Bringing Up Bebe (29 page)

This don’t-tell culture creates solidarity among kids. They learn to rely on one another and on themselves, rather than rushing to parents or school authorities for backup. There certainly isn’t the same reverence for truth at any cost. Marc and his American wife, Robynne, tell me about a recent case in which their son Adrien, who’s now ten, saw another student setting off firecrackers at school. There was a big inquiry. Robynne urged Adrien to tell the school authorities what he’d seen. Marc advised him to consider the other boy’s popularity and whether he could beat Adrien up.

“You have to calculate the risks,” Marc says. “If the advantage is not to do anything, he should do nothing. I want my son to analyze things.”

I see this emphasis on making kids learn their own lessons when I’m renovating our apartment. Like all the American parents I know, I’m eager for everything to be rigorously childproof. I choose rubber flooring for the kids’ bathroom, lest they slip on wet tile. I also insist that every appliance has a kidproof lock and that the oven door is the type that doesn’t get hot.

My contractor, Régis, an earthy, roguish fellow from Burgundy, thinks I’m nuts. He says the way to “childproof” an oven is to let the kid touch it once and realize that it’s hot. Régis refuses to install rubber floors in the bathroom, saying that they would look terrible. I concede, but only when he also mentions the apartmentg kiapaRés resale value. I don’t budge on the oven.

On the day
that I read an English story to Bean’s class at maternelle, the teacher gives a brief English lesson beforehand. She points to a pen and asks the kids to say the pen’s color in English. In response, a four-year-old boy says something about his shoes.

“That has nothing to do with the question,” the teacher tells him.

I’m taken aback by this response. I would have expected the teacher to find something positive to say, no matter how far off the subject the answer is. I come from the American tradition of, as the sociologist Annette Lareau describes it, “treating each child’s thought as a special contribution.”
²
By crediting kids for even the most irrelevant comments, we try to give them confidence and make them feel good about themselves.

In France, that kind of parenting is very conspicuous. I see this when I take the kids to the inground trampolines in the Tuileries gardens, next to the Louvre. Each child jumps on his own trampoline inside a gated area while parents watch from the surrounding benches. But one mom has brought a chair inside the gates and parked it directly in front of her son’s trampoline. She shouts “Whoa!” each time he jumps. I know, even before I approach to eavesdrop further, that she must be an Anglophone like me.

I know this because, although I manage to restrain myself at the trampolines, I feel compelled to say “Whee!” each time one of my kids goes down a slide. This is shorthand for “I see you doing this! I approve! You’re wonderful!” Likewise, I praise even their worst drawings and artwork. I feel that I must, to boost their self-esteem.

French parents also want their kids to feel good about themselves and “
bien dans leur peau
” (comfortable in their own skin). But they have a different strategy for bringing this about. It’s in some ways the opposite of the American strategy. They don’t believe that praise is always good.

The French believe that kids feel confident when they’re able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don’t praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well. Sociologist Raymonde Carroll says French parents want to teach their children to verbally “defend themselves well.” She quotes an informant who says, “In France, if the child has something to say, others listen to him. But the child can’t take too much time and still retain his audience; if he delays, the family finishes his sentences for him. This gets him in the habit of formulating his ideas better before he speaks. Children learn to speak quickly, and to be interesting.”

Even when French kids do say interesting things—or just give the correct answer—French adults are decidedly understated in response. They don’t act like every job well done is an occasion to say “good job.” When I take Bean to the free health clinic for a checkup, the pediatrician asks her to do a wooden puzzle. Bean does it. The doctor looks at the finished puzzle and then does something I’m not constitutionally ctittheapable of: practically nothing. She mutters the faintest “
bon
”—more of a “let’s move on” than a “good”—then proceeds with the checkup.

Not only don’t teachers and authority figures in France routinely praise children to their faces but, to my great disappointment, they also don’t routinely praise children to their parents. I had hoped this was a quirk of Bean’s rather sullen first-year teacher. The following year she has two alternating teachers. One is a dynamic, extremely warm young woman named Marina, with whom Bean has an excellent rapport. But when I ask Marina how things are going, she says that Bean is “
très compétente
.” (I type this into Google Translate, to make sure I haven’t missed some nuance of
compétente
that might suggest brilliance. It just means “competent.”)

It’s good that my expectations are
low when Simon and I have a midsemester meeting with Agnès, Bean’s other teacher. She, too, is lovely and attentive. And yet she also seems reluctant to label Bean or make any general statements about her. She simply says, “Everything is fine.” Then she shows us the one worksheet—out of dozens—that Bean had trouble finishing. I leave the meeting having no idea of how Bean ranks against her peers.

After the meeting, I’m miffed that Agnès didn’t mention anything that Bean has d
one well. Simon points out that in France, that’s not a teacher’s job. Rather, Agnès’s role is to discover problems. If the child is struggling, the parents need to know. If the child is coping, there’s nothing more to say.

This focus on the negative, rather than on trying to boost kids’—and parents’—morales with positive reinforcement, is a well-known (and often criticized) feature of French schools. It’s almost impossible to get a perfect score on the French
baccalauréat
, the final exams at the end of high school. A score of 14:20 (14 out of a possible 20) is considered excellent, and 16:20 is almost like getting a perfect score.
³

Through friends I meet Benoît, who’s a father of two and a professor at one of France’s elite universities. Benoît says his high-school-aged son is an excellent student. However, the most positive comment a teacher ever wrote on one of his papers was
des qualités
(some good qualities). Benoît says French teachers don’t grade their students on a curve, but rather against an ideal, which practically no one meets.
⁴
Even for an outstanding paper, “the French way would be to say ‘correct, not too bad, but this and this and this and this are wrong.’”

By high school, Benoît says there’s little value placed on letting students express their feelings and opinions. “If you say, ‘I love this poem because it makes me think of certain experiences I had,’ that’s completely wrong . . . What you’re taught in high school is to learn to reason. You’re not supposed to be creative. You’re supposed to be articulate.”

When Benoît took a temporary posting at Princeton, he was surprised when students accused him of being a harsh grader. “I learned that you had to say some positive things about even the worst essays,” he recaysigh alls. In one incident, he had to justify giving a student a D. Conversely, I hear that an American who taught at a French high school got complaints from parents when she gave grades of 18:20 and 20:20. The parents assumed that the class was too easy and that the grades were “fake.”

All this criticism can intimidate kids. A girlfriend of mine who went to French schools until she moved to Chicago for high school, remembers being shocked by how American students spoke up confidently in class. She says that unlike in her French schools, students weren’t immediately criticized for being wrong or for asking dumb questions. Another friend, a French physician who lives in Paris, tells me excitedly about the new yoga class she’s taking, taught by an American woman. “She keeps telling me how well I’m doing and how beautiful I am!” she says of the teacher. In her many years of French schooling, my friend had probably never gotten so much praise.

In general,
the French parents I know are a lot more supportive than French teachers. They do praise their kids and give them positive reinforcement. Even so, they don’t slather on praise, the way we Americans do.

I’m starting to suspect that French parents may be right in giving less praise. Perhaps they realize that those little zaps of pleasure kids get each time a grown-up says “good job” could—if they arrive too often—simply make kids addicted to positive feedback. After a while, they’ll need someone else’s approval to feel good about themselves. And if kids are assured of praise for what
ever they do, then they won’t need to try very hard. They’ll be praised anyway.

Since I’m American, what really convinces me is the research. Praise seems to be yet another realm in which French parents are doing—through tradition and intuition—what the latest scientific studies suggest.

In their 2009 book
NurtureShock
, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that the old conventional wisdom that “praise, self-esteem and performance rise and fall together” has been toppled by new research showing that “excessive praise . . . distorts children’s motivations; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of the intrinsic enjoyment.”

Bronson and Merryman point to research showing that when heavily praised students get to college, they “become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy.” These students “commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major. They’re afraid to commit to something because they’re afraid of not succeeding.”
⁵

This research also refutes the conventional American wisdom that when kids fail at something, parents should cushion the blow with positive feedback. A better tack is to gently delve into what went wrong, giving kids the confidence and the tools to improve. French schools may be a bit harsh, especially in the later years. But this is exactly what Bean’s French teachers were doing, and it certainly reflects what French parents believe.

The French seem to proceed through parenting using a kind of scientific method, to test what wto ids orks and what doesn’t. In general, they are unmoved by ideas about what
should
work on their kids and clear-sighted about what actually does work. What they conclude is that some praise is good for a child, but that if you praise her too much, you’re not letting her live her life.

Over the winter holidays I bring Bean back to the United States. At a family gathering, she starts putting on a one-child show, which mostly involves acting like a teacher and giving the grown-ups orders. It’s cute but, frankly, not brilliant. Yet gradually, every adult in the room stops to watch and to remark on how adorable Bean is. (She wisely drops in some French phrases and songs, knowing that these always impress.)

By the time the show is over, Bean is beaming as she soaks up all the praise. I think it’s the highlight of her visit. I’m beaming, too. I interpret the praise for her as praise for me, which I’ve been starving for in France. All through dinner afterward, everyone talks—within earshot of both of us—about how terrific the show was.

This is great on vacation. But I’m not sure I’d want Bean to get that kind of unconditional praise all the time. It feels good, but it seems to come bundled with other things, including letting a child constantly interrupt because she’s bursting with a sense of her own importance. It might also throw off Bean’s internal calibration of what’s truly entertaining and what’s not.

I’ve accepted that
if we stay in France, my kids probably won’t ever learn to shoot a bow and arrow. (God forbid they’re ever attacked by eighteenth-century American Indians.) I’ve even toned down my praise a bit. But adjusting to the overarching French view on autonomy is a lot harder. Of course I know that my children have an emotional life that’s separate from mine, and that I can’t constantly protect them from rejection and disappointment. Nevertheless, the idea that they have their lives and I have mine doesn’t reflect my emotional map. Or maybe it just doesn’t suit my emotional needs.

Still, I have to admit that my kids seem happiest when I trust them to do things for themselves. I don’t hand them knives and tell them to go carve a watermelon. They mostly know when things are way beyond their abilities. But I do let them stretch a bit, even if it’s just to carry a breakable plate to the dinner table. After these small achievements, they’re calmer and happier. Dolto is most certainly right that autonomy is one of a child’s most basic needs.

She also may be right about age six being the threshold. One night, I’m sick with the flu and keeping Simon awake with my coughing. I retreat to the couch in the middle of the night. When the kids march into the living room at about seven thirty
A.M.
, I can hardly move. I don’t start my usual routine of putting out breakfast.

So Bean does. I lie on the couch, still wearing my eyeshades. In the background I hear her opening drawers, setting the table, and getting out the milk and cereal. She’s five and a half years old. And she’s taken my job. She’s even subcontracted some of it to Joey, who’s organizing the silverware.