Bringing Up Bebe (12 page)

There are some good day-care centers, of course. But these can be extremely expensive, or limited to employees of certain companies. And bad centers are amply in evidence, with poor kids getting especially bad care. Other centers—usually the expensive ones—treat babyhood like a college-prep course. Perhaps to calm nervous parents, a Colorado-based company boasts that, in its centers, children under the age of one are taught “literacy.”

French mothers
are convinced that the crèche is good for their kids. In Paris, about a third of kids under the age of three go to the crèche, and half are in some kind of collective care. (There are still fewer crèches outside Paris.) French mothers do worry about pedophiles, but not at the crèche. They think kids are safer in settings with lots of trained adults looking after them, rather than being “alone with a stranger,” according to a report by a national group that advocates for parents. “If she’s going to be tête-à-tête with someone, I want it to be me,” the mother of an eighteen-month-old at Bean’s crèche tells me. The mother says if she hadn’t gotten a spot in the crèche, she would have quit her job.

French mothers do worry about the anguish they’ll feel when they drop their children off at a crèche for the first time. But they view this as their own separation issue. “In France parents are not afraid of sending their children to the crèche,” explains Marie Wierink, a sociologist with France’s Ministry of Labor. “
Au contraire
, they fear that if they cannot find a place in the crèche their child will be missing out on something.”

Kids don’t learn to read in a crèche. They don’t learn letters or other pr ks ont eliteracy skills. What they do is socialize with other kids. In America, some parents mention this to me as a benefit of day care. In France, all parents do. “I knew that it was very good, it was an opening to social life,” says my friend Esther, the lawyer, whose daughter entered a crèche at nine months old.

French parents take for granted that crèches are of universally high quality and that the members of their staffs are caring and highly skilled. In French parenting chat rooms, the most serious complaint I can find about a crèche is from a mother whose child was served ravioli along with moussaka, a similarly heavy dish. “I sent a letter to the crèche, and they responded to me, saying their regular chef was not there,” she explains. She adds, darkly: “Let’s see what happens the rest of the week.”

This certainty that the crèche is good for kids erases a lot of maternal guilt and doubt. My friend Hélène, an engineer, didn’t work during the first few years after her youngest daughter was born. But she was never remotely apologetic about sending the little girl to the crèche five days a week. This was in part so that Hélène could have time to herself, but also because she didn’t want her daughter to miss out on the communal experience.

The main question people in France ask about day care is how to get more kids into it. Thanks to France’s current
baby boom, you can’t run for public office in France—on the right or the left—without promising to build more crèches or expand existing ones. I read about a program to turn disused baggage areas in train stations into crèches for the children of commuters (much of the construction cost would go toward soundproofing).

Competition for the existing spots in a crèche is—as the French say—
énergique
. A committee of bureaucrats and crèche directors in each of Paris’s twenty arrondissements convenes to dole out their available spots. In the well-heeled 16th arrondissement there are four thousand applicants for five hundred spots. In our less rarefied area in eastern Paris the odds of getting a spot are one in three.

Scrambling for a spot in a crèche is one of the initiation rituals of new parenting. In Paris, women can officially begin petitioning the town hall when they’re six months pregnant. But magazines urge women to schedule a meeting with the director of their preferred crèche as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test.

Priority goes to single parents, multiple births, adoptees, households with three or more kids, or families with “particular difficulties.” How to fit into this last, ambiguous category is the topic of furious speculation in online forums. One mother advises writing to town hall officials about your urgent need to return to work and your epic but ultimately failed efforts to find any other form of child care. She suggests copying this letter to the regional governor and the president of France, then requesting a private audience with the district mayor. “You go there with the baby in your arms, looking desperate, and you retell the same story as in the letter,” she says. “I can assure you that this will work.”

Simon and I decide to work our only angle: being foreign. In a letter attached to our crèche
application, we extol Bean’s budding multili kddiourngualism (she doesn’t actually speak yet) and describe how her Anglo-Americanism will enrich the crèche. As promised, Dietlind talks us up to the director of the crèche
that her sons went to. I meet with this woman and try to project a mix of desperation and charm. I call the town hall once a month (for some reason, as with French couples, most of the crèche courting falls to me) to remind them of our “enormous interest and need for a spot.” Since I’m not French and can’t vote here, I decide not to bother the president.

Amazingly, these attempts to massage the process actually work. A congratulatory letter arrives from our town hall explaining that Bean has been assigned a spot in a crèche for mid-September, when she’ll be nine months old. I call Simon, triumphant: we foreigners have beaten the natives at their own game! We’re amazed and giddy from the victory. But we also have the feeling that we’ve won a prize that we don’t quite deserve and aren’t even sure we want.

I still have
my doubts when we take Bean to her first day of crèche
.
It’s at the end of a dead-end street, in a three-story concrete building with a little Astroturf courtyard out front. It looks like a public school in America but with everything in miniature. I recognize some of the kids’ furniture from the Ikea catalog. It’s not fancy, but it’s cheerful and clean.

The kids are divided by age into sections called small, medium, and large. Bean’s class is in a sunlit room with play kitchens, tiny furniture, and cubbyholes full of age-appropriate toys. Attached to the room is a glassed-in sleeping area where each child has his own crib, stocked with his pacifier and stuffed-animal companion, called a
doudou
.

Anne-Marie, who’ll be Bean’s main caregiver, greets us. (She’s the same lady who gave haircuts to Dietlind’s sons.) Anne-Marie is a grandmother in her sixties, with short blond hair and a rotating collection of printed T-shirts from places her charges have traveled to. (We’ll eventually bring her one attesting to her love of Brooklyn.) Employees have worked at the crèche for an average of thirteen years. Anne-Marie has been there much longer. She and most of the other caregivers are trained as
auxiliaires de puériculture
, which has no exact American equivalent.

A pediatrician and a psychologist each visit the crèche
once a week. The caregivers chart Bean’s daily naps and poops, and report to me about how she’s eaten. They feed the kids Bean’s age one at a time, with the child either on someone’s lap or in a bouncy seat. They put the kids down to sleep at roughly the same time each day and claim not to wake them up. For this initial adaptation period, Anne-Marie asks me to bring in a shirt that I’ve worn so that Bean can sleep with it. This feels a bit canine, but I do it.

I’m struck by the confidence that Anne-Marie and the other caregivers have. They’re quite certain about what children of each age need, and they’re equally confident in their abilities to provide this. They convey this without being smug or impatient. My one gripe is that Anne-Marie insists on calling me “mother of
Bean” rather than Pamela; she says it’s too difficult to learn the names of all the parents.

Given our doubts about day kts

As in Marbeau’s day, Bean is supposed to arrive with a clean diaper. This becomes an almost Talmudic point of discussion between Simon and me. What constitutes “arrival”? If Bean poops on her way in the door, or while we’re saying good-bye, who changes the offending diaper? Is it us, or the
auxiliaires
?

The first two weeks are an adaptation period, in which she stays for increasingly long periods at the crèche, with and without us. She cries a bit each time I leave, but Anne-Marie assures me that she quiets down soon after I go. Often one of the caregivers holds her up at the window facing the street so I can wave when I get outside.

If the crèche is damaging Bean, we can’t tell. Pretty soon she’s cheerful when we drop her off and happy when we pick her up. Once Bean has been at the crèche for a while, I begin to notice that the place is a microcosm of French parenting. That includes the bad stuff. Anne-Marie and the other caregivers are mystified that I’m still nursing Bean when she’s nine months old and especially when I nurse her on the premises. They’re not thrilled with my short-lived plan to drop off pumped breast milk before lunch each day, though they don’t try to stop me.

But all the big, positive French parenting ideas are in evidence, too. Since there’s so much agreement anyway on the best way to do things, French parents don’t have to worry that the caregivers aren’t following their personal parenting philosophy. For the most part, the caregivers reinforce the same schedule and habits as parents.

For example, the caregivers talk to even very young children all the time at the crèche
,
with what seems like perfect conviction that the children understand.
⁵
And there’s a lot of talk about the
cadre
. At a parents’ meeting, one of the teachers speaks almost poetically about it: “Everything is very
encadré
—built into a framework—the hour that they arrive and leave, for example. But inside this framework we try to introduce flexibility, fluidity and spontaneity, for the children and also for the [teaching] team.”

Bean spends a lot of the day just ambling around the room, playing with whatever she wants. I’m concerned about this. Where are the music circles and organized activities? I soon realize that all this freedom is by design. It’s the French
cadre
model yet again: kids get firm boundaries, but lots of freedom within those boundaries. And they’re supposed to learn to cope with boredom and to play by themselves. “When the child plays, he constructs himself,” Sylvie, another of Bean’s caregivers, tells me.

A mayor’s report on Parisian crèches calls for a spirit of “energetic discovery,” in which the children are “left to exercise their appetite for experimentation of their five senses, of using their muscles, of sensations, and of physical space.” As kids get older they do have some organized activities, but no one is obliged to participate.

“We propose, we don’t force,” another of Bean’s teachers explains. There’s soothing background music to launch the kids into their naps and a pile of books that they can read in bed. The kids gradually wake up to their
goûter
, the afternoon snack. The crèche isn’t the department of motor vehicles. It’s more like Canyon Ranch.

In the playground there are few rules, also by design. The idea is to give kids as much freedom as possible. “When they’re outside, we intervene very little,” says Mehrie, another one of Bean’s caregivers. “If we intervene all the time, they go a little nuts.”

The crèche also teaches kids patience. I watch as a two-year-old demands that Mehrie pick her up. But Mehrie is cleaning up the table where the children have just had lunch. “For the moment I’m not free. You wait two seconds,” Mehrie says gently to the little girl. Then she turns to me and explains: “We try to teach them to wait, it’s very important. They can’t have everything right away.”

The caregivers speak calmly and respectfully to the kids, using the language of rights: you have the right to do this; you don’t have the right to do that. They say this with that same utter conviction that I’ve heard in the voices of French parents. Everyone believes that for the
cadre
to seem immutable, it has to be consistent. “The prohibitions are always consistent, and we always give a reason for them,” Sylvie tells me.

I know the crèche
is strict about certain things because, after a while, Bean repeats phrases she’s learned. We know they’re “crèche” phrases because the teachers there are her only source of French. It’s like she’s been wearing a wire all day, and now we get to listen to the tape. Most of what Bean repeats is in the command form, like “
on va pas crier!
” (we’re not going to scream). My rhyming favorites, which I immediately begin using at home, are “
couche-toi!
” (go to sleep) and “
mouche-toi!
” (blow your nose), said when you’re holding a tissue up to a child’s face.

For a while Bean speaks French
only
in the command form or in these declarations of what’s permissible and what isn’t. When she plays “teacher” at home, she stands on a chair, wags her finger, and shouts instructions to imaginary children, or occasionally to our surprised lunch guests.

Soon, in addition to commands, Bean is coming home with songs. She often sings one that we know only as “
tomola tomola, vatovi
!” in which she sings more and more loudly with each line, while making a spinning motion with her arms. It’s only later that I learn this is one of the most popular French children’s songs (which actually goes “
ton moulin, ton moulin va trop vite
”), about a windmill that’s going too fast.

What really wins
us over about the crèche is the food, or, more specifically, the dining experience. Each Monday, the crèche posts its menu for the week on a giant white board near the entrance.