Bringing Up Bébé
As I write this, my son is, improbable as it may sound, simultaneously five months old and three months old. The former is his actual age – five months since he was lifted from my belly and into the world at exactly midnight at the beginning of September 2018. The latter is his adjusted age – the time that’s passed since his due date in late October.
Someday, only his actual age will matter. It’s the age he’ll use to enroll in school, to get a driver’s license, and to buy alcohol for the first time (or maybe he’ll use a fake ID with someone else’s actual age for that?!) But for now, apart from vaccinations, all the milestones of his life are calculated according to adjusted age.
Being dual-aged is one of the strange reminders of Finnegan’s prematurity, of the long months last autumn that he spent in casts, hooked up to oxygen, being fed through a tube. But those reminders, happily, are growing fewer and farther between. As the fog of his emergency birth has lifted and his leg and lung conditions have begun to resolve, my thinking has changed too. The intense anxiety of medical problems has yielded to the comparative luxury of standard new parent problems. My Google history used to teem with questions about blood transfusions, respiratory rates, and lung x-ray results. Now it’s more like “how do I know if my son is teething and what things can I do to encourage him to roll over and when can I start feeding him real food because I’m pretty sure I’m not making enough milk anymore?” To sum it up: still panicked, but more prosaic.
This pervasive sense of panic about your child’s development is, apparently, something Americans are famous for. This is a nation that believes in baby flashcards, in constant stimulation, and in hurtling past milestones as fast as humanly possible. In her memoir and parenting primer Bringing up Bébé, American ex-pat Pamela Druckerman boils down what it means to be a (bougie) American parent to a single scene. That scene opens with a Park Slope father guiding his son through various playground activities, narrating the entire experience aloud and making over-the-top sounds as if he himself were experiencing the slide, rings, and monkey bars. A few minutes later the boy’s mother shows up, food co-op bag in hand, announcing that she’s brought his “parsley snack.” The implication is clear – we’re so obsessed with the safety, development, and health of our children that we end up smothering their moments of play and unironically giving them herbs to eat.
In Bringing up Bébé, Druckerman offers a corrective in the form of French parenting – lessons on how to raise well-behaved, well-adjusted, and creative children without sacrificing your own sanity or sense of self. I picked up this book with the same attitude that I have about all French things. I adore them, but I’m self-aware enough to understand that I can never truly inhabit them. Just as all the Saint James striped tees, moto jackets, or Isabel Marant shoes in the world would fail to lend me the insouciant charm of a French woman, I doubted that any number of anecdotes about well-behaved children and relaxed parents could break me of my wound-up stateside ways. Because, loathe as I am to admit it, there’s never been a parent more American than me (in spite of the fact that I’m not even American). My husband and I have Finnegan on a rigorous schedule that involves intervals of baby massage, tummy time, stretching, and grasping exercises. His room has more electronics than a home office – a white noise machine, diffuser, humidifier, air purifier, and Wyze cam. We even rely on a robotic bassinet to nudge our child towards sleep every night, and then log that sleep in an app. There’s nothing laissez-faire about what’s happening in our home.
And yet, I was won over by this book (and not just because it advocates the hard line sleep training we embarked on with Finnegan about a month ago). Druckerman’s charming account of adapting her American child-rearing ethos to the reality of parenting à la francaise was at once fascinating, frank, and funny. In it, I learned about the ‘cadre,’ or framework for living, that all French parents create for their children. Basically, children have a firm set of limits, but lots of independence within those limits. It initially seemed counter-intuitive – at least to me – but this cadre explains the co-existence of strict control (you must try everything on your plate, you must say hello and goodbye to all adults, you must do as you’re told) with enormous autonomy (sleepaway camp from the age of five, hot chocolate for breakfast, infrequent punishments).
So what does life within the cadre look like? First and foremost, it involves a lot of waiting. French parents actively cultivate the capacity to be patient in their children, whereas American parents tend to view the ability to wait (or lack thereof) as an innate matter of temperament. Moreover, while American parents think denying their children attention is akin to neglect, the French feel differently. In France, teaching kids to wait and to handle disappointment is seen as equally important to showing them unconditional love. “You must teach your child frustration” is actually a French parenting maxim. According to Druckerman: “Making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustrations turns them into happier, more resilient people. And one of the main ways to gently induce frustration is to make children wait a bit. French parents treat waiting not just as one important skill among many but as a cornerstone of raising kids.”
Another major difference between French and American parents, Druckerman observes, is that the French prioritize letting kids be kids – experiencing the joy of unscheduled time, slowly discovering the world around them, and exploring their senses. Apparently, the impulse to impose structure and rush into formal learning that’s so often exhibited by American parents is largely absent in France. “In France, the point of enrolling children in Saturday morning music classes isn’t to activate some neural network,” Druckerman deadpans. “It’s to have fun.” But, interestingly, the French also believe that even young children are capable of good behavior and self-control. A key element of the French parenting philosophy is the conviction that kids are ultimately happier if they’re “sage” and in command of themselves. So while Gallic girls and boys are exempt from the Baby Mozart and alphabet drills of American parents, they are expected to act “mannered and civilized” and to adapt themselves to the rhythms of adult life.
Ultimately, I found a lot to love in this book* and its follow-up, Bébé Day by Day. But, unlike the French parents to whom all this stuff apparently comes naturally, I still had to resort to a very American behavior to keep track of the best bits – the notes app on my iPhone. In it, I recorded the tips I plan to use with Finnegan, things such as:
Serve a vegetable course first, when children are hungriest
You choose the foods but they choose the quantities
Aim for an attitude of cheerful nonchalance and calm positivity with food
Do “the pause:” making your children wait a bit before tending to them
Talk to your kids like they’re rational beings
View coping with frustration as a crucial life skill
Explain the reason behind the rule - it respects children’s intelligence and creates a coherent world for them
Make saying hello and goodbye as important as saying please and thank you
Give kids lots of free time to just be and play
Revel in what the French call “moments privileges:” little pockets of joy or calm when you simply enjoy being together
Don’t let baby-proofing be your dominant decorating motif
But first, I have to go record his next round of tummy time in our Baby Connect app. À bientot!
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*I did find the chapters about getting your pre-baby body back and abandoning hopes of marital equality a bit repellent. In a step back in time for self-respecting women everywhere, Druckerman writes: “Take the edge off inequality by treating men the way that many Frenchwomen do – as adorably hapless creatures who, in most cases, are biologically incapable of keeping track of the kids’ inoculation schedules. Of course they come home with the wrong kind of cereal and with strawberries that look as if they’ve been beaten with a mallet. They’re men. They just can’t help it.” As someone married to a man who has handled Finnegan’s last several vaccination appointments just fine without me, I beg to differ.