Bringing Up Bebe (34 page)

6.
only the Irish have a higher birth rate
According to 2009 figures from the OECD, France’s birth rate is 1.99 per w
oman; Belgium’s is 1.83; Italy’s is 1.41; Spain’s is 1.4; and Germany’s is 1.36.

1.
in France it’s 1 in 6,900
From a report called
Women on the Front Lines of Health Care: State of the World’s Mothers 2010
, publi
shed by Save the Children in 2010. The figures are from an appendix in the report titled “The Complete Mothers’ Index 2010.”

2.
about 87 percent of women have
epidurals, on average
“Top des Maternités
.
”
www.maman.fr/top_des_maternites-1-1.html.

1.
a meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers
Jodi Mindell et al., “Behavioral Treatment of Bedtime Problems and Night Wakings in Young Children: An American Academy of Sleep Medicine Review,”
Sleep
29 (2006): 1263–76.

2.
The authors of the meta-study point to a paper
Teresa Pinella and Leann L. Birch, “Help Me Make It Thr
ough the Night: Behavioral Entrainment of Breast-Fed Infants’ Sleep Patterns,”
Pediatrics
91, 2 (1993):436–43.

1.
Most could wait only about thirty seconds
Mischel’s experiments were recounted by Jonas Lehrer in
The
New Yorker
, May 18, 2009.

2.
“Hold on, I’m talking to Papa”
Walter Mischel cautions that even if young French children are good at w arpers
that doesn’t mean that they’ll become successful adults. Many other things affect them too. And while Americans typically don’t expect small children to wait well, they trust that the same children will somehow acquire this skill later in life. “I believe an undisciplined child isn’t doomed to become an undisciplined adult,” Mischel says. “Just be
cause a kid is throwing around food at age seven or eight, at a restaurant . . . doesn’t mean that the same child isn’t going to become a superb businessperson or scientist or teacher or whatever fifteen years later.”

3.
ended up eating it
Mischel found that kids can easily learn to distract themselves. In a subsequent marshmallow test, experimenters told the children that instead of thinking about the marshmallow, they should think about something happy like “swinging on a swing with mommy pushing” or to pretend it was just a
picture
of a marshmallow. With this instruction, overall waiting times increased dramatically. Waiting times improved even though kids knew that they were trying to trick themselves. The moment the experimenter walked back into the room, children who had been busy self-distracting for fifteen minutes gobbled up the marshmallow.

4.
now includes snacks
Jennifer Steinhauer, “Snack Time Never Ends,”
New York Times
, January 20, 2010.

5.
But the French moms said it was very important
Marie-Anne Suizzo, “French and American Mothers’ Childrearing Beliefs: Stimulating, Respondi
ng, and Long-Term Goals,”
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
35, 5 (September 2004): 606–26.

6.
an enormous U.S. government st
udy of the effects child care
National Instutute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD), Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, 1991–2007. www.nichd.nig.gov/reasearch/supported/seccyd/overview.cfm#initiating.

7.
American kids doing quite a lot of
n’importe quoi
A 2006 study of white, middle-class Canadian couples found that when the kids were around—which was very often—it was impossible for parents to have quality time togethe
r. One participant said that while speaking to his wife, “we would be interrupted on a minute-to-minute basis.” The authors concluded, “For any experience of being a couple together, they simply had to get away from the children.” Vera Dyck and Kerry Daly, “Rising to the Challenge: Father
s’ Role in the Negotiation of Couple Time,”
Leisure Studies
25, 2 (2006): 201–17.

8.
A French psychologist writes
The psychologist is Christine Bis e="runet, quoted in
Journal des Femmes
, February 11, 2005.

9.
an obligatory passage
Anne-Catherine Pernot-Masson, quoted
in
Votre Enfant
.

1.
as far away as Normandy or Burgundy
Elisabeth Badinter,
L’Amour en Plus: Histoire
de l’amour maternel
(Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 56–63.

2.
to replace the mother in the family store
Ibid.

3.
writes a French social historian
Ibid.

4.
because doing so gives the children pleas
ure
Marie-Anne Suizzo, “French and American Mothers’ Childrearing Beliefs: Stimulating, Responding, and Long-Term Goals,”
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
35, 5 (September 2004): 606–26.

5.
I don’t know where she got her answers
Dolto: Une vie pour l’enfance, Télérama hors série
, 2008.

6.
but that she later created
Dolto decided that she wanted a career after seeing formerly well-off women from her neighborhood come begging at her school because they’d lost their husbands
in World War I. “I saw the decrepitude of bourgeois widows who didn’t have a profession,” she explained.

7.
In a letter written in 1934
Françoise Dolto,
Lettres de jeunesse: Correspondance 1913–1938
(Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

8.
she would ask her young patients
Recollection of the psychoanalyst Alain Vanier, reported in
Dolto: Une vie pour l'enfance, Télérama hors série
, 2008.

9.
“some of them are small. But they communicate”
The psychologist is Muriel Djéribi-Valentin. She was interviewed by Jacqueline Sellem for an article titled “Françoise Dolto: An Analyst Who Listened to Children,” which appeared in h a Dj
l’Humanité
in English and was translated by Kieran O’Meara, www.humaniteinenglish.com/article1071.htm.

10.
give the baby a tour of the house
Marie-Anne Suizzo found that 86 percent of Parisian mothers she interviewed “specifically stated that they talk to their infants to communicate with them.” Marie-Anne Suizzo, “Mother-Child Relationships in France: Ba
lancing Autonomy and Affiliation in Everyday Interactions,”
Ethos
32, 3 (2004): 292–323.

11.
writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom, “Moral Life of Babies,”
New York Times Magazine
, May 3, 2010.

12.
that eight-month-olds understand probabilities
Alison Gopnik writes that these new studies “demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible.” Gopnik is a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of
The Philosophical Baby.

1.
and turn them into “Americans”
Abby J. Cohen, “A Brief History of Federal Financing for Child Care in the United States,”
The Future of Children: Financing Child Care
6 (1996).

2.
don’t have to work, or can afford nannies.
Eventually, the latter part of preschool was assimilated into the American public-school system. But day care remained staunchly private. Middle-class parents and experts believed that mothers should look after young children. The state wasn’t supposed to intrude on that stage of family life, except when “a family—or the country itself—is in crisis,” Abby Cohen writes.

The Great Depression was one such crisis. By 1933, the American government had set up emergency nursery schools, but this was explicitly done to create jobs. Cohen notes that a 1930 report by the White House’s Conference on Children said, “No one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep.” Most of the schools were shut down once the worst of the Depression passed.

When the United States entered World War II, another child-care crisis erupted: Who would look after Rosie the Riveter’s babies? Between 1942 and 1946 the federal government built child-care centers serving children whose mothers had gone to work in the defense industry. Most were in California, where much of the war production was taking place. Initially, the centers charged just fifty cents a day.

When the war ended, the governmentthe>

A new push for the U.S. government to help parents pay for child care—and even provide some of it—began to galvanize in the 1960s. There was a wave of new research about how disadvantages very early in life persist when kids are older. Head Start was created to fund schools for very poor three- to five-year-olds.

Of course, middle-class mothers wanted their kids to have the advantages of early education too. And with more women working, child care was increasingly a problem. In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. The act was meant to professionalize the child-care workforce, build lots of new child-care centers, and make quality child care available and affordable. Pr
esident Nixon vetoed the act, claiming (in a veto written by his adviser Pat Buchanan) that it favored “communal approaches to child-rearing over the family centered approach.” It was a brilliant invocation of both Cold War fears about communism and the long-standing idea that mothers should look after children themselves.

In the 1980s, this ambivalence about day care took on a new form: alleged sex-abuse rings set in home- and center-based day-care facilities. In a series of high-profile cases, day-care owners and employees were charged with pedophilia, sometimes even involving devil worship and journeys into underground labyrinths. Many of these charges turned out to be bunk, and key convictions were overturned because testimony from the children involved had been coerced by overzealous prosecutors. Journalist Margaret Talbot wrote that even the most outrageous charges seemed credible in the early 1980s because Americans were nervous about mothers of young children going to wor
k: “It was as though there were some dark, self-defeating relief in trading niggling everyday doubts about our children’s care for our absolute worst fears—for a story with monsters, not just human beings who didn’t always treat our kids exactly as we would like; for a fate so horrific and bizarre that no parent, no matter how vigilant, could have ever prevented it,” she said.

3.
are typically open from six
A.M.
to six thirty
P.M.
When there were sex-abuse cases at some CDCs in the 1980s, the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel and Compensation held hearings to investigate the whole system. It found the same problems faced by private-sector day care: high staff turnover, low pay, and sometimes nonexistent inspections, according to Gail L. Zellman and Anne Johansen in “Examining the Implementation and Outcom
es of the Military Child Care Act of 1989.” In response, Congress passed the Military Child Care Act in 1989. This contained exactly the sort of rules that American day-care advocates had been clamoring for: specialized training for caregivers, experts overseeing each center, and no-notice inspections four times a year. timeti

4.
American parents remain ambivalent about day care
In 2003, 72 percent of Americans agreed that “too many children are bei
ng raised in day-care centers these days,” up from 68 percent in 1987, according to the Pew Research Center.

5.
perfect conviction that
the children understand
A 2009 report by the Paris mayor’s office said that caregivers shouldn’t speak badly about a child’s parents, origins, or appearance, even if the child is an infant, and even if the remark is made to someone else. “The implicit message in this type of reflection is always perceived intuitively by t
he children. The younger they are, the more they understand what is contained behind the words,” the report says.