Bringing Up Bebe (28 page)

“
La fessée!
” (a spanking) the crowd of little kids shouts in unison. In a national poll,
²
19 percent of French parents said they spank their kids “from time to time”; 46 percent said they spank “rarely”; and 2 percent said they spank “often.” Another 33 percent said they never spank their kids.
³

In the past,
la fessée
probably played a bigger role in French child rearing and in enforcing adults’ authority. But the tide is turning. All the French parenting experts I read about oppose it.
⁴
Instead of spanking, they recommend that parents become adept at saying no. Like Marcelli, they say that “no” should be used sparingly. But once uttered, it must be definitive.

This idea isn’t new. Insnrenc fact, it comes all the way from Rousseau. “Give willingly, refuse unwillingly,” he writes in
Émile
. “But let your refusal be irrevocable. Let no entreaties move you; let your ‘no,’ once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it. Thus you will make him patient, equable, calm and resigned, even when he does not get all he wants.”

In addition
to the rapid-movement gene, Leo has also been born with the subversive gene.

“I want water,” he announces at dinner one night.

“What’s the magic word?” I ask sweetly.

“Water!” he says, smirking. (Strangely, Leo—who looks the most like Simon—speaks with a slight British accent. Joey and Bean both sound American.)

Building a
cadre
for your kids is a lot of work. In the early years, it requires much repetition and attention. But once it’s in place, it makes life much easier and calmer (or so it seems). In moments of desperation I start telling my kids, in French, “
C’est moi qui décide
” (It’s me who decides). Just uttering this sentence is strangely fortifying. My back stiffens a bit when I say it.

The French way also requires a paradigm shift. I’m so used to believing that everything revolves around the kids. Being more “French” means moving the center of gravity away from them and letting my own needs spread out a bit, too.

Feeling like I have some control also makes having three little kids a lot more manageable. When Simon is traveling one spring weekend, I let the kids drag carpets and blankets out on our balcony and create a kind of Moroccan lounge. I bring them hot chocolate, and they sit around sipping it.

When I tell Simon about this later, he immediately asks, “Wasn’t it stressful?” It probably would have been a few weeks earlier. I’d have felt overpowered by them or too worried to enjoy it. There would have been shouting, which—since our
balcony overlooks the courtyard—our neighbors would have heard.

But now that I’m the decider, at least a little bit, having three kids on the balcony with hot chocolate actually feels manageable. I even sit down and have a cup of coffee with them.

One morning I’m taking Leo to crèche by himself. (Simon and I have divided the morning duties.) As I’m riding down the elevator with Leo, I feel a sense of dread. I decide to tell him firmly that there will be no shouting in the courtyard. I present this new rule as if it has always existed. I explain it firmly, while looking into Leo’s eyes. I ask him whether he understands, and then pause to give him a chance to reply. After a thoughtful moment, he says yes.

When we open the glass door and walk out into the courtyard, it’s silent. There’s no shouting or whining. There’s just a very speedy little boy, tugging me along.

Chapter 14

let him live his life

O
ne day, a notice goes up at Bean’s school. It says that parents of students ages four to eleven can register their kids for a summer trip to the Hautes-Vosges, a rural region about five hours by car from Paris. The trip,
sans
parents, will last for eight days.

I can’t imagine sending Bean, who’s five, on an eight-day school holiday. She’s never even spent more than a night alone at my mother’s house. My own first overnight class trip, to SeaWorld, was when I was in junior high.

This trip is yet another reminder that while I can now use the subjunctive in French, and even get my kids to listen to me, I’ll never actually be French. Being French means looking at a notice like this and saying, as the mother of another five-year-old next to me does, “What a shame. We already have plans then.” None of the French parents find the idea of dispatching their four- and five-year-olds for a week of group showers and dormitory life to be at all alarming.

I soon discover that this school trip is just the beginning. I didn’t go to sleepaway camp until I was ten or eleven. But in France, there are hundreds of different sleepaway
colonies de vacances
(vacation colonies) for kids as young as four. The younger kids typically go away for seven or eight days to the countryside, where they ride ponies, feed goats, learn songs, and “discover nature.” For older kids, there are
colonies
that specialize in things like theater, kayaking, or astronomy.

It’s clear that giving kids a degree of independence, and stressing a kind of inner resilience and self-reliance, is a big part of French parenting. The French call this
autonomie
(autonomy). They generally aim to give children as much autonomy as they can handle. This includes physical autonomy, like the class trips. It also includes emotional separation, like letting them build their own self-esteem that doesn’t depend on praise from parents and other adults.

I admire a lot about French parenting. I’ve tried to absorb the French way of eating, of wielding authority, and of teaching my kids to entertain themselves. I’ve started speaking at length to babies and letting my kids just “discover” things for themselves, instead of pushing them to acquire skills. In moments of crisis and confusion, I often find myself asking: What would a French mother do?

But I have a harder time accepting certain parts of the French emphasis on autonomy, like the school trips. Of course I don’t want my kids to be too dependent on me. But what’s the rush? Must the push for autonomy start so young? And aren’t the French overdoing it a bit? In some cases, the drive to make kids self-reliant seems to clash with my most basic instincts to protect my kids and to make them feel good.

Amo perican parents tend to dole out independence quite differently. It’s only after I marry Simon, a European, that I realize I spent much of my childhood acquiring survival skills. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I can shoot a bow and arrow, right a capsized canoe, safely build a fire on someone’s stomach, and—while treading water—convert a pair of blue jeans into an inflated life jacket.

As a European, Simon didn’t have this survivalist upbringing. He never learned how to pitch a tent or steer a kayak. He’d be hard-pressed to know which end of a sleeping bag to crawl into. In the wild he’d survive about fifteen minutes—and that’s only if he had a book.

The irony is, while I have all these faux pioneering skills, I learned them in tightly scheduled summer camps after my parents had signed disclaimers drawn up by lawyers in case I drowned. And that was before there were Webcams in classrooms and vegan, nut-free birthday cakes.

Despite their scouting badges and killer backhands, middle-class American kids are famously quite protected. “The current trend in parenting is to shield children from emotional or physical discomfort,” the American psychologist Wendy Mogel writes in
The Blessing of a Skinned Knee
. Instead of giving kids freedom, the well-heeled parents Mogel counsels “try to armor [their kids] with a thick layer of skills by giving them lots of lessons and pressuring them to compete and excel.”

It’s not simply that Americans don’t emphasize autonomy. It’s that we’re not sure it’s a good thing. We tend to assume that parents should be physically present as much as possible, to protect kids from harm and to smooth out emotional turbulence for them. Simon and I have joked since Bean was born that we’ll just move with her to wherever she attends college. Then I see an article saying that some American colleges now hold “parting ceremonies” for the parents of incoming freshmen, to signal that the parents need to leave.

French parents don’t seem to have this fantasy of control. They want to protect their kids, but they aren’t obsessed with far-flung eventualities. When they’re traveling they don’t, as I do, e-mail their husband once a day to remind him to bolt the front door and to make sure that all the toilet lids are closed (so a child can’t fall in).

In France, the social pressure goes in the opposite direction. If a parent hovers too much or seems to micromanage his child’s experiences, someone else is apt to urge him to back off. My frie
nd Sharon, the literary agent with two kids, explains: “Here there’s an argument about pushing a child to the max. Everyone will say, ‘You have to let children live their lives.’”

The French emphasis on autonomy comes all the way from Françoise Dolto. “The most important thing is that a child will be, in full security, autonomous as early as possible,” Dolto says in
The Major Stages of Childhood
. “The trap of the relationship between parents and children is not recognizing the true needs of the child, of which freedom is one . . . The child has the need to feel ‘loved in what he is becoming,’ sure of himself in a space, day by day more freely left to his own exploration, to his personal experience, and in his relations with those of his own ageof su.”

Dolto is talking, in part, about leaving a child alone, safely, to figure things out for himself. She also means respecting him as a separate being who can cope with challenges. In Dolto’s view, by the time a child is six years old, he should be able to do everything in the house—and in society—that concerns him.
¹

The French way can be tough for even the most integrated Americans to accept. My friend Andi, an artist who’s lived in France for more than twenty years, says that when her older son was six she found out that he had an upcoming class trip.

“Everyone tells you how great it is, because in April there’ll be a
classe verte
(literally, a green class). And you say to yourself, ‘Hmm, what’s that? Oh, a field trip. And it’s a week? It lasts a week?’” At her son’s school, the trips are optional until first grade. After that, the whole class of twenty-five kids is expected to go on a weeklong trip with the teacher each spring.

Andi says that by American standards, she isn’t a particularly clingy mother. However, she couldn’t get comfortable with the “green class”—which was to be held near some salt marshes off the western coast of France. Her son had never even gone on a sleepover. Andi still corralled him into the shower each night. She couldn’t imagine him going to bed without her tucking him in. She liked his teacher, but she didn’t know the other adults who’d be supervising the trip. One was the teacher’s nephew. Another was a supervisor from the playground. The third, Andi recalls, was just “this other person [the teacher] knows.”

When Andi told her three sisters in the United States about the trip, “they completely freaked out. They said, ‘You don’t have to do that!’ One’s a lawyer, and she’s like, ‘Did you sign anything?’” Andi says they were mainly worried about pedophiles.

At an informational meeting about the trip, another American mom from the class asked the teacher how she would cope with a scenario in which an electrical wire accidentally fell in the water and a child then walked into the water. Andi says the French parents snickered. She was relieved that she hadn’t asked the question, but she admits that it reflected her own “hidden neuroses.”

Andi’s own main concern—which she didn’t dare raise at the meeting—was what would happen if her son became sad or upset during the trip. When this happens at home, “I try to help him identify his emotions. If he started crying and he didn’t know why, I would say, ‘Are you scared, frustrated, are you angry?’ That was my thing. I was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to go through this together.’”

The French emphasis on autonomy extends beyond school trips. My heart regularly jumps when I’m walking around my neighborhood, because French parents will often let small kids race ahead of them on the sidewalk. They trust that the kids will stop at the corner and wait for them. Watching this is particularly terrifying when the kids are on scooters.

I live in a world of worst-case scenarst-ularios. When I run into my friend Hélène on the street and we stop to chat, she lets her three girls wander off a bit, toward the edge of the sidewalk. She trusts that they won’t suddenly dash into the street. Bean probably wouldn’t do that either. But just in case, I make her stand next to me and hold my hand. Simon reminds me that I once wouldn’t let Bean sit in the stands to watch him play soccer, in case she got hit by the ball.

There are many small moments in France when I’d expect to help my kids along, but they’re supposed to go it alone. By accident, I often run into the caregivers from the boys’ crèche leading a group of toddlers down the street to buy the day’s baguettes. It’s not an official outing; it’s just taking a few kids for a walk. Bean has been on school trips to the zoo or to a big park on the outskirts of Paris, which I learn about only by accident weeks later (when I happen to take her to the same zoo). I am rarely asked to sign waivers. French parents don’t seem to worry that anything untoward might be happening on these trips.

When Bean has a recital for her dance class, I’m not even allowed backstage. I make sure she has a pair of white leggings, which is the only instruction that’s been communicated to parents. I never speak to the teacher. Her relationship is with Bean, not with me. When we get to the theater, I just hand Bean over to an assistant, who shuttles her backstage.

For weeks Bean has been telling me, “I don’t want to be a marionette.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it becomes clear as soon as the curtains open. Bean comes onstage in full costume and makeup, with a dozen other little girls, doing deliberately jolty arm and leg movements to a song called “Marionetta.” Not deliberately, the girls are way out of synch with each other. They look like escaped marionettes who’ve had too much cognac.

But it’s clear that Bean, without my knowledge, has memorized an entire ten-minute dance routine. When she comes out from backstage after the show, I gush about what a wonderful job she did. But she looks disappointed.

“I forgot to not be a marionette,” she says.

French kids aren’t just more independent in their extracurricular activities. They also have more autonomy in their dealings with each other. French parents seem slower to intervene in playground disputes or to mediate arguments between siblings. They expect kids to work these situations out for themselves. French schoolyards are famously free-for-alls, with teachers mostly watching from the sidelines.

When I pick up Bean from preschool one afternoon, she has just come from the schoolyard and has a red gash on her cheek. It’s not deep, but it’s bleeding. She won’t tell me what happened (though she doesn’t seem concerned, and she isn’t in pain). Her teacher claims not to know what happened. I’m practically in tears by the time I question the director of the school, but she doesn’t know anything about it either. They all seem surprised that I’m making such a fuss.

My mother happens to be visiting, and she can’t believe this nonchalance. She says that a similar injury in America would prompt official inquiries, calls home, and lengthy explanations.
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For French parents, such events are upsetting, but they aren’t Shakespearean tragedies. “In France we like it when kids brawl a bit,” the journalist and author Audrey Goutard tells me. “It’s the part of us that’s a bit French and a bit Mediterranean. We like that our children know how to defend their territory and quarrel a bit with other children . . . We’re not bothered by a certain violence between children.”

Bean’s reluctance to say how she got the gash probably reflects another aspect of the autonomy ethos. “Telling” on another child—known in French as
rapporter contre
—is viewed very badly. People theorize that this is because of all the lethal informing on neighbors that went on during World War II. At the annual meeting of my apartment’s building association, many of whose members were alive during the war, I ask if anyone knows who’s been tipping over our stroller in the lobby.

“We don’t
rapporter
,
”
an older woman says. Everyone laughs.

Americans don’t like tattletales, either. However, in France, even among kids, having the inner resolve to suffer some scrapes and keep your lips sealed is considered a life skill. Even within families, people are entitled to their secrets.

“I can have secrets with my son that he can’t tell his mother,” Marc, the French golfer, tells me. I see a French movie in which a well-known economist picks up his teenage daughter at a Parisian police station after she’s been brought in for shoplifting and possessing marijuana. On the drive home, she defends herself by saying that at least she didn’t rat on the friend who was with her.