French Children Don't Throw Food Read online

  The last American family she worked for had three kids, aged eight, five and eighteen months. For the five-year-old girl, whining ‘was her national sport. She whined all the time, with tears that could fall at a moment’s notice.’ Laurence believed that it was best to ignore the girl, so as not to reinforce the whining. But the girl’s mother – who was often home, in another room – usually rushed in and capitulated to whatever the girl was asking for.

  Laurence says the eight-year-old son was worse. ‘He always wanted a little bit more, and a little bit more,’ she says. And when his escalating demands weren’t met, he became hysterical.

  Laurence’s conclusion is that, in such a situation, ‘the child is less happy. He’s a little bit lost … in the families where there is more structure, not a rigid family but a bit more cadre, everything goes much more smoothly.’

  Laurence’s breaking point came when the mother insisted that Laurence put the two older kids on a diet. Laurence refused, and said she would simply feed them balanced meals. Then she discovered that after she put the kids to bed and left, at about 8:30 pm, the mother would feed them cookies and cake.

  ‘They were stout,’ Laurence says of the three children.

  ‘Stout?’ I ask.

  ‘I say “stout” so I don’t say “fat”,’ she says.

  I’d like to write off this story as a stereotype. Obviously not all American or other Anglophone kids behave this way. And French kids do plenty of n’importe quoi too. (Bean will later say sternly to her eight-month-old brother, in imitation of her own teachers, ‘Tu ne peux pas faire n’importe quoi’ – you can’t do whatever you fancy.)

  But the truth is, in my own home, I’ve witnessed Anglophone kids doing quite a lot of n’importe quoi.7 When their families come over, the grown-ups spend much of the time chasing after or otherwise tending to their kids. ‘Maybe in about five years we’ll be able to have a conversation,’ jokes a friend from California, who’s visiting Paris with her husband and two daughters, aged seven and four. We’ve been trying for an hour just to finish our cups of tea.

  She and her family arrived at our house after spending the day touring Paris, during which the younger daughter threw a series of spectacular tantrums. When the dinner I’m preparing isn’t ready, both parents come into the kitchen and say that their girls probably can’t wait much longer. When we finally sit down, they let the younger girl crawl under the table while the rest of us (Bean included) eat dinner. The parents explain that the girl is tired, so she can’t control herself. Then they wax lyrical about her prodigious reading skills and her possible admission to a gifted kindergarten.

  During the meal, I feel something stroking my foot.

  ‘Rachel is tickling me,’ I tell her parents, nervously. A moment later, I yelp. The gifted child has bitten me.

  Setting limits for kids isn’t a French invention, of course. Plenty of Anglophone parents and experts also think limits are very important. But in the US and Britain, this runs up against the competing idea that children need to express themselves. I sometimes feel that the things Bean wants – apple juice instead of water, to be sprung from her buggy every twenty feet – are immutable and primordial. I don’t concede to everything. But repeatedly blocking her urges feels wrong, and possibly even damaging.

  It’s also hard for me to conceive of Bean as someone who can sit through a four-course meal, or play quietly when I’m on the phone. I’m not even sure I want her to do those things. Will it crush her spirit? Am I stifling her self-expression, and her possibility of starting the next Facebook? With all these anxieties, I often capitulate.

  I’m not the only one. At Bean’s fourth birthday party, one of her English-speaking friends walks in carrying a wrapped present for Bean, and another one for himself. His mother says he got upset at the shop because he wasn’t getting a present too. My friend Nancy tells me about a new parenting philosophy in which you never let your child hear the word no, so that he can’t say it back to you.

  In France, there’s no such ambivalence about non. ‘You must teach your child frustration’ is a French parenting maxim. In my favourite series of French children’s books, The Perfect Princess, the heroine, Zoé, is pictured pulling her mother towards a crêpe stand. The text explains, ‘While walking past the crêperie, Zoé made a scene. She wanted a crêpe with blackberry jam. Her mother refused, because it was just after lunch.’

  On the next page, Zoé is in a bakery, dressed as the Perfect Princess of the title. This time she’s covering her eyes so she won’t see the piles of fresh brioche. She’s being sage. ‘As [Zoé] knows, to avoid being tempted, she turns her head away,’ the text says.

  It’s worth noting that in the first scene, where Zoé isn’t getting what she wants, she’s crying. But in the second one, where she’s distracting herself, she’s smiling. The message is that children will always have the impulse to give in to their vices. But they’re happier when they’re sage, and in command of themselves.

  In the book A Happy Child, French psychologist Didier Pleux argues that the best way to make a child happy is to frustrate him. ‘That doesn’t mean that you prevent him from playing, or that you avoid hugging him,’ Pleux says. ‘One must of course respect his tastes, his rhythms and his individuality. It’s simply that the child must learn, from a very young age, that he’s not alone in the world, and that there’s a time for everything.’

  I’m struck by how different the French expectations are when – on that same seaside holiday when I witnessed all the French kids happily eating in restaurants – I take Bean into a shop filled with perfectly aligned stacks of striped ‘mariner’ T-shirts in bright colours. Bean immediately begins pulling them down. She barely pauses when I scold her.

  To me, Bean’s bad behaviour seems predictable for a toddler. So I’m surprised when the saleswoman says, without malice, ‘I’ve never seen a child do that before.’ I apologize and head for the door.

  Walter Mischel says that capitulating to kids starts a dangerous cycle: ‘If kids have the experience that, when they’re told to wait, if they scream Mummy will come and the wait will be over, they will very quickly learn not to wait. Non-waiting and screaming and carrying on and whining are being rewarded.’

  French parents delight in the fact that each child has his own temperament. But they take for granted that any healthy child is capable of not whining, not collapsing after he’s told no, and generally not nagging or grabbing things.

  French parents are more inclined to view a child’s somewhat random demands as caprices – impulsive fancies or whims. They have no problem saying no to these. ‘I think [French women] understand earlier than American women that kids can have demands and those demands are unrealistic,’ a paediatrician who treats French and Anglophone children tells me.

  A French psychologist writes8 that when a child has a caprice – for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy – the mother should remain extremely calm, and gently explain that buying the toy isn’t in the day’s plan. Then she should try to ‘bypass’ the caprice by redirecting the child’s attention, for example by telling a story about her own life. (‘Stories about parents are always interesting to children,’ the psychologist says. After reading this, in every crisis I shout to Simon: ‘Tell a story about your life!’).

  The psychologist says that, throughout, the mother should stay in close communication with the child, embracing him or looking him in the eye. But she must also make him understand that ‘he can’t have everything right away. It’s essential not to leave him thinking that he is all-powerful, and that he can do everything and have everything.’

  French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them. On the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration. They treat coping with frustration as a core life skill. Their kids simply have to learn it. The parents would be remiss if they didn’t teach it.

  Laurence, the na
nny, says that if a child wants her to pick him up while she’s cooking, ‘It’s enough to explain to him, “I can’t pick you up right now,” and then tell him why.’

  Laurence says her charges don’t always take this well. But she stays firm, and lets the child express his disappointment. ‘I don’t let him cry eight hours, but I let him cry,’ she explains. ‘I explain to him that I can’t do otherwise.’

  This happens a lot when she’s watching several children at once. ‘If you are busy with one child and another child wants you, if you can pick him up obviously you do. But if not, I let him cry.’

  The French expectation that even little kids should be able to wait comes in part from the darker days of French parenting, when children were expected to be quiet and obedient. But it also comes from the belief that even babies are rational people who can learn things. According to this view, when we rush to feed Bean whenever she whimpers, we’re treating her like an addict. Seen in this light, expecting kids to have patience is a way of respecting them.

  But mostly, as with teaching kids to sleep, French experts view learning to cope with ‘no’ as a crucial step in a child’s evolution. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own. A French child psychiatrist writes that this éducation should begin when a baby is three to six months old. ‘His mother begins to make him wait a bit sometimes, thus introducing a temporal dimension into his spirit. It’s these little frustrations that his parents impose on him day after day, along with their love, that let him withstand, and allow him to renounce, between ages two and four, his all-powerfulness, in order to humanize him. This renunciation is not always verbalized but it’s an obligatory rite of passage.’9

  In the French view, I’m doing Bean no service by catering to her every whim. French experts and parents believe that hearing ‘no’ rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires. ‘As small children you have needs and desires that basically have no ending. This is a very basic thing. The parents are there – that’s why you have frustration – to stop that [process],’ says Caroline Thompson, a family psychologist who runs a bilingual practice in Paris.

  Thompson, who has a French mother and an English father, points out that kids often get very angry at their parents for blocking them. She says English-speaking parents often interpret this anger as a sign that the parents are doing something wrong. But she warns that parents shouldn’t mistake angering a child for bad parenting.

  On the contrary, ‘If the parent can’t stand the fact of being hated, then he won’t frustrate the child, and then the child will be in a situation where he will be the object of his own tyranny, where basically he has to deal with his own greed and his own need for things. If the parent isn’t there to stop him, then he’s the one who’s going to have to stop himself or not stop himself, and that’s much more anxiety-provoking.’

  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 quality among many, but as a cornerstone of raising kids.

  I’m still mystified by France’s national baby-feeding schedule. How do French babies all end up eating at the same times, if their mothers don’t make them do it? When I point this out, mothers continue to wax eloquent about rhythms and flexibility, and about how each child is different.

  But after a while, I realize that they also take a few principles for granted, even if they don’t always mention them. The first principle is that, after the first few months, a baby should eat at roughly the same time each day. The second is that babies should have a few big feeds rather than a lot of small ones. And the third is that the baby should fit into the rhythm of the family.

  So while it’s true that they don’t force their babies on to a schedule, they do nudge them towards it by observing these three principles. Votre Enfant says the ideal is to breastfeed on demand for the first few months, and then bring the baby ‘progressively and flexibly, to regular hours that are more compatible with daily life’.

  If parents follow these principles and the baby wakes up at seven or eight, and you think he should wait about four hours between meals, he is going to be routed on to the national meal plan. He’ll eat in the morning. He’ll eat again around noon. He’ll have an afternoon feed around four, and then eat again at about 8 pm, before bed. When he cries at 10:30 am, you’re going to assume that what’s best for him is to wait until lunchtime and have a big feed then. It might take a while for him to ease into this rhythm. Parents do this gradually, not abruptly. But eventually the baby gets used to it, the same way that grown-ups do. The parents get used to it too.

  Martine says that for the first few months she nursed Paulette on demand. Around the third month, to get her to wait three hours between feeds, she took her for walks or put her in a sling, where Paulette would usually quickly stop crying. Martine then did the same when she wanted to space out the feeding times to four hours. Martine says she never let either of her kids cry for very long. Gradually, she says, they just fell into the rhythm of eating four times a day. ‘I was really flexible, I’m just like that,’ she says.

  The critical assumption is that while the baby has his own rhythm, the family and the parents have rhythms too. The ideal, in France, is to find a balance between these two. The parenting book Your Child explains, ‘You and your baby each have your rights, and every decision is a compromise.’

  Bean’s regular paediatrician never mentioned this four-meal-a-day plan to me. But he’s away at Bean’s next appointment. His replacement is a young French woman who has a daughter about Bean’s age. When I ask her about the schedule, she says that – bien sûr – Bean should only be eating four times a day. Then the doctor grabs some Post-its and scribbles down the Schedule. It’s the same one again: morning, noon, 4 pm and 8 pm. When I later ask Bean’s regular doctor why he never mentioned this, he says he prefers not to suggest schedules to Anglophone parents, because they become too doctrinaire about them.

  It takes a few weeks, but we gradually nudge Bean on to this schedule. It turns out that she can take the wait. She just needed a bit of practice.

  Gâteau au Yaourt (Yogurt Cake)

  2 tubs plain whole-milk yogurt (the individual portion-sized tubs, about 175g/6 oz)

  2 eggs

  2 tubs sugar (or just one, depending on how sweet you like it)

  1 teaspoon vanilla essence

  just under 1 tub vegetable oil

  4 tubs plain flour

  1½ tsp baking powder

  Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celcius. Use vegetable oil to grease a 9-inch round pan (or a loaf tin).

  Gently combine the yogurt, eggs, sugar, vanilla and oil. In a separate bowl, mix the flour and baking powder. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients; mix gently until the ingredients are combined, but don’t over-mix. You can add 2 tubs frozen berries, a tub of chocolate chips, or any flavouring you like. Cook for 35 minutes, then 5 minutes more if it doesn’t pass the knife test. It should be almost crispy on the outside, but springy on the inside. Let it cool. The cake is delicious served with tea and a dollop of crème fraîche.

  5

  Tiny Little Humans

  WHEN BEAN IS a year and a half, we register her at the Centre for the Adaptation of the Young Child to the Aquatic Milieu, known as ‘babies in the water’ – bébés dans l’eau. It’s a weekly swimming class organized by our local town hall, and held every Saturday at one of the public pools in our neighbourhood. A month before the first class, the organizers summon parents to a meeting. The other parents seem a lot like us: university-educated, and willing to push buggies in the cold on Saturday mornings in order to teach their kids to swim. Each family is assigned a forty-fi
ve-minute swimming slot and reminded that – as in all public pools in Paris – men must wear tight swimming trunks, not shorts. (This is supposedly for hygiene. Swimming shorts could be worn elsewhere, and thus carry dirt into the pool.)

  The three of us arrive at the pool, get undressed and put on our swimming gear as discreetly as possible in the unisex changing room. Then we slip into the pool alongside the other kids and their parents. Bean throws around some plastic balls, goes down the slide and jumps off the rafts. At one point an instructor paddles up to us and introduces himself, then swims away. Before we know it, our time is up and the next shift of parents and kids is climbing into the pool.

  I figure that this must be an introductory class, and that the lessons will begin the following week. But at the next class it’s the same thing: lots of splashing around, no one teaching anyone how to kick, blow bubbles or otherwise begin to swim. In fact, there’s no organized instruction at all. Every so often the same instructor paddles by and makes sure we’re happy.

  This time, I corner him in the pool: when is he going to start teaching my daughter how to swim? He smiles indulgently. ‘Children don’t learn how to swim in “babies in the water”,’ he says, as if this is completely obvious. (I find out later that Parisian kids typically don’t learn to swim until they’re six. In the US, they often learn much younger.)

  So what are we all doing here? He says the point of these sessions is for children to discover the water, and to awaken to the sensations of being in it.

  Huh? My daughter has already ‘discovered’ water in the bath. I want her to swim! And I want her to swim as early as possible, preferably by age two. That’s what I thought I’d paid for, and why I dragged my family out of bed on a frigid Saturday morning.