Authors: Pamela Druckerman
6.
but must be trained i
n-house
OECD, “Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care,” 2006.
7.
the way kids develop and behave later in life
NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.
8.
One of the study’s researchers
Jay Belsky, “Effects of Child Care on Child Development: Give Parents Real
Choice.”
1.
do some breastfeeding
OECD, “France Country Highlights, Doing Better for Children,” 2009.
2.
a third are still nursing exclusively at four months.
WHO Global Data Bank on Infant and Young Child Feedi
ng, 2007–2008.
3.
weighing yourself daily.
“The more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you’ll control yourself,” Roy F. Baumeister and Jo
hn Tierney write in
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).
4.
they will eat those foods later.
Ibid.
5.
there’s no reason to feel bad about that
In a 2004 study, when French and American mothers ranked the importance of “always put[ting] the baby’s needs before one’s own,” American mothers gave it 2.89 out of 5; French mothers gave it 1.26 out of 5. 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.
6.
a fashion spread in a French mothers’ magazine
Violane Belle-Croix, “Géraldine Pailhas, des visages, des figures,”
Milk Magazine
, September 13, 2010.
7.
is also required to keep her looking and feeling seductive
“French women know that an inner life is a sexy thing. It needs to be nurtured, developed, pampered . . . ,” Debra Ollivier writes in
What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009).
1.
Just 71 percent of Americans and Britons said this
Given the baby boom and the shortage of spots in
crèche
s, the French state pays some mothers about five hundred euros a month to look after their own kids until the youngest is three. Mothers are also entitled to work part-time for the first three years.
2.
to make child care less pleasant for mothers
American mothers found child care twice as unpleas
ant as French mothers. Alan B. Krueger, Daniel Kahneman, Claude Fischler, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone, “Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S.,”
Social Indicators Research
93 (2009): 7–18.
3.
Annette Lareau observed among white and African American middle-class parents
Annette Lareau,
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
4.
she’s also supposed to attend the practices
Annette Lareau writes that most of the middle-class families she observed were frenetically busy, with parents working full-time, then shopping, cooking, overseeing baths and homework, and driving kids back and forth to activities. “Things are so hectic that the house sometimes seems to becom
e a holding pattern between activities,” she writes. From “Questions and Answers: Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life,” http://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/sociology.sas.upenn.edu/files/Lareau_Question&Answers.pdf.
5.
they might lose
Elisabeth Guédel Treussard, “Pourquoi les mères françaises sont supérieures,” French Morning, January 24, 2011.
6.
more time on child
care than parents did in 1965
Robert Pear, “Married and Single Parents Spending More Time with Children, Study Finds,”
New York Times
, October 17, 2006.
1.
child care is the top expense
The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States 2010
, published by Wider Opportunities for Women, 2010, www.wowonline.org/documents?BESTIndexforTheUnit
edStates2010.pdf.
2.
“passionately, madly, not at all”
Debra Ollivier,
What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and O
ther Matters of Heart and Mind
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009).
1.
marital satisfaction has fallen
Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Craig A. Foster, “Parenthood and Marital
Satisfaction: A Meta-Analytic Review,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
65, 3 (August 2003): 574–83.
2.
mothers find it more pleasant to do housework than to take care of their kids
In a well-known 2004
study, working mothers in Texas said child care was one of their most unpleasant daily activities. They preferred housework. Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,”
Science
, December 3, 2004.
3.
their unhappiness increases with each additional child
Jean M. Twenge et al., “Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction.”
4.
A paper on middle-class Canadians
Vera Dyck and Kerry Daly, “Rising to the Challenge: Fathers’ Role in the Negotiation of Couple Time,”
Leisure Studies
25, 2 (2006): 201–17.
5.
have a bigger gap than we do between what men and women earn
In the overall 2010 Global
Gender Gap Index, created by the World Economic Forum, the United States ranked nineteenth and France ranked forty-sixth.
6.
men doing household work and looking after children
According to Institut National d
e la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE).
7.
and 25 percen
t more time on child care
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, news release, June 22, 2010, “American Time Use Survey—2009 Results,” www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06222010.pdf.
8.
“it’s hard for me to cool back down
”
In a 2008 study, 49 percent of employed American men said they did as much or more child care as their partners. But just 31 percent of women saw it this way. Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann, and James T. Bond,
Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home.
9.
leaving Simon in Paris with the boys
Alan B. Krueger et al., “Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the U.S.” French women spent about 15 percent less time doing housework than the American women did.
10.
about twenty-one more vacation days each year
Ibid.
11.
A 2006 French study
Denise Bauer, Études et Résultats, “Le temps des parents après une na
issance,” Direction de la recherche, des études, de l’évaluation et des statistiques (DREES), April 2006, www.sante.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/er737.pdf.
1.
Just 3.1 percent of French five- and six-
year-olds are obese
Nathalie Guignon, Marc Collet, and Lucie Gonzalez, “La santé des enfants en grande section de maternelle en 2005–2006,” Drees études et resultats, September 2010.
2.
10.4 percent of kids between two and five are obese
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Prevalence of Obesity Among Children and Adolescents: United States, Trends 1963–1965 Through 2007–2008.”
3.
“health is seen as the main reason for eating”
Lemangeur-ocha.com, “France, Europe, the United States: What Eating Means to Us: Interview with Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson,” posted online, January 16, 2008.
1.
“and it’s respectful to the child,” Daniel Marcelli says
In an interview with
Enfant
magazine, “Comment réussir à se faire obéir?” October 2009, 78–82.
2.
In a national poll
“Les Français et la fessée” by the polling agency TNS Sofres/Logica for Dimanche Ouest France, November 11, 2009.
3.
said they never spank their kids
Fifty-five percent also said that they oppose spanking.
4.
All the French parenting experts I read about oppose it
Marcel Rufo, a well-known child psychiatrist based in Marseille, says: “There are two generations of parents . . . those of yesterday who were spanked and hit and who say, ‘We weren’t traumatized by it.’ And then there are the parents of today, who I think are much better, because they’re more about understanding the child than about prohibiting thing
s. The role of the parent is to give his view to the child, to explain things to him. The child will accept them.”
Le Figaro
Magazine
, November 20, 2009, www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2009/11/20/01016-20091120ARTFIG00670-deux-claques-pour-la-loi-antifessee-.php.
1.
everything in the house—and in society
that concerns him
When French and American mothers were asked to rank the importance of “Not let[ting] the baby become too dependent on his or her mother,” American mothers ranked the statement 0.93 out of a possible 5. French mothers ranked it 3.36. 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.
2.
“treating each child’s th
ought as a special contribution”
Raymonde Carroll writes in
Cultural Misunderstandings
that American parents “avoid as much as possible criticizing their children, making fun of their tastes, or telling them constantly ‘how to do things.’”
3.
is almost like getting a perfect score
Getting 16:20 is a “rare and outstanding achievement,” according to a report prepared by the University of Cambridge exam board for British Universities. Reported in “A Chorus of Disapproval,”
Economist
, September 30, 2010, www.economist.com/node/17155766.
4.
against an ideal, which practically no rac wione meets
This creates a problem for social scientists when they try to compare life in the United States and France. “Americans tend to be more emphatic when reporting their well-being,” say the authors of that study of women in Ohio and Rennes. Americans were more likely to choose extremes like “very satisfied” and “not at all satisfied,” whereas Frenchwomen avoided these. The researchers adjusted their findings to account for this.
5.
“because they’re afraid of not succeeding”
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman,
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
(New York: Twelve, 2009), http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=8433586&page=7.
1.
that I must bend to their wills
“For Françoise Dolto, a desire is not a need, it shouldn’t necessarily be satisfied, but we should listen to it and speak about it, which makes all the difference,” says Muriel Djéribi-Valentin, in “Francoise Dolto: An Analyst Who Listened to Children,”
l’Humanité
in English.