breast, turning it into something utilitarian and animalistic. Just as French fathers strategically avoid a woman’s “business end” during the birth, they avoid viewing the female breast when it’s used for unsexy purposes.

There are small pockets of breastfeeding enthusiasts in France. But mostly there’s little peer pressure to nurse for a long time. When my British friend Alison, who teaches English in Paris, told her doctor that she was still nursing her thirteen-month-old, she says the doctor asked, “What does your husband say? And your shrink?”
Enfant Magazine
, one of the main French glossies, says that “breastfeeding after three months is always viewed badly by one’s entourage.”

Alexandra, the mother of two girls who works in a crèche, tells me that she didn’t give a drop of breast milk to either of her daughters. She says this without apology or guilt. She says she was thrilled that her husband, who’s a fireman, wanted to help care for the girls, and that bottle-feeding them was a great way for him to pitch in. She points out that both girls are now perfectly healthy.

Alexandra adds, “It was good practice for the father to give a bottle at night. And I could sleep, and drink wine in restaurants. It wasn’t so bad for
maman
.”

Pierre Bitoun, a French pediatrician and longtime proponent of breastfeeding in France, says many Frenchwomen think they just don’t have enough milk. Dr. Bitoun says this is because French maternity hospitals often don’t encour son thage mothers to feed their newborns every few hours. That’s critical in the first few days, so that mothers produce enough milk to feed their babies. If they don’t nurse very frequently from the start, then they really don’t have enough milk, and a recourse to formula starts to seem inevitable. “By day three the kid has lost two hundred grams, and they say, ‘Oh, you don’t have enough milk, let’s give him some formula, the kid is starving.’ That’s what happens. It’s crazy.”

Dr. Bitoun speaks often at French hospitals to explain the science and the benefits of breastfeeding. But “the culture is stronger than the science,” he says. “Three quarters of the people I work with in hospitals don’t believe that breast milk is healthier than formula. They think there’s no difference. They think artificial milk is fine, or at least that’s what they say to mothers to avoid making them feel guilty.”

In fact, even though French children consume enormous amounts of formula, they beat American kids on nearly all measures of health. France ranks about six points
above
the developed-country average in Unicef’s overall health-and-safety ranking, which includes infant mortality, immunization rates until age two, and deaths from accidents and injury up to age nineteen. The United States ranks about eighteen points
below
the average.

French parents see no reason to believe that artificial milk is terrible or to treat breastfeeding as a holy rite. They assume that breast milk is far more critical for a baby born to a poor mother in sub-Saharan Africa than it is for one born to middle-class Parisians. “We look around and see that all the babies who drink formula are fine,” says Christine, the journalist, who has two young kids. “We all drank formula, too.”

I’m not so calm about it. In fact, I’m so panicked by my conversation with the breastfeeding consultant that, when I’m in the maternity hospital after Bean is born, I insist that she stay in the room with me around the clock. I wake up each time she whimpers and barely get any rest.

This suffering and self-sacrifice just seems like the natural order to me. But after a few days, I realize I’m probably the only mother in the maternity ward who’s subjecting herself to this torture. The others, even the ones who are breast-feeding, hand their babies over to the nursery down the hall at night. They feel entitled to a few hours sleep.

I finally feel shattered enough to give this a try, too, even though it feels enormously indulgent. I’m immediately won over by the system, and Bean doesn’t seem any worse for it. Contrary to the rumors, the nurses and
puéricultrices
who work in the nursery are more than happy to wheel her to my room whenever she needs to nurse and then take her away again.

France is probably never going to be ground zero for breastfeeding. But it does have the Protection maternelle et infantile (Mother and Infant Protection service), the same agency that oversees the crèche. This government health service has offices all over Paris that give free checkups and injections to all children until age six, even those who are in France illegally. Middle-class parents rarely use the PMI because the government insurance plan covers much of the cost of their visits to private pediatricia se pts ns. (The French government is the main insurer, but most French doctors are in private practice.)

I’m reluctant to use a public clinic. Will it be impersonal? Will it be clean? One crucial fact convinces me: it will be completely free. Our local PMI office is a ten-minute walk from our house. It turns out that we can see the same doctor each time we go. There’s a giant indoor playground in the immaculate waiting area. The PMI will send a
puéricultrice
to your house to check in on you and your baby when you get back from the hospital. If you get the
baby blues, they’ve got an in-house shrink. All of this is free, too: there’s not even a bill. It’s worth weighing that against an ounce of breast milk.

I’m not taking any chances about breastfeeding. The American Academy of Pediatrics says I should nurse for twelve months, so I do, practically to the day. I give Bean a final, valedictory feed on her first birthday. Sometimes I do enjoy nursing. But often I find it irritating to interrupt whatever I’m doing to rush back home for feeds or—increasingly—for a date with my electric breast pump. Mostly I forge on because of everything I’ve read about the health benefits and because I want to stick it to that lady in my playgroup.

All the American peer pressure to breast-feed does serve a public-health purpose: it gets breast milk into our babies’ mouths. But it also makes us a little crazy. Frenchwomen can see that steamroller of anxiety and guilt coming from a few kilometers away, and they’re at least trying to resist it.