Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

t’s a cliché about Europeans, but you can see it in the morals of Bean’s French stories: Life is ambiguous and complicated. There aren’t bad guys and good guys. Each of us has a bit of both. Eliette is bossy, but she’s also lots of fun. Alice is the victim, but she also seems to ask for it, and she goes back for more.

When I bring Bean to get her first inoculations, I cradle her in my arms and apologize to her for the pain she’s about to experience. The French pediatrician scolds me.

“You don’t say ‘I’m sorry,’” he says. “Getting shots is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.” He seems to be channeling Rousseau, who said, “If by too much care you spare them every kind of discomfort, you are preparing great miseries for them.” (I’m not sure what Rousseau thought about suppositories.)

Thompson’s view reflects what seems to be the consensus in France: making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustration turns them into happier, more resilient people. And one of the main ways to gently induce frustration, on a daily basis, is to make children wait a bit. As with The Pause as a sleep strategy, French parents have homed in on this one thing. They treat waiting not just as one important skill among many but as a cornerstone of raising kids.

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.

An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.

rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that.

What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper that tracked pregnant women who planned to breast-feed. Researchers gave some of the women a two-page handout with instructions. One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, re

if they grow up to be geeks, they can mention “growing up in Paris” and be instantly cool.

Cadre means that kids have very firm limits—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce t [tlyabohose limits. But within those limits, the kids have a lot of freedom.

what’s especially crucial is the mother’s or caregiver’s “sensitivity”—