BOOKS AND ARTS FEBRUARY 22, 2012
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The other day, a friend and I were walking down a crowded sidewalk when we noticed a little boy of about three. We noticed him not because he was adorable (though he was), but because he was hitting his father with a giant stick. As they passed us—the boy hitting, the father ignoring—the boy’s flailing stick hit my companion. Only the boy’s mother, running after them, seemed to notice. “Sorry,” she flung out breathlessly, smiling.
We were, of course, in Brooklyn, the epicenter of permissive parenting. A look at the landscape is enough to demonstrate that our children are running our lives—the “progressive preschools” that brighten the storefronts every few blocks, the new paint-your-own-pottery shop and “origami studio,” the never-ending parade of burger joints. In the latest viral video, “Sh*t Park Slope Parents Say,” a pair of insufferable hipster parents and their friends trade barbs of condescension. The only time these people are speechless is when they’re trying to make plans for a date night out.
Pamela Druckerman has some ideas about what we’re doing wrong. An American who lives with her English husband in Paris, she has just published a book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, based on her observations of French parents. French mothers, I should say, since—de rigueur for the parenting genre—there are very few fathers here. Apparently, in addition to being able to wear stripes without looking fat and tie a silk scarf fifty ways, French women are effortlessly chic when it comes to motherhood. Their children sleep through the night after a few weeks, eat four-course meals at age two, and greet adults with “Bonjour, monsieur” or “Bonjour, madame.”
The advice, as usual, ranges from breathtakingly obvious to off-the-wall. One French parenting expert believes you should explain to your baby everything you do—not to help him learn language, but because he’s been eavesdropping in the womb and therefore can understand what you say. But we are also told, uncontroversially, to allow a baby to try to self-soothe rather than rushing in to rock her to sleep; to feed a variety of fruits and vegetables; to use a firm tone to remind children who’s in charge. Of course, you can do all these things—I did!—and still wind up with children who don’t sleep through the night until 18 months, refuse to put anything “mushy” into their mouths, and tug constantly at your arm while you’re on the phone. The true message of this book—and it’s one that the parents rushing to buy it in droves may find a little disappointing—is that the real advantage the French have over us isn’t what they say or do so much as the culture that surrounds them.
Nearly universally, we are told, French parents believe in being at once strict and permissible. There are clear limits on how children can behave, but within those confines the children have certain leeway. (One example: At home they are allowed to wear whatever they want, but when they go out they must wear appropriate clothing—no princess dresses in the playground.) The adult is the authority figure (“It’s me who decides” is apparently the parenting mantra); the child listens. They call this not discipline, but education. And they don’t hesitate to correct other people’s children: Druckerman watches with astonishment as a childless French friend instructs her baby not to pull books off the bookshelf—and the baby obeys. The foundation for these beliefs, she suggests, is a general sense that people—including babies—are rational creatures who will behave in certain preordained ways.
Druckerman discovers that the French attitude toward pregnancy, as well, is far less judgmental than in the United States. “The point in France isn’t that anything goes,” she writes. “It’s that women should be calm and sensible.” No strangers lecture her in public on what foods she should or should not eat, or give other unsolicited advice. (During my pregnancies, a barista at Starbucks once asked if I was sure I wanted a caffeinated drink, and an airport security screener told me my nail polish would endanger my baby.) Virtually from birth, French babies, too, are expected to fulfill certain obligations, to their parents and to society: to sleep through the night so that maman can go to work the next day (most French mothers go back to work after 3 months), to eat meals on a regular schedule (starting at around 6 months), to acknowledge those around them while developing the independence to entertain themselves.
Druckerman traces this mindset back to Rousseau, who “wasn’t sentimental about children”; rather, he “wanted to make good citizens out of lumps of clay.” Just as babies are expected to fit into the “rhythm of the family”—not the other way around, as we seem to think here—children must adapt to the rhythms of society. And parents are supported by a network of government-run day cares and preschools that reinforce these lessons. Druckerman starts feeding her children a “starter” of vegetables every night—carrots in vinaigrette, for instance—to mirror their meals at school. But even if I had offered my toddlers Dover sole and haricots verts at home, at day care they would still have been fed pasta and chicken nuggets.
One can be skeptical about the French ideal of what constitutes a “good citizen” and still acknowledge that in America, as far as parenting goes, we’ve taken our rugged individualism too far. Over the last century, as Ann Hulbert brilliantly demonstrated in her book Raising America, each generation of American parenting experts has espoused wildly contradictory theories about how to raise children. As a result, we’re left to wade through the morass on our own, picking and choosing what we like—a bit of Dr. Ferber here, a bit of Dr. Sears there. In France, by contrast, all babies come with an “instruction manual”: a little carnet de santé in which to record vaccinations and the like. I’m guessing that the idea of “spacing out” vaccines (widespread here for fear that too many shots at a time tax the child’s immune system) would be about as popular as forgoing the epidural (which 87 percent of French women opt for).
One French father tells Druckerman that a child who has too many choices “doesn’t feel reassured.” Has the tyranny of choice affected us as much as our kids? Perhaps the reason American parents are less successful at projecting the kind of calm authority that our French counterparts apparently wield so nonchalantly is that we’ve simply lost a basic confidence in ourselves. (Druckerman writes poignantly of an American woman who repeats reflexively, “I’m a bad mother.”) Drowning in experts, we absolve ourselves of responsibility for our own decisions. Meanwhile, our unhealthy habits are clearly taking a toll on our kids. How can a baby fit into “the rhythm of the family” if we have no daily rhythm—we grab a yogurt on the way out the door in the morning, eat lunch at our desks, get takeout for dinner?
There’s a deeper problem here. How many times, in America, have you heard a parent say he wants his child to be a “good citizen”? Instead, we’re focused on producing overachievers: children who read at age three, are musical and mathematical prodigies, or otherwise stand out from the pack. (It’s easy to mock the “Tiger Mom” for her fanaticism, but there’s a little bit of her in all of us.) We micromanage our kids’ lives, with karate on Tuesday and pottery on Thursday, but we deprive them of the sense that they are full human beings vested in their own character. “I don’t need the child’s acknowledgment because I don’t quite count him as a full person; he’s in a separate kids’ realm,” Druckerman comments on the son of American friends who can’t be prompted to properly greet her. “I might hear all about how gifted he is, but he never actually speaks to me.” Ironically, we cultivate our children’s individualism while abandoning our own. If it’s not important for us to have our own lives—in a recent New York Times article about parent-run preschools in (yes) Brooklyn, the author spoke admiringly of a group of mothers whose children, ages two and three, “had basically never left [their] sides”—how can our children have theirs?
It takes a village to raise a child. We’ve heard this less as a parenting mantra than as a political one—as citizens of the “global village,” we ought to be looking out for those less fortunate than us. Meanwhile, we’ve abandoned the village at home. When I saw that child whacking passersby with his stick, I didn’t reprimand him for not behaving like a good citizen. I just watched as he and his parents continued on their way.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic. Follow her on Twitter @ruth_franklin.
14 comments
WTF? Can we get a representative examination of how women (and parents generally) actually interact with and raise their children? Upper-middle class professional or stay-at-home white women are a declining minority of birthmothers. I will not let this perversion of reality continue to propagate inasmuch as I have any say. No disrespect for you, Ms. Franklin, and anecdata from personal experience are definitely more trustworthy, but the whole angst-anxiety of "organic soy versus raw milk?!" from the unrepresentative chattering class is really just too much. The media needs to actually do the research and describe the world as it is experienced. Because otherwise the actual birth mothers who are raising more and more of our children are going to tune out news that is clearly irrelevant to life as it is lived and we are going to have more serious problems than helicopter parents who have nervous breakdowns over whether otherwise inadvisable bottle-feeding can be excused if you fastidiously use BPA-free containers.
- chaitless
February 22, 2012 at 1:22am
Gee you took the words out of my mouth sorta. Sorta because I couldn't have said it as well as you did.
- basman
February 22, 2012 at 2:07am
Two thoughts: Amongst my fairly numerous French friends, both expats in this country, and in France, I saw as much variation in child rearing technique and results as I do amongst Americans. Yes, one French mother had a textbook case of the strict-permissive routine described here, and she had delightfully polite, talented and well behaved kids. But another French family had equally delightful, but somewhat off-the-wall-American-style kids, despite obvious and very French approaches to discipline. The rest - a lot of variation is about all I can say. Second, the thing that I dislike most about American parenting - if there is such a thing - is not the helicoptering, or food angst, or over-structured child-centric days (although I see no good in any of those), it's that American parents seem to expect from the outset that they will end up disliking their children however much they love them, and generally do dislike them (or at least say they do) by the time they are 12 or so. I wasn't too keen on the infant stage myself - roughly as interesting as growing corn at that stage - but as soon as our children started doing stuff that forshadowed the emergence of a human being, I have found them more interesting and more enjoyable to be around as every year passes - right up to the present, where they are adults ranging in age from 25 to 31. There are probably a million things I could have done better as a parent, but I'm convinced that finding my children interesting, and being genuinely interested in them, is probably the best thing I ever did for them.
- IowaBeauty
February 22, 2012 at 8:33am
When my daughter was born I prepared myself for dealing with all types of hipster judgmental parents, out of control children, and exposure to all of the "problems of modern American parenting". After 5 years I'm convinced that the anecdotal problems decried by people like Druckerman are a load of bull (or perhaps just limited to Park Slope, although I haven't observed these issues among friends in Brooklyn). The problems they see are the ultimate in White Whine, the result of surrounding yourself with financially secure narcissists and then congratulating yourself for being better than them. Sure, there are parents out there with poor discipline skills and some children who don't know their limits, but overall I've found the vast majority of children and parents my daughter and I interact with to be well behaved, attentive, and not nearly as neurotic as Druckerman makes American parents out to be. There are real problems with raising children in the US, but Druckerman misses them entirely. She minimizes French public services that pay for preschool, health insurance and college. She ignores the differences in vacation time and hours worked by Americans. Even with the advantages of being a college educated professional most Americans are expected to work more than 8 hours a day, and frequently over weekends. For parents earning a low hourly wage the problem is even more pronounced. If there is a problem with "American parenting" Druckerman misses it in the same way Charles Murray misses larger societal issues in “Coming Apart”. BTW - I completely agree with Iowa that finding your children interesting is one of the most important things you can do, unfortunately many American parents have little time to get to know their kids.
- Attrill
February 22, 2012 at 1:21pm
Before having a child, my wife and I had long discussions about our theories of child-raising and formed definite ideas how we were going to go about it. Unfortunately, as von Clausewitz observed, "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." The child brings it's own behavioral and emotional repertoire to the game. We've seen friends produce totally different children with the same parenting approach. Kids raised with virtually no discipline grow into polite, self-controlled adults. Kids raised with what we saw as almost insane levels of discipline and control turned out as totally undiciplined adults. As grandpa used to say, "You pays yer money and takes yer chances!"
- dabowers
February 22, 2012 at 3:36pm
Snore. More "American parents are nightmares" stories - they always sell, there is always a market for this tripe. I ignore them along with all the supposed "war between working Moms and stay at home Moms" tripe that passes for analysis. I know hundreds of families in several states, working Moms, stay at home Moms, etc. I've never met a single person or kid who ever fits in to any of these types of punative, lecturing, lazy story lines. You see what you want to see. Knock it off - write about something real.
- WandreyCer
February 22, 2012 at 5:15pm
Humans have three main drives. 1. We survive. We kill grizzly bears and white sharks with our bare hands and our teeth and our machine guns. 2. We reproduce, f*cking like crazed weasels and covering the earth with perhaps 100,000 times the population we need, many of whom have bad manners. 3. We pontificate and put the young folks to sleep, producing tedious publications, posts, and comments such as this.
- skahn
February 22, 2012 at 5:24pm
Humans have three main drives: sex, drugs and cantatas
- basman
February 22, 2012 at 6:55pm
I find it ironic Pamela Druckerman would invoke Jean-Jacques Rousseau who "wasn't sentimental about children" in her book as an authority on parenting. He abandoned all his children soon after their births and sent them to a local orphanage. And his common-law wife, an illiterate French chambermaid, never even said one word of protest to the author of "The Social Contract." But she remained his personal factotum. He skipped over the this aspect of his life in his "Confessions." Perhaps it was an orphanage which specialized in raising them to be fine, upstanding French citizens of the Republic. And they were probably better off there given his lack of interest in parenting. That is, if they survived through their childhood. There was a high rate of infant mortality at that time. But I must remind myself to try and tell the dancer from from the dance, as W.B. Yeats wrote in one of his poems. Paul Fussell, who wrote a brilliant and highly politically incorrect article for TNR entitled "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," has called these self-help or advice books just a another trend in the dumbing down of America. This book sounds like it puts a pretentious French twist on the subject. And of course it is marketed toward intelligent, upscale but insecure professional women, who are grasping at straws, while asking themselves during an anxiety attack: "Did this child before me actually issue forth from my womb?" Fear not, Dear Lady, in your moment of doubt. I have often thought becoming a parent is like playing Russian Roulette during procreation.
- rewiredhogdog
February 23, 2012 at 1:26am
I'm raising my kids to be great novelists. Toward that end, when I return from work each day I pour myself a tumblerful of Bourbon then pass the hours before their bedtime making wry, cutting remarks about all the ways in which they have let me down.
- AaronW
February 23, 2012 at 7:00am
I think that the availability of good universal health care might go a long way to easing the social environment in which parents bring up their kids.
- ironyroad
February 23, 2012 at 3:57pm
...02/23/2012 - 3:57pm EDT | ironyroad... As the great S. Robinson said, "I second that emotion."
- basman
February 23, 2012 at 5:09pm
Having lived three years in Paris while raising small children as a single parent, I think this is pretty much a bunch of nonsense, with one exception: What I think distinguishes France from America is simply that there is a firm culture and a fairly firm set of cultural expectations that people actually believe in. The astonishing range of human cultures to which children can be socialized ought to instruct us that we are as a species incredibly malleable. That's how we come to have culture at all. Whatever the society and parents who are its members firmly believe in (not pretend to believe in but actually believe in) as the future of children will be their future. Here there is a cacophony of conflicting messages and little firm belief in anything. That state of affairs in turn requires individual parents to be very, very deliberately consistent, because whatever they are doing will not find general reinforcement. I have gotten plenty of mileage with my kids, when they have confronted me about different standards in other families, simply by telling them that my children are in my care and are my responsibility, other families and their children are not my responsibility. They very much like hearing that, that I take responsibility for them. And I NEVER EVER EVER explain my rules no matter the entreaty. I just tell them that these are our rules and they accept that. The moment you start to explain, you lose your authority, and then you are finished. It matters far less exactly what it is they envision for their children than that they reinforce it consistently and model it consistently. The outcome may not then be what others will admire, but it can certainly be achieved. My observation of friends who preceded me, as I came relatively late to parenthood, is that they were often wildly inconsistent in what they conveyed to their children, one thing one day, something else the next or even the next hour, and do indeed suffer from a lack of confidence in anything. Other than "success," many have no firm, moral commitment to any disciplined behavior (by which I mean not good manners, but a consistent standard of behavior). Hence too many children don't develop any belief in the importance of any particular discipline, no matter what it is.
- roidubouloi
February 23, 2012 at 10:10pm
Most humans are fairly malleable, though we have a slight tilt toward evil. A thought experiment. If I had control of a small country's population [say Finland size] with unabridged dictatorial powers, I think I could with a fair degree of success turn the next generation of children into little Nazis/Commissars or turn the next generation of children into fairly decent, respectable humane people. In other words, what Hitler and Stalin did with their respective countries, or what the Scandinavians seem to have done with their countries. Given our tendency to evil, I would put odds of 80% on the evil option and perhaps 60% chance of being successful with the benign goal.
- skahn
February 24, 2012 at 7:26pm