French Children Don't Throw Food (10 page)

Of course we Anglophone parents want our children to be patient. We believe that ‘patience is a virtue’. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table, and to practise 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
. Parents are either lucky, and get a child who waits well, or they aren’t.

French parents and carers 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 made friends with 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 kids frequently interrupted the adults mid-sentence. And they recall that there were no fixed mealtimes; the kids went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted.

More than any one detail, it just seemed like the 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
’ – whatever – 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 Anglophone kids (I seem to trigger more stories about Americans) include this phrase ‘
n’importe quoi
’. It means ‘whatever’ or ‘anything they like’.” It suggests that the children in the story 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 framework, that French parents talk about. In the
cadre
, kids have very firm limits – that’s the framework. But they also have a lot of freedom within those limits.

Anglophone parents impose limits too, of course. But often they’re different from the French ones. In fact, French people often don’t see them as limits at all. Laurence, the nanny from Normandy, tells me she won’t work for American families any more, and that several of her nanny friends won’t either. She says she left 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 been a nanny in Paris for twenty years. She’s reluctant to offend me. But she says that compared to French families she’s worked for, in the American homes there was much more crying and whining (this is the first time I hear the onomatopoeic French verb
chouiner
– to whine).

The last American family she worked for had three kids, aged eight, five and eighteen months. For the five-year-old girl, whining ‘was her national sport. She whined all the time, with tears that could fall at a moment’s notice.’ Laurence believed that it was best to ignore the girl, so as not to reinforce the whining. But the girl’s mother – who was often home, in another room – usually rushed in and capitulated to whatever the girl was asking for.

Laurence says the eight-year-old son was worse. ‘He always wanted a little bit more, and a little bit more,’ she says. And when his escalating demands weren’t met, he became hysterical.

Laurence’s conclusion is that, in such a situation, ‘the child is less happy. He’s a little bit lost … in the families where there is more structure, not a rigid family but a bit more
cadre
, everything goes much more smoothly.’

Laurence’s breaking point came when the mother insisted that Laurence put the two older kids on a diet. Laurence refused, and said she would simply feed them balanced meals. Then she discovered that after she put the kids to bed and left, at about 8:30 pm, the mother would feed them cookies and cake.

‘They were stout,’ Laurence says of the three children.

‘Stout?’ I ask.

‘I say “stout” so I don’t say “fat”,’ she says.

I’d like to write off this story as a stereotype. Obviously not all American or other Anglophone kids behave this way. And French kids do plenty of
n’importe quoi
too. (Bean will later say sternly to her eight-month-old brother, in imitation of her own teachers, ‘
Tu ne peux pas faire n’importe quoi
’ – you can’t do whatever you fancy.)

But the truth is, in my own home, I’ve witnessed Anglophone kids doing quite a lot of
n’importe quoi
.
⁷
When their families come over, the grown-ups spend much of the time chasing after or otherwise tending to their kids. ‘Maybe in about five years we’ll be able to have a conversation,’ jokes
a
friend from California, who’s visiting Paris with her husband and two daughters, aged seven and four. We’ve been trying for an hour just to finish our cups of tea.

She and her family arrived at our house after spending the day touring Paris, during which the younger daughter threw a series of spectacular tantrums. When the dinner I’m preparing isn’t ready, both parents come into the kitchen and say that their girls probably can’t wait much longer. When we finally sit down, they let the younger girl crawl under the table while the rest of us (Bean included) eat dinner. The parents explain that the girl is tired, so she can’t control herself. Then they wax lyrical about her prodigious reading skills and her possible admission to a gifted kindergarten.

During the meal, I feel something stroking my foot.

‘Rachel is tickling me,’ I tell her parents, nervously. A moment later, I yelp. The gifted child has bitten me.

Setting limits for kids isn’t a French invention, of course. Plenty of Anglophone parents and experts also think limits are very important. But in the US and Britain, this runs up against the competing idea that children need to express themselves. I sometimes feel that the things Bean wants – apple juice instead of water, to be sprung from her buggy every twenty feet – are immutable and primordial. I don’t concede to everything. But repeatedly blocking her urges feels wrong, and possibly even damaging.

It’s also hard for me to conceive of Bean as someone who can sit through a four-course meal, or play quietly when I’m on
the
phone. I’m not even sure I want her to do those things. Will it crush her spirit? Am I stifling her self-expression, and her possibility of starting the next Facebook? With all these anxieties, I often capitulate.

I’m not the only one. At Bean’s fourth birthday party, one of her English-speaking friends walks in carrying a wrapped present for Bean, and another one for himself. His mother says he got upset at the shop because he wasn’t getting a present too. My friend Nancy tells me about a new parenting philosophy in which you never let your child hear the word no, so that he can’t say it back to you.

In France, there’s no such ambivalence about
non
. ‘You must teach your child frustration’ is a French parenting maxim. In my favourite series of French children’s books,
The Perfect Princess
, the heroine, Zoé, is pictured pulling her mother towards a crêpe stand. The text explains, ‘While walking past the
crêperie
, Zoé made a scene. She wanted a
crêpe
with blackberry jam. Her mother refused, because it was just after lunch.’

On the next page, Zoé is in a bakery, dressed as the Perfect Princess of the title. This time she’s covering her eyes so she won’t see the piles of fresh
brioche
. She’s being
sage
. ‘As [Zoé] knows, to avoid being tempted, she turns her head away,’ the text says.

It’s worth noting that in the first scene, where Zoé isn’t getting what she wants, she’s crying. But in the second one, where she’s distracting herself, she’s smiling. The message is that children will always have the impulse to give in to their
vices
. But they’re happier when they’re
sage
, and in command of themselves.

In the book
A Happy Child
, French psychologist Didier Pleux argues that the best way to make a child happy is to frustrate him. ‘That doesn’t mean that you prevent him from playing, or that you avoid hugging him,’ Pleux says. ‘One must of course respect his tastes, his rhythms and his individuality. It’s simply that the child must learn, from a very young age, that he’s not alone in the world, and that there’s a time for everything.’

I’m struck by how different the French expectations are when – on that same seaside holiday when I witnessed all the French kids happily eating in restaurants – I take Bean into a shop filled with perfectly aligned stacks of striped ‘mariner’ T-shirts in bright colours. Bean immediately begins pulling them down. She barely pauses when I scold her.

To me, Bean’s bad behaviour seems predictable for a toddler. So I’m surprised when the saleswoman says, without malice, ‘I’ve never seen a child do that before.’ I apologize and head for the door.

Walter Mischel says that capitulating to kids starts a dangerous cycle: ‘If kids have the experience that, when they’re told to wait, if they scream Mummy will come and the wait will be over, they will very quickly learn not to wait. Non-waiting and screaming and carrying on and whining are being rewarded.’

French parents delight in the fact that each child has his own temperament. But they take for granted that any
healthy
child is capable of not whining, not collapsing after he’s told no, and generally not nagging or grabbing things.

French parents are more inclined to view a child’s somewhat random demands as
caprices
– impulsive fancies or whims. They have no problem saying no to these. ‘I think [French women] understand earlier than American women that kids can have demands and those demands are unrealistic,’ a paediatrician who treats French and Anglophone children tells me.

A French psychologist writes
⁸
that when a child has a
caprice
– for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy – the mother should remain extremely calm, and gently explain that buying the toy isn’t in the day’s plan. Then she should try to ‘bypass’ the
caprice
by redirecting the child’s attention, for example by telling a story about her own life. (‘Stories about parents are always interesting to children,’ the psychologist says. After reading this, in every crisis I shout to Simon: ‘Tell a story about your life!’).

The psychologist says that, throughout, the mother should stay in close communication with the child, embracing him or looking him in the eye. But she must also make him understand that ‘he can’t have everything right away. It’s essential not to leave him thinking that he is all-powerful, and that he can do everything and have everything.’

French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them. On the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration. They treat coping with frustration as a core life
skill
. Their kids simply have to learn it. The parents would be remiss if they didn’t teach it.

Laurence, the nanny, says that if a child wants her to pick him up while she’s cooking, ‘It’s enough to explain to him, “I can’t pick you up right now,” and then tell him why.’

Laurence says her charges don’t always take this well. But she stays firm, and lets the child express his disappointment. ‘I don’t let him cry eight hours, but I let him cry,’ she explains. ‘I explain to him that I can’t do otherwise.’

This happens a lot when she’s watching several children at once. ‘If you are busy with one child and another child wants you, if you can pick him up obviously you do. But if not, I let him cry.’

The French expectation that even little kids should be able to wait comes in part from the darker days of French parenting, when children were expected to be quiet and obedient. But it also comes from the belief that even babies are rational people who can learn things. According to this view, when we rush to feed Bean whenever she whimpers, we’re treating her like an addict. Seen in this light, expecting kids to have patience is a way of respecting them.

But mostly, as with teaching kids to sleep, French experts view learning to cope with ‘no’ as a crucial step in a child’s evolution. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own. A French child psychiatrist writes that this
éducation
should begin when a baby is three to six months old. ‘His mother begins to make him wait a bit sometimes, thus
introducing
a temporal dimension into his spirit. It’s these little frustrations that his parents impose on him day after day, along with their love, that let him withstand, and allow him to renounce, between ages two and four, his all-powerfulness, in order to humanize him. This renunciation is not always verbalized but it’s an obligatory rite of passage.’
⁹

In the French view, I’m doing Bean no service by catering to her every whim. French experts and parents believe that hearing ‘no’ rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires. ‘As small children you have needs and desires that basically have no ending. This is a very basic thing. The parents are there – that’s why you have frustration – to stop that [process],’ says Caroline Thompson, a family psychologist who runs a bilingual practice in Paris.

Thompson, who has a French mother and an English father, points out that kids often get very angry at their parents for blocking them. She says English-speaking parents often interpret this anger as a sign that the parents are doing something wrong. But she warns that parents shouldn’t mistake angering a child for bad parenting.