French Children Don't Throw Food (32 page)

Saying ‘One, two, three’ isn’t rocket science. It certainly happens in Britain and America too. But the logic behind it is very French. ‘This gives him some time, and it’s respectful to the child,’ Daniel Marcelli says.
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He says the child should be allowed to play an active role in obeying, which requires giving him time to respond.

In
It Is Permissible to Obey
, Marcelli gives the example of a child who seizes a sharp knife. ‘His mother looks at him and says, her face “cold”, her tone firm and neutral, her eyebrows lightly furrowed: “Put that down!”’ In this example, the child looks at his mother but doesn’t move. Fifteen seconds later, his mother adds, in a firmer tone, ‘You put it down right away,’ and then ten seconds later, ‘Do you understand?’

In Marcelli’s telling, the little boy then puts the knife on the table. ‘The mother’s face relaxes, her voice becomes sweeter, and she says to him, “That’s good.” Then she explains to him that it’s dangerous and that you can cut yourself with a knife.’

Marcelli notes that although the child was obedient in the end, he was also an active participant. There was reciprocal respect. ‘The child has obeyed, his mother thanks him but not excessively, her child recognizes her authority … For this to happen, there must be words, time, patience, and reciprocal recognition. If his mother had rushed over to him and
snatched
the knife from his hands, he wouldn’t have understood much of anything.’

It’s hard to strike this balance between being the boss but also listening to a child and respecting him. One afternoon, as I’m getting Joey dressed to leave the crèche, he suddenly collapses in tears. I’m all charged up in my new ‘It’s me who decides’ mode. I have the fervour of a convert. I decide that this is like the incident with Adrien on the doctor’s scales: I’m going to force him to get dressed.

But Fatima, his favourite carer at the crèche, hears the ruckus and comes into the changing room, concerned. She takes the opposite tack from me. Joey may throw fits all the time at home, but at the crèche it’s quite unusual. Fatima leans into Joey, and starts stroking his forehead.

‘What is it?’ she keeps asking him gently. She views this tantrum not as some abstract, inevitable expression of the terrible twos, but as communication from a very small, rational being.

After a minute or two, Joey calms down enough to explain – through words and gestures – that he wants his hat from his locker. That’s what this whole scene has been about (I think he’d tried to grab it earlier). Fatima takes Joey down from the changing table, then watches as he goes to the locker, opens it and takes out the hat. After that, he’s
sage
and ready to go.

Fatima isn’t a pushover. She has a lot of authority with the kids. She didn’t think that just because she patiently listened to Joey, she was giving in to him. What she did was to calm him down, then give him a chance to express what he wanted.

Unfortunately, there are endless scenarios, and no one rule about what to do in every case. The French have a whole bunch of contradictory principles, and few hard-and-fast rules. Sometimes you listen carefully to your kid. And sometimes you just put him on the scales. It’s about setting limits, but also about observing your child and building complicity, and then adapting to what the situation requires.

For some parents, all this probably becomes automatic. But for now, I wonder if this balance will ever come naturally to me. It feels like the difference between trying to learn salsa dancing as a thirty-year-old, and growing up dancing salsa as a child with your dad. I’m still counting steps, and stepping on toes.

In some Anglophone homes I’ve visited, it’s not uncommon for a child to be sent to his room during practically every meal. Whereas in France, there are lots of small reminders about how to behave, but being
puni
is a big deal.

Often, parents send the punished child to his room, or to a corner. Sometimes, they spank him. I’ve only seen French kids spanked in public a few times, though friends of mine in Paris say they see it more frequently. At a staging of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
, the actress playing mummy bear asks the audience what should happen to the baby bear, who’s been acting up.

‘
La fessée!
’ – a spanking – the crowd of little kids shouts in unison. In a national poll,
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19 per cent of French parents said they spank their kids ‘from time to time’; 46 per cent said they
spank
‘rarely’ and 2 per cent said they spank ‘often’.’ Another 33 per cent said they never spank their kids.
³

In the past, ‘
la fessée
’ probably played a bigger role in French child-rearing and in enforcing adults’ authority. But the tide is turning. All the French parenting experts I read about oppose it.
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Instead of spanking, they recommend that parents become adept at saying no. Like Marcelli, they say that ‘no’ should be used sparingly. But once uttered, it must be definitive.

This idea isn’t new. In fact, it comes all the way from Rousseau. ‘Give willingly, refuse unwillingly,’ he writes in
Émile
. ‘But let your refusal be irrevocable. Let no entreaties move you; let your “no”, once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it. Thus you will make him patient, equable, calm and resigned, even when he does not get all he wants.’

In addition to the rapid-movement gene, Leo has also been born with the subversive gene.

‘I want water,’ he announces at dinner one night.

‘What’s the magic word?’ I ask sweetly.

‘Water!’ he says, smirking. (Strangely, Leo – who looks the most like Simon – speaks with a slight British accent. Joey and Bean both sound American).

Building a
cadre
for your kids is a lot of work. In the early years, it requires quite a lot of repetition and attention. But once it’s in place, it makes life much easier and calmer (or so it seems). In moments of desperation I start telling my kids, in
French
, ‘C’
est moi qui décide
’ – it’s me who decides. Just uttering this sentence is strangely fortifying. My back stiffens a bit when I say it.

The French way also requires a paradigm shift. I’m so used to believing that everything revolves around the kids. Being more ‘French’ means moving the centre of gravity away from them, and letting my own needs spread out a bit too.

Feeling like I have some control also makes having three little kids a lot more manageable. When Simon is away one spring weekend, I let the kids drag carpets and blankets out on to our balcony and create a kind of Moroccan lounge. I bring them hot chocolate, and they sit around sipping it.

When I tell Simon about this later, he immediately asks, ‘Wasn’t it stressful?’ It probably would have been a few weeks earlier. I’d have felt overpowered by them, or too worried to enjoy it. There would have been shouting, which – since our balcony overlooks the courtyard – our neighbours would have heard.

But now that I’m the decider, at least a little bit, having three kids on the balcony with hot chocolate actually feels manageable. I even sit down and have a cup of coffee with them.

One morning I’m taking Leo to crèche by himself (Simon and I have divided the morning duties). As we’re riding down in the lift, I feel a sense of dread. I decide to tell Leo firmly that there will be no shouting in the courtyard. I present this new rule as if it’s always existed, and explain it firmly, while looking into his eyes. I ask him whether he understands, and
then
pause to give him a chance to reply. After a thoughtful moment, he says yes.

When we open the glass door and walk out into the courtyard, it’s strangely silent. There’s no shouting or whining. There’s just a very speedy little boy, tugging me along.

14

Let Him Live His Life

ONE DAY, A
notice goes up at Bean’s school. It says that parents of students aged four to eleven can register their kids for a summer trip to the Hautes-Vosges, a rural region about five hours by car from Paris. The trip,
sans
parents, will last for eight days.

I can’t imagine sending Bean, who’s five, on an eight-day school holiday. She’s never spent more than a night alone at my mother’s house. My own first overnight class trip, to SeaWorld, was when I was in secondary school.

This trip is yet another reminder that while I can now use the subjunctive in French, and even get my kids to listen to me, I’ll never actually be French. Being French means looking at a notice like this and saying, as the mother of another five-year-old next to me does, ‘What a shame. We already have plans then.’ None of the French parents finds the idea of dispatching their four- and five-year-olds for a week of group showers and dormitory life to be at all alarming.

I soon discover that this school trip is just the beginning. I didn’t go to sleep-away camp until I was ten or eleven. But in
France
, there are hundreds of different sleep-away
colonies de vacances
– holiday camps – for kids as young as four. The younger kids typically go away for seven or eight days to the countryside, where they ride ponies, feed goats, learn songs and ‘discover nature’. For older kids, there are
colonies
that specialize in things like theatre, kayaking or astronomy.

It’s clear that giving kids a degree of independence, and stressing a kind of inner resilience and self-reliance, is a big part of French parenting. The French call this
autonomie
– autonomy. They generally aim to give children as much autonomy as they can handle. This includes physical autonomy, like the class trips. It also includes emotional separation, like letting them build their own self-esteem that doesn’t depend on praise from parents and other adults.

I admire a lot about French parenting. I’ve tried to absorb the French way of eating, of wielding authority, and of teaching my kids to entertain themselves. I’ve started speaking at length to babies, and letting my kids just ‘discover’ things for themselves, instead of pushing them to acquire skills. In moments of crisis and confusion, I often find myself asking: what would a French mother do?

But I have a harder time accepting some parts of the French emphasis on autonomy, like the school trips. Of course I don’t want my kids to be too dependent on me. But what’s the rush? Must the push for autonomy start so young? And aren’t the French overdoing it a bit? In some cases, the drive to make kids self-reliant seems to clash with my most basic instincts to protect my kids, and to make them feel good.

American parents tend to dole out independence quite differently. It’s only after I marry Simon, a European, that I realize I spent much of my childhood acquiring survival skills. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I can shoot a bow and arrow, right a capsized canoe, safely build a fire on someone’s stomach, and – while treading water – convert a pair of blue jeans into an inflated life-jacket.

As a European, Simon didn’t have this survivalist upbringing. He never learned how to pitch a tent or steer a kayak. He’d be hard-pressed to know which end of a sleeping bag to crawl into. In the wild he’d survive about fifteen minutes – and that’s only if he had a book.

The irony is, while I have all these
faux
pioneering skills, I learned them in tightly scheduled summer camps, after my parents had signed legal disclaimers in case I drowned. And that was before there were webcams in classrooms and vegan, nut-free birthday cakes.

Despite their scouting badges and killer backhands, middle-class American (and British) kids are famously quite protected. ‘The current trend in parenting is to shield children from emotional or physical discomfort,’ the psychologist Wendy Mogel writes in
The Blessing of a Skinned Knee
. Instead of giving kids freedom, the well-heeled parents that Mogel counsels ‘try to armour [their kids] with a thick layer of skills by giving them lots of lessons and pressuring them to compete and excel’.

It’s not simply that Anglophones don’t emphasize autonomy. It’s that we’re not sure it’s a good thing. We tend to
assume
that parents should be physically present as much as possible, to protect kids from harm and to smooth out emotional turbulence for them. Simon and I have ‘joked’ since Bean was born that we’ll just move with her to wherever she attends university. Then I see an article saying that some American colleges now hold ‘parting ceremonies’ for parents of incoming freshmen, to signal that the parents must leave.

French parents don’t seem to have this fantasy of control. They want to protect their kids, but they aren’t obsessed with far-flung eventualities. When they’re travelling they don’t, as I do, email their spouse once a day to remind him to bolt the front door and to make sure that all the toilet lids are closed (in case a child falls in).

In France, the social pressure goes in the opposite direction. If a parent hovers too much or seems to micromanage his child’s experiences, someone else is apt to say some version of ‘Just let him live his own life’. My friend Sharon, the literary agent with two kids, explains: ‘Here there’s an argument about pushing a child to the max. Everyone will say, “You have to let children live their lives.”’

The French emphasis on autonomy comes all the way from Françoise Dolto. ‘The most important thing is that a child will be, in full security, autonomous as early as possible,’ Dolto says in
The Major Stages of Childhood
. ‘The trap of the relationship between parents and children is not recognizing the true needs of the child, of which freedom is one … The child has the need to feel “loved in what he is becoming”, sure of himself in a space, more freely day by day left to his own exploration, to his
personal
experience, and in his relations with those of his own age.’

Dolto is talking, in part, about leaving a child alone, safely, to figure things out for himself. She also means respecting him as a separate being who can cope with challenges. In Dolto’s view, by the time a child is six, he should be able to handle everything in the house – and in society – that concerns him.
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