French Children Don't Throw Food (16 page)

Kids fared better with a caregiver who was sensitive, whether it was a nanny, a grandparent or a nursery worker. ‘It would not be possible to go into a classroom and, with no additional information, pick out which children had been in center care,’ the researcher writes.

What we should be fretting about isn’t just whether bad nurseries have bad outcomes (of course they do), but how unpleasant it is for kids to spend their days in bad nurseries. We’re so concerned about cognitive development that we’re forgetting to ask whether children in nurseries are happy, and whether it’s a positive experience for them while it’s happening. That’s what French parents are talking about.

Even my mother gets used to the crèche. She starts calling it ‘the crèche’ instead of ‘daycare’, which probably helps. The crèche certainly has benefits for us. We do feel more a part of France, or at least a part of our neighbourhood. Thankfully, we put our ongoing ‘to stay or not to stay in Paris’ conversation on pause. We can’t really imagine moving somewhere where we’d struggle to find decent, affordable childcare. And we can see the next excuse for staying in France coming up soon: the
école maternelle
, free state nursery school, with places for just about everyone.

Mostly, we like the French crèche because Bean likes it. She
eats
blue cheese, shares her toys, and plays ‘
tomate ketchup
’ (the French version of ‘duck, duck, goose’). Also, she has mastered the command form of French. She is a bit too aggressive: she likes to kick me in the shins. But I suspect she’ll outgrow this. I don’t think I can blame the crèche for her faults.

Maky and Lila are still Bean’s dear friends. Occasionally we even take Bean back to the crèche to stare through the railings at the children who are now playing in the courtyard. And every once in a while, out of nowhere, Bean turns to me and says: ‘Sylvie cried.’ This was a place where she mattered.

7

Bébé au Lait

WARMING UP TO
the crèche turned out to be easy. Warming up to the other mothers there isn’t. I’m aware that Anglo-American-style instant bonding between women doesn’t happen in France. I’ve heard that female friendships here start out slowly, and can take years to ramp up. (Though once you’re finally ‘in’ with a French woman, you’re supposedly stuck with her for life. Whereas your English-speaking insta-friends can drop you at any time.)

I have managed to make friends with a few French women in the time I’ve now lived in Paris. But most either don’t have kids or they live across town. The ones in my courtyard are barely around, or their kids are older. I’d just assumed that I’d also meet other mums in my neighbourhood, with kids the same age as Bean. In my fantasy, we’d swap recipes, organize picnics, and complain about our husbands. That’s how it’s supposed to happen. My own mother is still close to women she met in the playground when I was small.

So I’m unprepared when the French mothers at the crèche – who all live in my neighbourhood and have age-appropriate
kids
– barely say
bonjour
to me when we plop our toddlers down next to each other in the morning. I eventually learn the names of most of the kids in Bean’s classes. But even after a year or so, I don’t think any of the mothers knows Bean’s name. They certainly don’t know mine.

This initial stage, if that’s what it is, doesn’t feel like progress. Mothers I see several days a week at the crèche seem not to recognize me when we pass each other in the supermarket. Perhaps, as the cross-cultural books claim, they’re giving me privacy; to speak would be to forge a relationship, and thus create obligations. Or perhaps they’re just stuck up.

It’s the same at the playground. The Canadian and Australian mothers I occasionally meet there treat the playground like I do: as a place to mingle, and perhaps make friends for life. Within minutes of spotting each other, we’ve revealed our hometowns, marital status and views on bilingual schooling. Soon we’re mirroring like nobody’s business: ‘You trek to Concorde to buy Grape-Nuts cereal? Me too!’

But usually it’s just me and the French mothers. And they don’t do me too’s. In fact, they barely exchange glances with me, even when our kids are sparring over sandbox toys. When I try icebreakers like ‘How old is he?’ they usually mutter a number, then eye me like I’m a stalker. They rarely ask any questions back. When they do, they turn out to be Italian.

Granted, I’m in the middle of Paris, surely one of the world’s least friendly places. The sneer was probably invented here. Even people from the rest of France tell me that they find Parisians cold and distant.

I should probably just ignore these women. But I can’t help it: they intrigue me. For starters, many of them look so much better than we Anglophones do. I drop Bean off at crèche in the morning wearing a ponytail and whatever was on the floor next to my bed. They arrive fully coiffed, perfumed and looking like they have early-rising personal stylists. I don’t even gawk any more when French mothers prance into the park dressed in high-heeled boots and skinny jeans, while pushing buggies with tiny newborns in them. (Mums do get a bit fatter as you get further from central Paris.)

These mothers aren’t just chic; they’re also strangely collected. They don’t shout the names of their children across the park, or rush out with a howling toddler strapped into a pram. They have good posture. They don’t radiate that famous combination of fatigue, worry and on-the-vergeness that’s bursting out of most Anglophone mums I know (myself included). Except for the actual child, you wouldn’t know that they’re mothers.

Part of me just wants to force-feed these women some spoonfuls of fatty pâté. But another part of me is dying to know their secrets. Having kids who sleep well, wait and don’t whine surely helps them stay so calm. But there’s got to be more to it. Are they secretly struggling with anything? Where’s their belly fat? If this is all a façade, what’s behind it? Are French mothers really perfect? And if so, are they happy?

After the baby is born, the first obvious difference between French and Anglophone mums is breastfeeding. For us, the
length
of time that we breastfeed – like the size of a Wall Street bonus – is a measure of performance. One former businesswoman in my Anglophone playgroup used to sidle up to me and ask,
faux
innocently, ‘Oh, are you still nursing?’

It’s
faux
because we all know that our breastfeeding ‘number’ is a concrete way to compete. A mother’s score is reduced if she mixes in formula, relies too heavily on a breast-milk pump, or actually breastfeeds too long (at which point she starts to seem like a crazed hippie).

In Britain and the US, many mothers treat infant formula as practically a form of child abuse. The fact that breastfeeding requires endurance, inconvenience and in some cases physical suffering adds to its status.

You get bonus points from Anglophone mums for nursing in France, where breastfeeding isn’t encouraged and many people find it disturbing. ‘The breastfeeding mother is regarded, if not as an interesting oddity, then as someone who is performing above and beyond the call of duty,’ explains the parenting guide published by Message, the organization for Anglophone mothers in Paris.

We expatriates exchange horror stories about French doctors who – when confronted with the occasional cracked nipple or blocked duct – blithely tell mothers to switch to formula. To combat this, Message has its own army of volunteer ‘breastfeeding supporters’. Before I delivered Bean, one of them warned me never to hand my baby over to the hospital staff while I slept, lest they defy my instructions and give her a bottle when she cried. This woman made ‘nipple confusion’ sound scarier than autism.

All this adversity makes Anglophone mothers in Paris feel like lactating superheroes, battling the evil doctors and strangers who would like to steal antibodies from our babies. In chat rooms, mothers list the strangest places they’ve nursed in Paris: inside Sacré Coeur basilica, on a tomb at the Père Lachaise cemetery, and at a cocktail party at the Four Seasons Hotel George V. One mother says she breastfed her baby ‘while standing and complaining at the easyJet desk in Charles de Gaulle Airport. I sort of laid him on the counter.’ I pity the poor clerk.

Given our zeal, we can’t fathom why French mothers barely breastfeed. About 63 per cent of French mothers do some breastfeeding,
¹
compared to 76 per cent of mothers in the UK (and 90 per cent of mothers in London).
²
Long-term breastfeeding is rare in France. A bit more than half of French mothers are still nursing when they leave the maternity hospital, but most abandon it soon after that.

It’s harder still for us Anglos to understand why even a certain type of middle-class French mother – the ones who steam and purée organic leeks for their seven-month-olds and send their older children to the same African drumming classes that we do – don’t breastfeed much either.

‘Don’t they have the same medical information we have?’ one incredulous American mother asks me. Among Anglophones, the reigning theories about why French women don’t nurse include: they can’t be bothered; they care more about their boobs than about their babies (though apparently it’s pregnancy, not breastfeeding, that stretches
out
breasts); and they just don’t know how important it is.

Locals tell me that breastfeeding still has a ‘peasant’ image, from the days when babies were farmed out to rural wet nurses. Others say that artificial-milk companies pay off hospitals, give away free samples in maternity wards, and advertise mercilessly. Olivier, who’s married to my journalist friend Christine, theorizes that breastfeeding demystifies the female breast, turning it into something utilitarian and animalistic. Just as French fathers steer clear of a woman’s business end during the birth, they avoid viewing the female breast when it’s used for unsexy purposes. ‘Men prefer not to see breastfeeding,’ Olivier says.

There are small pockets of breastfeeding enthusiasts in France. But mostly, there’s little peer pressure to nurse for a long time. My friend Alison, who’s from Brighton and teaches English in Paris, innocently told her doctor that she was still nursing her thirteen-month-old. Alison says the doctor immediately asked her, ‘What does your husband say? And your shrink?’
Enfant
magazine acknowledges that ‘Breastfeeding after three months is always viewed badly by one’s entourage.’

Alexandra, the mother of two girls who works in a crèche, tells me that she didn’t give a drop of breast milk to either of her daughters. She says this without a trace of apology or guilt. She says she was thrilled that her husband, who’s a fireman, wanted to help care for the girls, and that bottle-feeding them was a great way to do this. She points out that both of her daughters are now perfectly healthy.

Alexandra adds: ‘It was good practice for the father to give
a
bottle at night. And I could sleep, and drink wine in restaurants. It wasn’t so bad for
maman
.’

Pierre Bitoun, a French paediatrician and long-time proponent of breastfeeding in France, says many French women think they don’t have enough milk. Dr Bitoun says the real problem is that French maternity hospitals often don’t encourage mothers to feed their newborns every few hours. That’s critical at the beginning to stimulate mothers to produce enough milk. If they don’t nurse very frequently, a recourse to formula starts to seem inevitable. ‘By day three the kid has lost 200 grams, and they say, “Oh you don’t have enough milk, let’s give him some formula, the kid is starving.” That’s what happens. It’s crazy.’

Dr Bitoun speaks often at French hospitals, to explain the science and the benefits of breastfeeding. ‘The culture is stronger than the science,’ he says. ‘Three-quarters of the people I work with in hospitals don’t believe that breast milk is healthier than formula. They think there’s no difference. They think artificial milk is fine, or at least that’s what they say to mothers.’

In fact, even though French children consume enormous amounts of formula, they beat American kids on nearly all measures of health. France ranks about six points
above
the developed-country average in Unicef’s overall health-and-safety ranking, which includes infant mortality, immunization rates until age two, and deaths from accidents and injury up to age nineteen. The United States ranks about eighteen points
below
the average, the UK ranks about two points below.

French parents see no reason to believe that artificial milk is terrible, or to treat breastfeeding as a holy rite. They assume that breast milk is far more critical for a baby born to a poor mother in sub-Saharan Africa than it is for one born to middle-class Parisians. ‘We look around and see that all the babies who drink formula are fine,’ says Christine, the journalist, who has two young kids. ‘We all drank formula too.’

I’m not so calm about it. In fact, I’m so panicked by my conversation with the breastfeeding consultant that, when I’m in the maternity hospital after Bean is born, I insist that she stays in the room with me round the clock. I wake up each time she whimpers, and barely get any rest.

This suffering and self-sacrifice just seems like the natural order to me. But after a few days, I realize I’m probably the only mother in the maternity ward who’s subjecting herself to this torture. The others, even the ones who are breastfeeding, hand their babies over to the nursery down the hall at night. They feel entitled to a few hours’ sleep.

I’m finally shattered enough to give this a try too, even though it feels enormously indulgent. I’m immediately won over by the system. And Bean doesn’t seem any the worse for it. Contrary to the rumours, the nurses and
puéricultrices
who work in the nursery are more than happy to wheel her to my room whenever she needs a feed, then take her away again.

France is probably never going to be ground-zero for breastfeeding. But it does have the Protection Maternelle et Infantile, the same agency that oversees the crèche. This government health service has offices all over Paris that give
free
check-ups and injections to all children until age six, even those who are in France illegally. Middle-class parents rarely use the PMI, because the government insurance plan covers much of the cost of their visits to private paediatricians. (The French government is the main insurer, but most French doctors are in private practice.)