French Twist (13 page)

But it gets even better, and in a subsequent book,
Parenting That Works
(co-written with child psychologist Dr. Susan Mortweet) Christophersen asserts that kids who have developed these independent play skills tend to find enough enjoyment in their activities alone and thus have less of a need for parental involvement in their games or external rewards. The doctors contend that such skills help children to sit still, whether it be for a whopper of a
homework assignment, burying themselves in a book, or working on a new hobby.

This puts the whole image of an aloof French parent into a new perspective. When Daphne complains, ten minutes after getting home from school, “I need you to play with me, because I have no one else to play with!” I now employ a new tactic. Or I try, anyway. I promise to play for the
beginning only
, and we set the timer for fifteen minutes. When the timer goes off, she’s on her own. Lately we’ve been playing dolls, with her favorite two going on hair-raising escapades throughout the house. When my time is up (thanks, timer!), she usually takes over for both dolls and keeps the game going. She isn’t up to carrying on solo for two hours yet, but things are certainly progressing. In fact, it is not uncommon at all for her to initiate a game without me having to kick things off.

How do you say “Can I get a ‘woo-woo’ ” in French?

The French parents I observed seemed to have less time to, say, get down on the floor and build a Lego spaceship with their kids or jump into the bunk-bed fort for a tea party, because they were busy doing their own things. This made me sad at first glance, but after reading the work of Dr. Christophersen, I am heartened in my search for a middle ground. There are so many benefits for everyone to having a child who can placate himself. Still, sometimes I really want to join that bunk-bed party. So I do.

What I don’t want to do all the time is sit on the sidelines for tennis lessons, hip-hop dance class, cooking club, sewing circle, and on and on. And yet my children have
grown so accustomed to having me on hand that it’s been a hard pattern to break. When I learned what typically goes on in the extracurricular world of a French child, my determination was bolstered. In France, if a child takes up a sport outside school—which, by the way, is not nearly as popular there as here—parents don’t hang out for every (or, often,
any
) practice. In fact, they rarely go to the weekend game, and it’s only for the final match or championships that they will make an appearance. Very few of the parents are on hand rooting until their voices are hoarse and/or fighting with the referees, and yet the kids don’t feel neglected. In the United States, it is intensely important to rigorously, and loudly, support our children in all of their endeavors so that they feel encouraged to find “their thing.” Every few months, we suit up for a different new undertaking—which requires different new equipment, different arrangements, and brand-new registration fees. No wonder we don’t have the energy—or spare cash—to go on a date.

The whole setup in France is distinct because Wednesday, when there is no school, is the typical day for children to take classes, thus freeing up the weekends for real relaxing—and more sleep. Ducking out of school on Wednesdays is not an option for us, but, inspired by the French, I aimed to sedate the pace of our lives. Again, this was not without its complications.

At the beginning of the year, Daphne announced that she wanted to be enrolled in tap, sing (I assume voice lessons), “moderen” (four-year-old-speak for modern dance),
and pottery. Where did she get such notions? From any number of her pals who bop around to multiple extracurricular activities each week. As this is not sanctioned French behavior, I signed my girl up for exactly zero of these classes. Having barely lived through the nightly witching hour of Oona as a spent, overscheduled kindergartner—one who did ballet, drama, and soccer—I was happy at the thought of how this different, more relaxed lifestyle might affect Daphne, certainly the more “excitable” of my kids.

Bingo! The increasingly unhurried clip of our lives has made everyone happier. We are slowly, slowly, becoming a decently oiled machine here, and everything from homework to bedtime is rarely racked with the anguish I formerly thought was par for the course. Daphne will have opportunities to learn her ball changes and scales in due time.

By the way, in addition to taming little Daphnes, I’ve a hunch this French priority of traipsing rather than hurtling through life might account for their more domesticated male offspring. American parents of young, practically feral boys often gaze longingly at me with two comparatively tranquil girls. I’d estimate that about 40 percent of the boys I know have some extra oomph in them and that their woeful parents seem to be waiting it out until the constant urges to jump on other kids mellow out. But damn if that 40 percent doesn’t seem more like 10 percent in France.

As you can see, the French approach to classes and
activities for their kids is certainly less vigorous. Instead of spending all their free time searching for, say, their five-year-old’s talent and life passion, the French keep things more open, flexible. For those classes and sports that French children do pursue, their parents are often not part of the experience. I happened to be in France the afternoon that a friend’s eight-year-old started a new dance class. This little girl, who is half American, had her heart set on learning hip-hop, but there were no such classes offered to children nearby.
Pas de problème
—she opted for the adult class. Her mom walked her across the busy intersection to the building where the classes were held, because she was still too small to do that alone, but once there the kid was on her own. She came home and reported that at first the teacher was very skeptical but grew less leery when she caught on quickly, and he agreed to let her come back the following week. I keep trying to imagine Oona doing something similar, even with me holding her hand and watching the entire class, but it does not compute. I have heard more than one Frenchie argue that by letting children do things on their own, something that they can practice and tell the family about with pride, the kids end up much happier and more confident.

This sounds great in theory, yet I have managed to slip away for only one of Oona’s tennis classes. At this point, she prefers when we tell her, rather than she tell us, that she’s doing great. No doubt this is the result of being told throughout her entire life that she is amazing. I fear that she needs endless approbation to do anything vaguely
challenging. As you might recall from the carousel scene, French adults do not praise their children with the same frequency and volume as we Americans. Before I committed completely to that approach, however, I needed to do some due diligence to see what the experts make of these two divergent approaches.

The result? Point to the French.

At least if you listen to current theorists, who claim that many American kids, lauded at every turn, are suffering the effects of overpraise
and
hollow praise. All of the kudos appear to be putting a damper on the output of effort, as children either believe that they can’t do any better or they just don’t want to try and risk their perfect standing. But on top of this, kids are pretty smart, and, after about the age of seven, they become skilled at identifying (locally sourced, farm-raised turkey) baloney. If the praise is not sincere (I shudder at the memory of telling Oona that her seal drawing was “stunning”—truth is, I initially thought it was a giant tongue licking a UFO), they catch on quickly, so any form of praise thereafter has little meaning. Dang.

Somehow, maybe in part because of Dr. Nathaniel Branden and the popularity of his book
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
, we are obsessed with self-esteem in this country. My friend Sandra, who moved from the south of France to Los Angeles when she was thirteen, loves to tell the story of one of her first weeks in American high school. Her class was engaged in some sort of activity that required them to look in a mirror and tell themselves how important and special
they were—listing all of their best attributes. Still in the French mindset, Sandra was utterly confused. “I thought it was ridiculous and meaningless. Why should these nice things mean anything coming from me to me?” I guess Dr. Branden hadn’t really taken off in France in the same way. This same friend remembers the first time she was given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. She genuinely thought someone was playing a joke on her.

Where we might err on the side of overpraise, the French could stand to step it up a bit and let go of those humiliation tactics. Meet me halfway, France!

It has been exceedingly hard to deprogram myself from telling my kids how wonderful, bright, beautiful, and, yes, perfect they are fifty times a day. Now I am down to about ten, a good thing as Oona has begun to call me on it: “Are you just saying that because you are my mom and you have to?” This is a difficult question to answer, and I wish she had never thought to ask it. It is not easy to help a child improve on something if you have told them that they already produce genius-quality work.

It could be that when we fixate only on our children’s happiness and never let them feel wretched, or anything close to it, we are laying the groundwork for future, adult discomfort. Not only will they lack the tools to deal with pain and disappointment on their own, but they will pulse with guilt for not feeling great! All the time! They did, after all, have such amazing (read: martyred) parents.

It is as though contemporary American parents don’t know where to draw the line—or if there should be a line at
all. Eileen, a doctor friend of mine, recently told me a story that chilled me to my core and made me realize how slippery this slope can be. Eileen was in the consulting room with a middle-aged female patient. The patient’s phone rang and she excused herself, telling Eileen that it was an important call. Eileen then listened to her patient trying to console her nearly-thirty-year-old lawyer daughter, who, she could not help overhearing, had just been reprimanded at her new job at a law firm. The next time Eileen saw this patient, she learned that the lawyer daughter had since been fired from the firm—not because of her poor performance but because her mother had called the head partner in the firm, a man she had never met, to rebuke him for admonishing her daughter. Could the signals be clearer? Cut the cord!

That’s not easy, of course. I know of what I speak. Not long ago Oona was rejected from a clique of girls in her class, some of whom had previously been close buddies (if that can be said of kindergartners). One night at bath time it all came pouring out, the tears splashing into the sudsy water: “Annabel, Sarah, and Evelyn don’t ever want to play with me. They just want to play alone. And Annabel called me a nuisance!” Sarah’s mother, Megan, is a good friend of mine, and my first instinct was to call a meeting. I was halfway through the sentence “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll call Megan and we will work this out” when I realized that I wasn’t going to do my daughter any favors by having her friends’ mothers force them to play with her. Unfortunately, life does have its hard moments—
c’est la guerre
and all that unpleasant jazz.

Oona had grown accustomed to having me or my husband solve all of her problems, and she wanted, even expected, me to call Megan, but I held strong. It was hard for both of us, yet in the end we both came out a little sturdier. Oona pushed herself to seek out other friends and discovered that the world does not end when things do not work out as she’d planned. I was able to detach myself just a skosh from my beloved daughter’s social life (to be honest, it makes me kind of queasy to even write that sentence). It all felt very French.

As parents, it’s not easy to disentangle our own emotions from those of our children, especially when we have never tried. Parents these days seem to view their children as mini extensions of themselves, not as independent beings who need to learn how to navigate the world, for better and for worse. We already know what disappointment, pain, and fear feel like (I do not know anyone my own age who was reared with the same protective and indulgent tendencies we use with our kids) and want to avoid it at all costs for our lovies. The thing is, our kids
need
these experiences to get along in life; they’re healthy. Somehow, when we surrendered everything to those adorable kids, we lost sight of that fact. Whenever the subject of coddling came up in my conversations with French parents, they always pointed out how very important it is
for the children
that
parents let them be alone, solve their own problems, and experience—and get over—discomfort. Most certainly, it’s important for the parents and their quality of life as well.