Bringing Up Bebe (7 page)

Mischel concludes that having the willpower to wait isn’t about being stoic. It’s about learning techniques that make waiting less frustrating. “There are many many ways of doing that, of which the most direct and the simplest . . . is to self-distract,” he says.

Parents don’t have to specifically teach their kids “distraction strategies.” Mischel says kids learn this skill on their own, if parents just allow them to practice waiting. “I think what’s often underestimated in parenting is how extraordinary . . . the cognitive facilities of very young kids are, if you engage them,” he says.

This is exactly what I’ve been seeing French parents doing. They don’t explicitly teach their kids distraction techniques. Mostly, they just seem to give them lots of opportunities to practice waiting.

On a gray Saturday afternoon, I take a commuter train to Fontenay-sous-Bois, a suburb just east of Paris. A friend has arranged for me to visit a family that lives there. Martine, the mother, is a pretty labor lawyer in her midthirties. She lives with her husband, an emergency-room doctor, and their two kids, in a modern low-rise building set amid a patch of trees.

I’m immediately struck by how much Martine’s apartment resembles my own. Toys line the perimeter of the living room, which is attached to an open kitchen (known in French as a
cuisine americaine
). We have the same stainless-steel appliances.

But the similarities end there. Despite having two young kids, Martine’s house has a calm that we could only wish for. When I arrive, her husband is working on his laptop in the living room, while one-year-old Auguste naps nearby. Paulette, their three-year-old with a pixie haircut, is sitting at the kitchen table plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. When each wrapper is full, she tops it with colored sprinkles and fresh red gooseberries.

Martine and I sit down to chat at the other end of the table. But I’m transfixed by little Paulette and her cupcakes. Paulette is completely absorbed in her task. She somehow resists the temptation to eat the batter. When she’s done she asks her mother if she can lick the spoon.

“No, but you can have some sprinkles,” Martine says, prompting Paulette to shake out several tablespoons of sprinkles onto the table.

My daughter Bean is the same age as Paulette, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to let her do a complicated task like this all on her own. I’d be supervising, and she’d be resisting my supervision. There would be much stress and whining (mine and hers). Bean would probably grab batter, berries, and sprinkles each time I turned around. I certainly wouldn’t be chatting calmly with a visitor.

The whole scene wouldn’t be something I’d want to repeat a week later. Yet baking seems to be a weekly ritual in France. Practically every time I visit a French family on a weekend, they’re either making a cake or serving the one they made earlier that day.

At first I think this must be because I’m visiting. But I soon realize that it has nothing to do with me. There’s a national bake-off in Paris every weekend. Practically from the time kids can sit up, their moms begin leading them in weekly or biweekly baking projects. These kids don’t just spill some flour and mash a few bananas. They crack eggs, pour in cups of sugar, and mix with preternatural confidence. They actually make the whole cake themselves.

The first cake that most French kids learn to bake is
gâteau au yaourt
(yogurt cake), in which they use empty yogurt containers to measure out the other ingredients. It’s a light, not-too-sweet cake to which berries, chocolate chips, lemon, or a tablespoon of rum can be added. It’s pretty hard to screw up.

All this baking doesn’t just yield lots of cakes. It also teaches kids how to control themselves. With its orderly measuring and sequencing of ingredients, baki [edis ong is a perfect lesson in patience. So is the fact that French families don’t devour the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven, as I would. They typically bake in the morning or early afternoon, then wait and eat the cake or muffins as a
goûter
(pronounced goo-tay)—the French afternoon snack.

It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which moms don’t walk around with baggies of Goldfish and Cheerios in their purses to patch over the inevitable moments of angst. Jennifer, a mother and a reporter for the
New York Times
, complains that every activity her daughter attends, no matter how brief or at what time of day, now includes snacks.
⁴
“Apparently we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes,” she writes.

In France the
goûter
is the official, and only, snack time. It’s usually at about four thirty
P.M.
, when kids get out of school. It has the same fixed status as other mealtimes and is universally observed for kids.

The
goûter
helps explain why those French kids I saw at the restaurant were eating so well. They were actually hungry, because they hadn’t been snacking all day. (Adults might have a coffee, but rarely a snack. A friend of mine who was visiting France complained that he had a hard time finding any adult snack food.)

Martine, the mother in the suburbs, says she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals—which I see reenacted in many other middle-class French homes—are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification.

Martine says she often buys Paulette candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Paulette isn’t allowed to eat the candy until that day’s
goûter
, even if that means waiting many hours. Paulette is used to this. Martine sometimes has to remind her of the rule, but Paulette doesn’t protest.

Even the
goûter
isn’t a free-for-all. “The great thing is that there was cake to eat,” recalls Clotilde Dusoulier, a French food writer. “But the flip side of the coin was that my mom would say, ‘that’s enough.’ It was also teaching kids restraint.” Clotilde, who’s now in her early thirties, says that as a kid she baked with her mother “pretty much every weekend.”

It’s not just what and when French families eat that make their meals little capsules of patience training. It’s also how they eat, and with whom. From a very young age, French kids get used to eating meals in courses, with—at a minimum—a starter, a main course, and a dessert. They also get used to eating with their parents, which has to be better for learning patience. According to Unicef, 90 percent of French fifteen-year-olds eat the main meal of the day with their parents several times per week. In the United States and the United Kingdom, it’s about 67 percent.

These meals aren’t rushed affairs. In that study of women in Rennes, France, and in Ohio, the Frenchwomen spent more than twice as much time eating each day. They surely pass [y swom on this pace to their kids.

Fortunately it’s
goûter
time when the cupcakes come out of the oven at Martine’s. Paulette happily eats two of them. But Martine doesn’t even taste one. She seems to have tricked herself into thinking of cupcakes as child’s food in order not to eat them. (Sadly, I think she assumes I’m doing the same trick and doesn’t offer me one.)

This is yet another way that French parents teach their kids to wait. They model waiting themselves. Little girls who grow up in homes where the mother doesn’t eat the cupcake surely grow up to be women who don’t eat the cupcake either. (My own mother has many wonderful qualities, but she always eats the cupcake.)

It strikes me that Martine doesn’t expect her daughter to be perfectly patient. She assumes that Paulette will sometimes grab stuff and make mistakes. But Martine doesn’t overreact to these mistakes, the way that I tend to. She understands that all this baking and waiting is practice in building a skill.

In other words, Martine is even patient about teaching patience.

When Paulette tries to interrupt our conversation, Martine says, “Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.” It’s both very polite and very firm. I’m struck both by how sweetly Martine says it and by how certain she seems that Paulette will obey her.

Martine has been teaching her children patience since they were tiny. When Paulette was a baby, Martine usually waited five minutes before picking her up when she cried (and, of course, Paulette did her nights at two and a half months).

Martine also teaches her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. “The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,” she says of her son, Auguste.

A child who can play by himsel
f can draw upon this skill when his mother is on the phone. And it’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In another study, of college-educated mothers in the United States and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.
⁵

Parents who value this ability are probably more apt to leave a child alone when he’s playing well by himself. When French mothers say that it’s important to take cues from a child’s own rhythm, part of what they mean is that when the child is busy playing, they leave him alone.

This seems to be another example of French mothers and caregivers intuitively following the best science. Walter Mischel says the worst-case scenario for a kid from eighteen to twenty-four months of age is “the child is busy and the child is happy, and the mother comes along with a fork full of spinach . . .

“The mothers
who really foul it up are the ones who [theeigare coming in when the child is busy and doesn’t want or need them, and are not there when the child is eager to have them. So becoming alert to that is absolutely critical.”

Indeed, an enormous U.S. government study of the effects of child care
⁶
found that what’s especially crucial is the mother’s or caregiver’s “sensitivity”—how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world. “The sensitive mother is aware of the child’s needs, moods, interests, and capabilities,” a backgrounder explains. “She allows this awareness to guide her interactions with her child.” Conversely, having a depressed mother is very bad, because the depression stops the mother from tuning in to her child.

Mischel’s conviction about the importance of sensitivity doesn’t just come from research. He says that his own mother was alternately smothering and absent. Mischel still can’t ride a bike, because she was too afraid of head injuries to let him learn. But neither of his parents came to hear him give the valedictory address at his high school graduation.

Of course American parents
want their kids to be patient. We believe that “patience is a virtue.” We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turns, to set the table, and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. As with sleep, we tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.

French parents and caregivers can’t believe that we’re so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. For them, having kids who need instant gratification would make life unbearable. When I mention the topic of this book at a dinner party in Paris, my host—a French journalist—launches into a story about the year he lived in Southern California. He and his wife, a judge, had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they’d met each other’s kids, who ranged in age from about seven to fifteen.

From my hosts’ perspective, the weekend quickly became maddening. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted.

To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge. “What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said ‘no,’” the journalist said. “They did
n’importe quoi
,” his wife added. This was apparently contagious. “The worst part is, our kids started doing
n’importe quoi,
too,” she says.

After a while, I realize that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “
n’importe quoi
,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the
cadre
, or frame, that French parents talk about.
Cadre
means that kids have very firm limits—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce t [tlyabohose limits. But within those limits, the kids have a lot of freedom.

American parents impose limits, too, of course. But often they’re different from the French ones. In fact, French people often find these American limits shocking. Laurence, the nanny from Normandy, tells me she won’t work for American families anymore, and that several of her nanny friends won’t either. She says she quit her last job with Americans after just a few months, mostly over the issue of limits.

“It was difficult because it was
n’importe quoi;
the child does what he wants, when he wants,” Laurence says.

Laurence is tall with short hair and a gentle, no-nonsense manner. She’s reluctant to offend me. But she says that compared with the French families she’s worked for, in the American homes there was much more crying and whining. (This is the first time that I hear the onomatopoeic French verb
chouiner—
to whine.)