French Children Don't Throw Food (36 page)

ABCs of Parenting in Paris
, fifth edition, France: MESSAGE Mother Support Group, 2006.

CIA,
The World Factbook
.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

Direction de la recherche, des études, de l’évaluation et des statistiques (DREES), April 2006,
Le temps des parents après une naissance
.

INSEE, Time-Use Surveys, 1986 and 1999.

Lemangeur-ocha.com
, ‘France, Europe, the United States: what eating means to us: Interview with Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson’, posted online 16 January 2008.

Mairie de Paris, ‘Mission d’information et d’évaluation sur l’engagement de la collectivité parisienne auprès des familles en matière d’accueil des jeunes enfants de moins de trois ans’, 15 June 2009.

Military.com
, ‘Military Child Care’,
www.military.com/benefits/resources/family-support/child-care
.

National Institutes of Health, ‘Child Care Linked To Assertive, Noncompliant, and Aggressive Behaviors; Vast Majority of Children Within Normal Range’, 16 July 2003.

OECD, ‘
Éducation et accueil des Jeunes Enfants
’, May 2003.

Pew Global Attitudes Project, ‘Men’s Lives Often Seen as Better: Gender Equality Universally Embraced, but Inequalities Acknowledged’, 1 July 2010.

Unicef, ‘Child poverty in perspective: an overview of childhood well-being in rich countries’, Innocenti Report Card 7, 2007, UNICEF Innocenti Research Center, Florence.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey Summary, 2009 results.

1
In a 2002 survey by the International Social Survey Program, 90 per cent of French adults agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘Watching children grow up is life’s greatest joy.’ In the US it was 85.5 per cent; in the UK it was 81.1 per cent.

2
Joseph Epstein, ‘The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin’,
The Weekly Standard
, 9 June 2008. Epstein may also have coined the word ‘kindergarchy’.

3
Judith Warner describes this in
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
, New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

4
Alan B. Krueger, Daniel Kahneman, Claude Fischler, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur A. Stone, ‘Time Use and Subjective Well-Being in France and the US’,
Social Indicators Research
93 (2009), 7–18.

5
According to 2009 figures from the OECD, France’s birth rate is 1.99 per woman. Belgium’s is 1.83; Italy’s is 1.41; Spain’s is 1.4 and Germany’s is 1.36.

1
Edmund White,
The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris
, London: Bloomsbury, 2001.

1
Save the Children,
The Complete Mothers’ Index
, 2010.

2
The World Health Report 2000 – Health systems: improving performance
, World Health Organization, 2000.

3
‘It’s good for women to suffer the pain of a natural birth, says medical chief’, by Denis Campbell,
Observer
, 12 July 2009.

4
Maman.fr, ‘
Les Tops des Maternités
’.

1
Jodi Mindell et al., ‘Behavioral treatment of bedtime problems and night wakings in young children: an American Academy of Sleep medicine review’,
Sleep
, 29 (2006), 1263–76.

2
Teresa Pinella and Leann L. Birch, ‘Help me make it through the night: behavioral entrainment of breast-fed infants’ sleep patterns’,
Pediatrics
, 1993: 91 (2), 436–43.

1
Mischel’s experiments were recounted by Jonas Lehrer in the
New Yorker
, 18 May 2009.

2
Walter Mischel cautions that even if young French children are good at waiting, that doesn’t mean they’ll become successful adults. Many other things affect them too. And while Americans typically don’t expect small children to wait well, they trust that the same children will somehow acquire this skill later in life. ‘I believe an undisciplined child isn’t doomed to become an undisciplined adult,’ Mischel says. ‘Just because a kid is throwing around food at age seven or eight, at a restaurant … doesn’t mean that the same child isn’t going to become a superb business person or scientist or teacher or whatever fifteen years later.’

3
Mischel found that kids can easily learn to distract themselves. In a subsequent marshmallow test, experimenters told the children that instead of thinking about the marshmallow, they should think about something happy like ‘swinging on a swing with Mummy pushing’ or pretend it was just a
picture
of a marshmallow. With this instruction, overall waiting times increased dramatically. Waiting times improved even though kids knew that they were trying to trick themselves. The moment the experimenter walked back into the room, children who had been busy self-distracting for fifteen minutes gobbled up the marshmallow.

4
Jennifer Steinhauer, ‘Snack Time Never Ends’,
New York Times
, 20 January 2010.

5
Marie-Anne Suizzo, ‘French and American mothers’ childrearing beliefs: stimulating, responding, and long-term goals’,
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
, 35:5 (September 2004), 606–26.

6
NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development
.

7
A 2006 study of white, middle-class Canadian couples found that when the kids were around – which was very often – it was impossible for parents to have quality time together. One participant said that while speaking to his wife, ‘we would be interrupted on a minute-to-minute basis’. The authors conclude that, ‘For any experience of being a couple together, they simply had to get away from the children.’ Vera Dyck and Kerry Daly, ‘Rising to the challenge: fathers’ role in the negotiation of couple time’,
Leisure Studies
, 25:2 (2006), 201–17.

8
The psychologist is Christine Brunet, quoted in
Journal des Femmes
, 11 February 2005.

9
Anne-Catherine Pernot-Masson, quoted in
Votre Enfant
.

1
Judith Woods, ‘I’m a pushy parent, and proud’,
Daily Telegraph
, 6 January 2010.

2
Elisabeth Badinter,
L’amour en plus: histoire de l’amour maternel
, Paris: Flammarion, 1980.

3
Ibid.

4
Ibid.

5
Marie-Anne Suizzo, ‘French and American mothers’ childrearing beliefs: stimulating, responding, and long-term goals’,
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
, 35:5 (September 2004), 606–26.

6
‘
Dolto: une vie pour l’enfance
’, Télérama hors série, 2008.

7
Recollection of the psychoanalyst Alain Vanier, reported in
Dolto: une vie pour l’enfance
,
Télérama hors série
, 2008.

8
The psychologist is Muriel Djéribi-Valentin, interviewed by Jacqueline Sellem in ‘
Françoise Dolto: quand l’enfant est un sujet à part entière
’, translated by Kieran O’Meara for
l’Humanité
in English.

9
Marie-Anne Suizzo found that 86 per cent of Parisian mothers she interviewed ‘specifically stated that they talk to their infants to communicate with them’. Marie-Anne Suizzo, ‘Mother–child relationships in France: balancing autonomy and affiliation in everyday interactions’,
Ethos
, 32:3 (2004), 292–323.

10
Paul Bloom, ‘Moral Life of Babies’,
New York Times Magazine
, 3 May 2010.

11
Alison Gopnik writes that these new studies ‘demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible’. Gopnik is a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of
The Philosophical Baby
.

1
A 2009 report by the Paris mayor’s office said that caregivers shouldn’t speak badly about a child’s parents, origins, or appearance, even if the child is an
infant
, and even if the remark is made to someone else. ‘The implicit message in this type of reflection is always perceived intuitively by the children. The younger they are, the more they understand what is contained behind the words,’ the report says.

2
OECD, ‘Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care’, 2006.

3
NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.

4
Jay Belsky, ‘Effects of child care on child development: give parents real choice’, March 2009.

1
OECD, ‘France Country Highlights, Doing Better for Children’, 2009.

2
WHO Global Data Bank on Infant and Young Child Feeding, 2007–2008. In America, 74 per cent of mothers do at least some breastfeeding, and a third are still nursing exclusively at four months.

3
‘Why do babies turn so many brilliant women into slummy mummies?’ by Helen Kirwan-Taylor,
Mail Online
, 2 September 2009.

4
When French and American mothers ranked the importance of ‘always put[ting] the baby’s needs before one’s own’, American mothers gave it 2.89 out of 5; French mothers gave it 1.26 out of 5. The 2004 study, by Marie-Anne Suizzo, is called ‘French and American mothers’ childrearing beliefs: stimulating, responding, and long-term goals’. It was published in the
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
.

5
‘Géraldine Pailhas, des visages, des figures’, by Violaine Belle-Croix,
Milk Magazine
, 13 September 2010.

6
‘French women know that an inner life is a sexy thing. It needs to be nurtured, developed, pampered …’ Debra Ollivier writes in
What French Women Know
.

1
Given the baby boom and the shortage of places in crèches, the French state pays some mothers about 500 euros a month to look after their own children until the youngest is three. Mothers are also entitled to work part-time for the first three years.

2
Judith Warner writes in
Perfect Madness
that after her first child was born, ‘I talked and sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides and read at mealtimes until, when my daughter turned four and a half, I realized that I had turned into a human television set, so filled with twenty-four-hour children’s programming that I felt as though I had no thoughts left of my own.’

3
Alan B. Krueger, Daniel Kahneman, Claude Fischler, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur A. Stone, ‘Time use and subjective well-being in France and the US’,
Social Indicators Research
, 93 (2009), 7–18.

4
Annette Lareau,
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

5
Annette Lareau writes that most of the middle-class families she observed were frenetically busy, with parents working full-time, then shopping, cooking, overseeing baths and homework, and driving kids back and forth to activities. ‘Things are so hectic that the house sometimes seems to become a holding pattern between activities,’ she writes.

6
Robert Pear, ‘Married and Single Parents Spending More Time with Children, Study Finds’,
New York Times
, 17 October 2006.

1
Debra Ollivier,
What French Women Know About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of Heart and Mind
, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009.

1
Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Craig A. Foster, ‘Parenthood and marital satisfaction: a meta-analytic review’,
Journal of Marriage and Family
, 65: 3 (August 2003), 574–83.

2
In a well-known 2004 study, working mothers in Texas said childcare was one of their most unpleasant daily activities. They preferred housework. Daniel Kahneman, et al., ‘A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method’,
Science
, 3 December 2004.

3
Ibid., Jean M. Twenge.

4
Dyck, Vera and Kerry Daly, ‘Rising to the challenge: fathers’ role in the negotiation of couple time’,
Leisure Studies
, 25:2 (2006), 201–217.

5
In the overall 2010 Global Gender Gap Index, created by the World Economic Forum, the UK ranked fifteenth, the United States ranked nineteenth and France ranked forty-sixth.

6
According to the French statistics agency Insee.

7
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

8
In a 2008 study, 49 per cent of employed American men said they did as much or more childcare as their partners. But just 31 per cent of women saw it this way. The study is Ellen Galinsky, Kerstin Aumann and James T. Bond,
Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home
, Families and Work Institute, 2009.

9
Ibid., Alan B. Krueger et al. French women spent about 15 per cent less time doing housework than the American women did.

10
Denise Bauer, Études et Résultats, ‘Le temps des parents après
une naissance’, Drees, April 2006.

1
Nathalie Guignon, Marc Collet and Lucie Gonzalez, ‘La santé des enfants en grande section de maternelle en 2005–2006’, Études et resultats, September 2010.

2
National Child Measurement Programme, June 2010. Figures given are for 2008 and 2009.

3
Lemangeur-ocha.com
, ‘France, Europe, the United States: what eating means to us: Interview with Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson’, posted online 16 January 2008.