French Children Don't Throw Food (8 page)

To believe in the Pause, or in letting an older baby do controlled crying, you also have to believe that a baby is a person who’s capable of learning things (in this case, how to sleep) and coping with some frustration. Michel Cohen spends a lot of time converting parents to this French idea. To the common worry that a four-month-old is hungry at night, he writes: ‘She is hungry. But she does not need to eat. You’re hungry in the middle of the night too; it’s just that you learn not to eat because it’s good for your belly to take a rest. Well, it’s good for hers too.’

The French don’t believe that babies should withstand biblical-sized trials. But they also don’t think that a bit of frustration will crush kids. On the contrary, they believe it will make children more secure. According to
Sleep, Dreams and the Child
, ‘To always respond to his demands, and never tell him “no”, is dangerous for the construction of his personality. Because the child won’t have any barrier to push up against, to know what’s expected of him.’

For the French, teaching a small baby to sleep isn’t a self-serving strategy for lazy parents. It’s a first, crucial lesson for children in self-reliance and in how to enjoy one’s own company. A psychologist quoted in
Maman!
magazine says that babies who learn to play by themselves during the day – even in the first few months – are less worried when they’re put into their beds alone at night.

De Leersnyder writes that even babies need some privacy.
‘The
little baby learns in his cradle that he can be alone from time to time, without being hungry, without being thirsty, without sleeping, just being calmly awake. At a very young age, he needs time alone, and he needs to go to sleep and wake up without being immediately watched by his mother.’

De Leersnyder even devotes a portion of her book to what a mother should do while her baby sleeps. ‘She forgets about her baby, to think about herself. She now takes her own shower, gets dressed, puts on make-up, becomes beautiful for her own pleasure, that of her husband and of others. Evening comes, and she prepares herself for the night, for love.’

As an Anglophone parent, this film-noir scene – with its suggestion of kohl eyeliner and silk stockings – is hard to imagine in anything but the movies. Simon and I just assumed that, for quite a while, we’d rearrange our lives around Bean’s whims.

The French don’t think that’s good for anyone. They view learning to sleep as an aspect of learning to be part of the family, and adapting to what other members of the family need too. De Leersnyder tells me: ‘If he wakes up ten times at night, [the mother] can’t go to work the next day. So that makes the baby understand that – voilà – he can’t wake up ten times a night.’

‘The baby understands that?’ I ask.

‘Of course he understands that,’ she says.

‘How can he understand that?’

‘Because babies understand everything.’

* * *

French parents think the Pause is essential. But they don’t hold it up as a panacea. Instead, they have a bundle of beliefs and habits which, when applied patiently and lovingly, put babies in the mood to sleep well. The Pause works in part because parents believe that tiny babies aren’t helpless blobs. They can learn things. This learning, done gently and at a baby’s own pace, isn’t damaging. To the contrary, parents believe it gives the babies confidence and serenity, and makes them aware of other people. And it sets the tone for the respectful relationship between parents and children that I see later on.

If only I had known all this when Bean was born. We definitely miss the four-month window for painlessly teaching her to sleep through the night. At nine months old, she still wakes up every night at around 2 am. We brace ourselves to let her do controlled crying. On the first night, she cries for twelve minutes. (I clutch Simon and cry too.) Then she goes back to sleep. The next night she cries for five minutes.

On the third night, Simon and I both wake up to silence at 2 am. ‘I think she was waking up for us,’ Simon says. ‘She thought that we needed her to do it.’ Then we go back to sleep. Bean has been doing her nights ever since.

4

Wait!

I’M GETTING MORE
used to france. One day, I’m feeling so worldly I announce to Simon that we’ve joined the global elite.

‘We’re global, but we’re not elite,’ he replies.

The truth is, I miss America. I miss grocery shopping in tracksuit bottoms, smiling at strangers, and being able to banter. Mostly, I miss my parents. I can’t believe I’m raising a child while they’re 4,500 miles away.

Neither can my mother. My meeting and marrying a handsome foreigner was the thing she most dreaded when I was growing up. She discussed this fear so extensively that it’s probably what planted the idea. On one visit to Paris, she takes me and Simon out to dinner, and breaks down in tears at the table. ‘What do they have here that they don’t have in America?’ she demands to know. (Had she been eating
escargots
, I could have pointed at her plate. Unfortunately she had ordered the chicken.)

Although living in France is easier now, I haven’t really assimilated. On the contrary, having a baby – and speaking
better
French – makes me realize just how foreign I am. Soon after Bean begins sleeping through the night, we arrive for her first day at France’s state-run day nursery, the crèche. During the intake interview, we sail through questions about her dummy use and favourite sleeping positions. We’re ready with her inoculation records and emergency-contact numbers. But one question stumps us: what time does she have her milk?

On the matter of when to feed babies, Anglophone parents are once again in sparring camps. You could call it a food fight: one camp believes in feeding babies at fixed times, another says to feed them on demand.

We’ve drifted into a hybrid. Bean always has milk when she wakes up, and again before bedtime. In between, we just feed her whenever she seems hungry. Simon thinks there isn’t a problem that a bottle or a boob can’t solve. We’ll both do anything to keep her from yowling.

When I finish explaining our feeding system to the crèche lady, she looks at me like I’ve just said that we let our baby drive the family car. We don’t know when our child eats? This is a problem she will soon solve. Her look says that although we’re living in Paris, we’re raising a child who eats and sleeps – and yes, probably poos – like a foreigner.

The crèche lady’s look also reveals that on this, too, there are no sparring camps in France. Parents don’t anguish about how often their children should eat. From the age of about four months, most French babies eat at regular times. As with sleep techniques, French parents see this as common sense, not as
part
of a parenting philosophy or as the dictate of some parenting guru.

What’s even stranger is that these French babies all eat at roughly the same times. With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about 8 am, 12 pm, 4 pm and 8 pm.
Votre Enfant
(
Your Child
), a respected French parenting guide, has just one sample menu for four- or five-month-olds. It’s this same sequence of feeds.

In French these aren’t even called ‘feeds’, which after all sounds like you’re pitching hay at cows. They’re called ‘meals’. And their sequence resembles a schedule I’m quite familiar with: breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus an afternoon snack. In other words, by about four months old, French babies are already on the same eating schedule that they’ll be on for the rest of their lives (grown-ups usually drop the snack).

You’d think the existence of this national baby meal plan would be obvious. Instead, it feels like a state secret. If you merely ask French parents if their babies eat on a schedule, they almost always say no. As with sleep, they insist that they’re merely following their babies’ ‘rhythms’. When I point out that French babies all seem to eat at roughly the same times, parents shrug it off as a coincidence.

The deeper mystery to me is how all these French babies are capable of waiting four hours from one meal to the next. Bean gets anxious if she has to wait even a few minutes for a feed. We get anxious too. But I’m beginning to sense that there’s a lot of waiting going on all around me in France. First there was the Pause, in which French babies wait after they wake up.
Now
there’s the baby meal plan, in which they wait long stretches from one feed to the next. And of course there are all those toddlers waiting contentedly in restaurants until their food arrives.

The French seem collectively to have achieved the miracle of getting babies and toddlers not just to wait, but to do so happily. Could this ability to wait explain the difference between French and Anglophone kids?

To get my head around these questions, I email Walter Mischel, the world’s expert on how children delay gratification. He’s eighty years old, and holds a chair in psychology at Columbia University. I’ve read all about him, and read some of his many published papers on the topic. I explain that I’m in Paris researching French parenting, and ask if he might have time to talk on the phone.

Mischel replies a few hours later. To my surprise, he says that he’s in Paris too. Would I like to come by for a coffee? Two days later we’re at the kitchen table in his girlfriend’s apartment in the Latin Quarter, just down the hill from the Panthéon.

Mischel hardly looks seventy, and certainly not eighty. He has a shaved head and the coiled energy of a boxer, but with a sweet, almost childlike face. It’s not hard to envision him as the eight-year-old boy from Vienna who fled Austria with his family after the Nazis annexed the country.

The family eventually landed in Brooklyn, where adapting to America was a trial. When Walter entered school at age nine, he was assigned to kindergarten to learn English, and
remembers
‘trying to walk on my knees to not stick out from the five-year-olds when our class marched through the corridors’. Mischel’s parents – who were cultured and comfortably middle class in Vienna – opened a struggling five-and-dime. His mother, who’d been mildly depressed in Vienna, was energized by America. But his father never recovered from his fall in status.

This early experience gave Mischel a permanent outsider’s perspective, and helped frame the questions that he has spent his career answering. In his thirties, he upended the whole science of personality by arguing that people’s ‘traits’ aren’t fixed; they depend on context. Despite marrying an American and bringing up three daughters in California, Mischel began making annual pilgrimages to Paris. ‘I always felt myself to be European and felt Paris was the capital of Europe,’ he tells me. Mischel, who divorced in 1996, has lived with a Frenchwoman for the past decade. They divide their time between New York and Paris.

Mischel is most famous for devising the ‘marshmallow test’ in the late 1960s, when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a four- or five-year-old into a room where there’s a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while. If the child manages not to eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll only get that one.

It’s a very hard test. Of the 653 kids who took it back in the 1960s and ’70s, only one in three managed to resist eating the marshmallow for the full fifteen minutes that the
experimenter
was away. Some ate it as soon as they were alone. Most could only wait about thirty seconds.
¹
In the mid-1980s, Mischel revisited the kids from the original experiment, to see if there was a difference between how good and bad delayers were faring as teenagers. He and his colleagues found a remarkable correlation: the longer children had resisted eating the marshmallow as four-year-olds, the higher Mischel and his colleagues assessed them in all sorts of other categories. Among other skills, the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning. And according to a report that Mischel and his colleagues published in 1988, they ‘do not tend to go to pieces under stress’.

Could it be that making children delay gratification – as French parents do – actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Whereas Anglophone children, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, go to pieces under stress? Are French parents once again doing – by tradition and instinct – exactly what scientists recommend?

Bean, who expects immediate gratification, can go from calm to hysterical in seconds. Whenever I go to Britain or the US, I realize that miserable, screaming toddlers are just part of the scenery of daily life. One day in Muswell Hill, London, I see an angry toddler pitch himself on to the pavement in front of a chemist’s, where he lay face down and refused to budge. We pedestrians just parted round him.

I rarely see such scenes in Paris. French babies and toddlers, who are used to waiting longer, seem oddly calm about not getting what they want right away. When I visit French
families
and hang out with their kids, there’s a conspicuous lack of whining and complaining. Often – or at least much more often than in my house – everyone’s calm and absorbed in what they’re doing.

In France I regularly see what amounts to a minor miracle: adults in the company of small children at home having entire cups of coffee and full-length adult conversations. And instead of telling eager kids ‘quiet’ or ‘stop’, French parents often just say a sharp ‘
attend
’ – wait. Mischel hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on any French children (he’d probably have to do a version with
pain au chocolat
). But as a long-time observer of France, he says he’s struck by the difference between French and American kids.

In America, he says, ‘Certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.’ That’s sometimes true even with his own grandchildren. ‘I don’t like it when I call a daughter, if she tells me that she can’t talk now because a child is pulling on her, and she can’t say, “Hold on, I’m talking to papa.”’
²