French Children Don't Throw Food Read online

  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

  Having kids who can wait does make family life a lot more pleasant. Children in France ‘seem much more disciplined and more raised the way I was’, Mischel says. ‘With French friends coming over with small children, you can still have a French dinner … the expectation with French kids is that they’ll behave themselves in an appropriate, quiet way and enjoy the dinner.’

  ‘Enjoy’ is an important word here. For the most part, French parents don’t expect their kids to be joylessly compliant. Parents just don’t see how their kids can enjoy themselves if they can’t control themselves.

  I often hear French parents telling their kids to ‘be sage’. Saying ‘be sage’ is a bit like saying, as we would in English, ‘be good’. But it implies more than that. When I tell Bean to ‘be good’ before we walk into someone’s house, it’s as if she’s a wild animal who must act tame for an hour, but who could go wild again at any moment. There’s some fear in my telling her to ‘be good’, as if that goes contrary to what a child really is.

  When I tell Bean to ‘be sage’, I’m also telling her to behave appropriately. But I’m asking her to use good judgement, and to be aware and respectful of other people. I’m implying that she has a certain wisdom about the situation, and that she’s in command of herself. Underlying all of this is the idea that I trust her.

  I hope I’m not making French kids sound grim. The ones I know have a lot of fun. On weekends, Bean and her friends run shouting and laughing through the park for hours. Breaktime at her nursery, and later at her school, are free-for-alls. There’s also plenty of controlled fun in Paris, like children’s film festivals, theatres and cooking classes, which require patience and attention. The French parents I meet want their kids to have rich experiences and to be exposed to art and music.

  But they believe that kids need patience in order to absorb these experiences fully. In the French view, having the self-control to be calmly present, rather than anxious, irritable and demanding, is what allows kids to have fun.

  French parents and carers don’t think that kids have infinite patience. They don’t expect toddlers to sit through symphonies or formal banquets. They usually talk about waiting in terms of minutes or seconds.

  But even these small delays seem to make a big difference. I’m now convinced that the secret of why French kids don’t whine (well, hardly ever) and don’t often collapse into tantrums is that they’ve developed the internal resources to cope with frustration. They don’t expect to get what they want instantly. When French parents talk about the ‘éducation’ of their children, they are talking, in large part, about teaching them how not to eat the marshmallow.

  So how exactly do the French turn ordinary children into expert delayers? And can we teach Bean how to wait too?

  Walter Mischel watched videotapes of hundreds of squirming four-year-olds taking the marshmallow test. He eventually figured out that the bad delayers focused on the marshmallow. The good delayers distracted themselves. ‘The kids who manage to wait very easily are the ones who learn during the wait to sing little songs to themselves, or pick their ears in an interesting way, or play with their toes and make a game of it,’ he tells me. The ones who didn’t know how to distract themselves, and just stared at the marshmallow, ended up eating it.3

  Mischel concludes that having the will power to wait isn’t about being a stoic. It’s about knowing techniques that make waiting less frustrating. ‘There are many many ways of doing that, of which the most direct and the simplest … is to self-distract,’ he says.

  Parents don’t have to specifically teach their kids ‘distraction strategies’. Mischel says kids learn these skills intuitively, if parents just allow them to practise. ‘I think what’s often underestimated in parenting is how extraordinary … the cognitive faculties of very young kids are, if you engage them,’ he says.

  This is exactly what I’ve been seeing French parents doing. They don’t explicitly teach their kids distraction techniques. Mostly, they just seem to give them lots of opportunities to practise waiting.

  On a grey Saturday afternoon, I take a commuter train to Fontenay-sous-Bois, a suburb just east of Paris. A friend of mine has arranged for me to visit a family that lives there. Martine, the mother, is a pretty lawyer in her mid-thirties. She lives with her husband, an A&E doctor, and their two kids in a modern low-rise building set amid a patch of trees.

  I’m immediately struck by how much Martine’s apartment resembles my own. Toys line the perimeter of the living room, which is attached to an open kitchen (known in French as a ‘cuisine américaine’). We have the same stainless-steel appliances.

  But the similarities end there. Despite having two young kids, Martine’s house has a calm that we could only wish for. When I arrive, her husband is working on his laptop in the living room, while one-year-old Auguste naps nearby. Paulette, their three-year-old, who has a pixie haircut, is sitting at the kitchen table plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. When each wrapper is full, she tops it with coloured sprinkles and fresh red gooseberries.

  Martine and I sit down to chat at the other end of the table. But I’m transfixed by little Paulette and her cupcakes. Paulette is completely absorbed in her task. She somehow resists the temptation to eat the batter. When she’s done she asks her mother if she can lick the spoon.

  ‘No, but you can have some sprinkles,’ Martine says, prompting Paulette to shake out several tablespoons of sprinkles on to the table.

  My daughter Bean is the same age as Paulette, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to let her do a complicated task like this all on her own. I’d be supervising, and she’d be resisting my supervision. There would be much stress and whining (mine and hers). Bean would probably grab batter, berries and sprinkles each time I turned away. I certainly wouldn’t be chatting calmly with a visitor.

  The whole scene definitely wouldn’t be something I’d want to repeat a week later. Yet baking seems to be a weekly ritual in France. Practically every time I visit a French family on a weekend, they’re either making a cake or serving the one they made earlier that day.

  At first I think it must be because I’m visiting. But I soon realize that it has nothing to do with me. There’s a national bake-off in Paris every weekend. Practically from the time kids can sit up, their mums begin leading them in weekly or bi-weekly baking projects. These kids don’t just spill some flour and mash a few bananas. They crack
eggs, pour in cups of sugar, and mix with preternatural confidence. They make the whole cake.

  The first cake that most French kids learn to bake is gâteau au yaourt – yogurt cake – in which the empty yogurt tubs are used to measure out the other ingredients. It’s a light, not-too-sweet cake to which they can add berries, chocolate chips, lemon or a tablespoon of rum. It’s pretty hard to screw up.

  All this baking doesn’t just make lots of cakes. It also teaches kids how to control themselves. With its orderly measuring and sequencing of ingredients, baking is a perfect lesson in patience. So is the fact that French families don’t devour the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven, as I would do. They typically bake in the morning or early afternoon, then wait and eat the cake or muffins as a goûter – the French afternoon snack.

  It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which mums don’t walk around with packets of Cheerios in their bags, to patch over the inevitable moments of angst. Jennifer, a mother and a reporter for the New York Times, complains that every activity her daughter attends, no matter how brief or at what time of day, now includes snacks.4 ‘Apparently we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes,’ she writes.

  In France the goûter is the official and only snack time. It’s usually at 4 or 4:30 pm, when kids get out of school. It has the same fixed status as other mealtimes, and is universally observed for kids.

  The goûter helps explain why those French kids I saw at the restaurant were eating so well. They were actually hungry, because they hadn’t been snacking all day. (Adults might have a coffee, but rarely a snack. A friend of mine who was visiting France complained that he had a hard time finding any adult snack food.)

  Martine, the mother in the suburbs, says she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals – which I see re-enacted in many other homes – are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Martine says she often buys Paulette sweets (bonbons are on display in most bakeries). But Paulette doesn’t eat the sweets until that day’s goûter, even if that means waiting many hours. Paulette is used to this. Martine sometimes has to remind her of the rule, but Paulette doesn’t protest.

  Even the goûter isn’t a free-for-all. ‘The great thing is that there was cake to eat,’ recalls Clotilde Dusoulier, a French food writer. ‘But the flip side of the coin was that my mum would say, “That’s enough.” It was also teaching kids restraint.’ Clotilde, who’s now in her early thirties, says that as a kid she baked with her mother ‘pretty much every weekend’.

  It’s not just what and when French families eat that makes their meals little capsules of patience training. It’s also how they eat, and with whom. From a very young age, French kids get used to eating meals in courses, with – at a minimum – a starter, a main course and a dessert. They also get used to eating with their parents, which has to be better for learning patience. According to Unicef, 90 per cent of French fifteen-year-olds eat the main meal of the day with their parents ‘several times per week’. In the US and UK, it’s about 67 per cent.

  At these meals, there’s no devouring everything at once. In that study of women in Rennes and Ohio, the French women spent more than twice as much time eating each day. They surely pass on this pace to their kids.

  Fortunately it’s goûter time when the cupcakes come out of the oven at Martine’s. Paulette happily eats two of them. But Martine doesn’t even taste one. She seems to have tricked herself into thinking of cupcakes as ‘children’s food’ in order not to eat them. (Sadly, I think she assumes I’m doing the same tricks, and doesn’t even offer me one.)

  This is yet another way that French parents teach their kids to wait. They model waiting themselves. Little girls who grow up in homes where the mother doesn’t eat the cupcake surely grow up to be women who don’t eat the cupcake either. (My own mother has many wonderful qualities, but she always eats the cupcake.)

  It strikes me that Martine doesn’t expect her daughter to be perfectly patient. She assumes that Paulette will sometimes grab stuff and make mistakes. But Martine doesn’t overreact to these mistakes, the way that I tend to. She understands that all this baking and waiting is practice in building a skill.

  In other words, Martine is even patient about teaching patience. When Paulette tries to interrupt our conversation, Martine says, ‘Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.’ It’s both very polite and very firm. I’m struck both by how sweetly Martine says it, and by how certain she seems that Paulette will obey her.

  Martine has been teaching her children patience since they were tiny. When Paulette was a baby, Martine usually waited five minutes before picking her up when she cried (and, of course, Paulette did her nights at two and a half months). Martine also teaches her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. ‘The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,’ she says of Auguste, her eighteen-month-old son.

  A child who can play by himself can draw upon this skill when his mother is on the phone. And it’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids, more than Anglophone mothers do. In a study of university-educated mothers in the US and France, the American mums said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French mums said it was very important.5

  Parents who value this ability are probably more apt to leave a child alone when he’s playing well by himself. When French mothers say that it’s important to take cues from a child’s own rhythm, what they mean is that when the child is playing, they leave him alone.

  This seems to be another example of French mothers and caregivers intuitively following the best science. Walter Mischel says the worst-case scenario for a kid from eighteen to twenty-four months is ‘the child is busy and the child is happy, and the mother comes along with a fork full of spinach’.

  ‘The mothers who really foul it up are the ones who are coming in when the child is busy and doesn’t want or need them, and are not there when the child is eager to have them. So becoming alert to that is absolutely critical,’ Mischel says.

  Indeed, an enormous US government study of the effects of childcare6 found that what’s especially crucial is the mother or caregiver’s ‘sensitivity’ – how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world. ‘The sensitive mother is aware of the child’s needs, moods, interests, and capabilities,’ a researcher explains. ‘She allows this awareness to guide her interactions with her child.’ Conversely, having a depressed mother is very bad, because the depression stops the mother from tuning in to her child.

  Mischel’s conviction about the importance of sensitivity doesn’t just come from research. He says that his own mother was alternately smothering and absent. Mischel still can’t ride a bike, because she was too afraid of head injuries to let him learn. But neither of his parents came to hear him give the valedictory address at his secondary school.

  Of course we Anglophone parents want our children to be patient. We believe that ‘patience is a virtue’. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table, and to practise the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. As with sleep, we tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. Parents are either lucky, and get a child who waits well, or they aren’t.

  French parents and carers can’t believe that we’re so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. For them, having kids who need instant gratification would make life unbearable. When I mention the topic of this book at a dinner party in Paris, my host – a French journalist – launches into a story about the year he lived in Southern California. He and his wife, a judge, had made friends with an American couple, and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they’d met each other’s kids, who ranged in age from about seven
to fifteen.

  From my hosts’ perspective, the weekend quickly became maddening. Years later, they still remember how the kids frequently interrupted the adults mid-sentence. And they recall that there were no fixed mealtimes; the kids went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted.

  More than any one detail, it just seemed like the kids were in charge. ‘What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said no,’ the journalist said. ‘They did n’importe quoi’ – whatever – his wife added. This was apparently contagious. ‘The worst part is, our kids started doing n’importe quoi too,’ she says.

  After a while, I realize that most French descriptions of Anglophone kids (I seem to trigger more stories about Americans) include this phrase ‘n’importe quoi’. It means ‘whatever’ or ‘anything they like’.” It suggests that the children in the story don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or framework, that French parents talk about. In the cadre, kids have very firm limits – that’s the framework. But they also have a lot of freedom within those limits.

  Anglophone parents impose limits too, of course. But often they’re different from the French ones. In fact, French people often don’t see them as limits at all. Laurence, the nanny from Normandy, tells me she won’t work for American families any more, and that several of her nanny friends won’t either. She says she left her last job with Americans after just a few months, mostly over the issue of limits.

  ‘It was difficult because it was n’importe quoi, the child does what he wants, when he wants,’ Laurence says.

  Laurence is tall with short hair and a gentle, no-nonsense manner. She’s been a nanny in Paris for twenty years. She’s reluctant to offend me. But she says that compared to French families she’s worked for, in the American homes there was much more crying and whining (this is the first time I hear the onomatopoeic French verb chouiner – to whine).