French Children Don't Throw Food (6 page)

What’s also consoling is that this is all to be expected. Parents of infants aren’t supposed to get any sleep. Almost all the American and British parents I know say that their kids began sleeping through the night at eight or nine months, or much later. ‘It was really early,’ a friend of Simon’s from Vermont says, consulting with his wife about when their son’s 3 am wake-ups stopped. ‘What was it, at one year old?’ Kristin, a British lawyer in Paris, tells me that her sixteen-month-old sleeps through the night, then adds: ‘Well, when I say “sleeps through the night”, she gets up twice. But each time, only for five minutes.’

I take great comfort in hearing about parents who have it
much
worse than we do. They’re easy to find. My cousin, who shares a bed with her ten-month-old, hasn’t gone back to her teaching job, in part because she’s up feeding the baby much of the night.

The worst story I hear comes from Alison, a friend of a friend in Washington, DC, whose son is seven months old. Alison – a marketing expert with an Ivy League degree – explains that for the first six months of her son’s life, she nursed him every two hours
around the clock
. At seven months old, he began sleeping four-hour stretches. Alison shrugs off her exhaustion, and the fact that her career is on pause. She feels that she has no choice but to cater to her baby’s punishing, peculiar sleep schedule.

The alternative to all this night waking is supposedly ‘sleep training’, in which parents leave their babies alone for ‘controlled crying’. I read up on this, too. It seems to be for babies who are at least six or seven months old. Alison tells me that she tried this one night, but gave up because it felt cruel. Online discussions about sleep training quickly dissolve into brawls, in which opponents claim the practice is at best selfish and at worst abusive. ‘Babies are designed to cry when they need something and mothers are designed to respond,’ a mother writes on mumsnet. Another, whose son was waking up every ninety minutes, feels she must justify having done controlled crying. ‘I know that many people will think me intolerably cruel, but I was losing my sanity,’ she writes.

Although sleep training sounds awful, Simon and I are theoretically in favour of it. But we’re under the impression
that
Bean is too young for something so militaristic. Like our Anglophone friends and family, we think Bean wakes up at night because she’s hungry, or because she needs something from us, or just because that’s what babies do. She’s very small. So we give in to her.

I talk to French parents about sleep too. They’re neighbours, work acquaintances and friends of friends. They all claim that their own kids began sleeping through the night much earlier. Samia says her daughter, who’s now two, started doing her nights at six weeks old; she wrote down the exact date. Stéphanie, a skinny tax inspector who lives on our courtyard, looks ashamed when I ask when her son, Nino, began doing his nights.

‘Very late, late late!’ Stéphanie says. ‘He started doing his nights in November, so it was … four months old! For me it was very late.’

Some French sleep stories sound too good to be true. Alexandra, who works in a French nursery and lives in a suburb of Paris, tells me that both her daughters began sleeping through the night almost from birth. ‘Already in the maternity ward, they woke up for their bottles around 6 am,’ she says.

Many of these French babies are bottle-fed, or they drink a combination of breast milk and formula. But that doesn’t seem to be a crucial difference. The French breastfed babies I meet do their nights early on too. Some French mums I meet tell me they stopped breastfeeding when they went back to work, at
about
three months. But by that time their babies were already doing their nights.

At first I think that I’m just meeting a few lucky French parents. But soon the evidence becomes overwhelming: having a baby who sleeps through the night early on seems to be the norm in France. Just as stories of terrible sleepers are easy to find in the Anglophone world, stories of spectacular sleepers are easy to find among the French. My neighbours suddenly seem less obnoxious. They weren’t baiting me; they actually believed that my two-month-old might already be doing her nights.

French parents don’t expect their babies to sleep well right after they’re born. But by the time these broken nights start to seem unbearable – usually after two or three months – they end. Parents talk about night wake-ups as a short-term problem, not a chronic one. Everyone I speak to takes for granted that babies can and probably will do their nights by about six months, and often much sooner. ‘Certain babies do their nights at six weeks, others need four months to find their rhythm,’ an article in
Maman
! magazine says.
Le sommeil, le rêve et l’enfant
(
Sleep, Dreams and the Child
), a top-selling sleep guide, says that between three and six months, ‘He’s going to sleep complete nights, of eight or nine hours at a minimum. The parents will finally rediscover the pleasure of long uninterrupted nights.’

There are exceptions, of course. That’s why France has baby sleep books and paediatric sleep specialists. Some babies who do their nights at two months start waking again a few months
later
. I do hear about French kids who take a year to start doing their nights. But the truth is, over many years in France, I don’t meet them. Marion, the mother of a little girl who becomes one of Bean’s close friends, says her baby boy did his nights at six months. That’s the longest among any of my Parisian friends and acquaintances. Most of them are like Paul, another architect, who says that his 3½-month-old son sleeps a full twelve hours, from 8 pm to 8 am.

What’s maddening is that while French parents can tell you exactly when their kids began sleeping through the night, they can’t explain how this came about. They don’t mention sleep training, ‘Ferberizing’ – a sleep technique promoted by Dr Richard Ferber – or any other branded method. And they claim that they never let their babies cry for long periods. In fact, most parents look a little queasy when I mention this.

Speaking to older parents isn’t much help either. A French publicist in her fifties – who goes to work in pencil skirts and stilettos – is shocked to learn that I have any baby sleep issues. ‘Can’t you give her something to sleep? You know, some medicine or something like that?’ she asks. At the very least, she says, I should leave the baby with someone and recover at a spa for a week or two.

None of the younger French parents I meet either drug their kids to sleep or hide in a sauna. Most insist that their babies learned to sleep long stretches all by themselves. Stéphanie, the tax inspector, claims she didn’t have much to do with it. ‘I think it’s the child, he’s the one who decides,’ she said.

I hear this same idea from Fanny, thirty-three, the publisher
of
a group of financial magazines. Fanny says that at around three months old, her son Antoine spontaneously dropped his 3 am feed and slept through the night.

‘He decided to sleep,’ Fanny explains. ‘I never forced anything. You give him food when he needs food. He just regulated it all by himself.’

Fanny’s husband Vincent, who’s listening to our conversation, points out that three months is exactly when Fanny went back to work. Like other French parents I speak to, he says this timing isn’t a coincidence. He believes that Antoine understood that his mother needed to wake up early to go to the office. Vincent compares this understanding to the way ants communicate through chemical waves that pass between their antennae.

‘We believe a lot in
le feeling
,’ Vincent says, using the English word. ‘We guess that children understand things.’

French parents do offer a few sleep tips. They almost all say that in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light, during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night. And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully ‘observed’ their babies, and then followed the babies’ own ‘rhythms’. French parents talk so much about rhythm, you’d think they were starting rock bands, not raising kids.

‘From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep,’ explains Alexandra, the mother whose babies slept through the night practically from birth.

I observe Bean too, often at 3 am. So why is there no rhythm in our house? If sleeping through the night ‘just
happens
’, why hasn’t it just happened to us?

When I pour out my frustration over coffee one day to Gabrielle, one of my new French acquaintances, she recommends that I look at a book called
L’enfant et son sommeil
(The Child and His Sleep). She says the author, Hélène de Leersnyder, is a well-known paediatrician in Paris who specializes in sleep. The book is baffling. I’m used to the straightforward self-help style of English-language baby books. De Leersnyder’s book opens with a quotation from Marcel Proust, then launches into an ode to slumber.

‘Sleep reveals the child and the life of the family,’ De Leersnyder writes. ‘To go to bed and fall asleep, to separate himself from his parents for a few hours, the child must trust his body to keep him alive, even when he’s not in control of it. And he must be serene enough to approach the strangeness of the “
pensées de la nuit
” – thoughts that come in the night.’

Sleep, Dreams and the Child
also says that a baby can only sleep well once he accepts his own separateness. ‘The discovery of peaceful, long and serene nights, and an acceptance of solitude, is that not a sign that the child has recovered his inner peace, that he has moved beyond sorrow?’

Even the scientific sections of these books sound existential. What we call ‘rapid-eye-movement sleep’ the French call ‘
sommeil paradoxal
’ – paradoxical sleep, so called because the body is still but the mind is extremely active. ‘To learn to sleep, to learn to live, are these not synonyms?’ De Leersnyder asks.

I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information. I’m not looking for a meta-theory on how to think about
Bean’s
sleep. I just want her to sleep. But how can I figure out why French babies sleep so well if their own parents can’t explain it, and their sleep books read like cryptic poetry? What’s a mother got to do for a good night’s rest?

Oddly enough, my epiphany about the French sleep rules happens while I’m visiting New York. I’ve come to the US to visit family and friends, and also to get a hands-on feel for one corner of Anglophone parenting. For part of the trip I stay in Tribeca, the neighbourhood in lower Manhattan where industrial buildings have been converted into smart loft apartments. I hang out at a local playground, chatting with the other mothers there.

I thought I knew my parenting literature. But these women make it clear that I’m an amateur. Not only have they read everything, they’ve also assembled their own parenting styles like eclectic designer outfits, following separate gurus for sleep, discipline and food. When I naively mention ‘attachment parenting’ to one Tribeca mother, she quickly corrects me.

‘I don’t like that term, because who’s not attached to their child?’ she snaps.

When talk turns to how their kids sleep, I expect these women to cite lots of theories but then to complain that their one-year-olds wake up twice per night. But they don’t. Instead, they say that lots of babies in Tribeca do their nights
à la française
at about two months old. One mother, a photographer, mentions that she and many others take their kids to a local paediatrician called Michel Cohen. She
pronounces
his first name
me-shell
, like the Beatles’ song.

‘Is he French?’ I venture.

‘Yeah,’ she says.

‘French from France?’ I ask.

‘French from France,’ she says.

I immediately make an appointment to meet him. When I walk into ‘Michel’s’ waiting room, there’s no doubt that I’m in Tribeca and not in Paris. There’s an Eames lounge chair, retro seventies wallpaper, and a lesbian mother in a fedora. A receptionist in a black tank top is calling out the names of the next patients: ‘Ella? Benjamin?’

When Cohen comes out, I immediately see why he’s such a hit with mothers. He has tousled brown hair, doe-like eyes and a deep tan. He wears his designer shirts untucked, with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Despite two decades in the US, he has hung on to a charming French accent and parlance (‘When I give my advices to parents …’). He’s done for the day, so he suggests that we sit outside at a local café. I readily agree.

Cohen clearly loves America, in part because America venerates its mavericks and entrepreneurs. In the land of managed care, he’s fashioned himself into a neighbourhood doctor (he greets a dozen passers-by by name as we sip our beers). His practice, Tribeca Paediatrics, has expanded to five locations. And he’s published a pithy parenting book called
The New Basics
with his picture on the cover.

Cohen is reluctant to credit France for the innovations he’s brought to lower Manhattan. He left France in the late 1980s, and remembers it as a country where newborn babies were left
to
cry it out in the hospital. Even now, he says, ‘You can’t go to a park without seeing a kid take a beating.’ (Perhaps this used to be true. But in the scores of hours I’ve clocked in Parisian parks recently, I witnessed a spanking only once.)

But some of Cohen’s ‘advices’ are exactly what today’s Parisian parents do. Like the French, he starts babies off on vegetables and fruit rather than bland cereals. He’s not obsessed with allergies. He talks about ‘rhythm’, and teaching kids to handle frustration. He values calm. And he gives real weight to the parent’s own quality of life, not just to the child’s welfare.

So how does Cohen get the babies of Tribeca to do their nights?

‘My first intervention is to say, when your baby is born, just don’t jump on your kid at night,’ Cohen says. ‘Give your baby a chance to self-soothe, don’t automatically respond, even from birth.’

Maybe it’s the beer (or Cohen’s doe eyes), but I get a little jolt when he says this. I realize that I’ve seen French mothers and nannies pausing exactly this little bit before tending to their babies during the day. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was deliberate, or a sleep strategy, or that it was at all significant. In fact, it had bothered me. I didn’t think that you were supposed to make babies wait. Could this explain why French babies do their nights so early on, supposedly with few tears?