French Twist (9 page)

In these parts, helicopter parents are being replaced with lawn-mower parents (look it up, it’s a real condition), equally at the ready to remove any impediment to their
child’s joy. Sadly, their omnipresence is an obstacle in itself, as we’ll see a bit later.

Just as my kids do with their dinners—miserably swallowing down every last green bean before getting to the grilled cheese and frozen mango—here I’ve saved my best discoveries for last. Recall that my introduction to the world of French parenting was the adage “If there is no blood, don’t get up.” When I first heard it I thought it was funny, and at the time I was thrilled because I really didn’t want to leave
my
friends and attend to Daphne’s demands for me. Now, as I get deeper into the mind of a French parent, I see that there is much more to it. Teaching children to be proficient in waiting is good for everyone—even the neighbors, especially the ones who live near the elevator.

I have had many talks with my girls recently about the new, unbreakable quality of my rules as well. For instance, crying when an Internet connection is lost, and with it the show in progress, now results in the computer being put away. It was hard on all of us at first—believe me, once you’ve tasted freedom doled out in delicious twenty-five-minute intervals, it is tough to give that up. However, now they know this dictum, and they have learned to look at me pleadingly when the signal fails (like there’s anything I can do?), sometimes fighting tears. But the point is that they are fighting their emotions and not me. It is not wise to pick a fight with the chief.

The beauty of the French approach, of course, is that you do not find French parents screaming at their kids across the park, restaurant, department store, or wherever
to keep them in line. Their emphasis on the good of society is not only their inspiration in raising well-mannered kids, it’s also the reason they don’t allow themselves to get riled up in public. It’s like double discipline. One French mom, Helene, let me in on her secret when she wants to yell at her son in a public setting. “You whisper. Bring your child very close to you, and whisper in his ear quietly and calmly what he is doing wrong and why he must behave. I even do this at home sometimes, because the whispering seems to really get his attention.”

On the other hand, I’ve seen French parents pull out the ever-effective (though so cruel) weapon of humiliation to combat unruly behavior, when things get even a little out of hand. For the French parent, this comes with the added “benefit” of proving to everyone that they are doing their job as a good parent and teaching proper behavior. But, ugh—I could never say, “You are acting the imbecile,” to my girls, especially in front of a playground full of kids (the offense of the “imbecile” was interrupting his mom, by the way). Publicly disgracing a kid is a tad too sadistic for my taste, and I’ll leave that one in France.

Still, I love a good tip. Another one Helene gave me was her “no-eye-contact secret.” With American in-laws from Iowa, Helene has spent more than a few summer hours in playgrounds in the Midwest, and she will “never get used to the way the moms there rush to comfort their kids, sometimes before the kids are even having trouble. If I see my child fall down or have a problem on the playground, my way is to not look him in the eye right after. If
he knows I saw him fall, he might cry just for the comfort. If he comes to me crying, he’s usually truly hurt. And that really does not happen very much. But some of these kids in Des Moines are always crying, and I don’t even know why.”

With so much laying down of the law, I was struck by the response received when I asked French parents what they do—and what was done to them—for issues of lesser offense (though American obsessions), such as thumb-sucking, bed-wetting, and even nail-biting. The prevailing attitude that I detected was to let it be. This is the land of laissez-faire, after all. “These things will work themselves out, Catherine,” I was told. As the mother of a very dedicated thumb-sucker, I have, with the help of the World Wide Web, worked myself into heart palpitations trying to figure out what to do about her habit. Visions of misshapen jawbones, thumb sores, untamed tongues, collapsing nostrils, low SAT scores, and other related horrors haunt my brain. When I expressed these fears to a Parisian mother of two thumb-suckers, she replied, “You worry about her test scores? We will have to fix some teeth, this is true. But we cannot cut off their little thumbs. I do not worry about these things. They are just children, after all.”
Just children
—isn’t that what we often use to excuse sweeping tantrums, finicky eating, and straight-up brattiness? Interesting, yes, but also ironic. My child was chastised by her dentist, her teachers … sigh … even me, for doing something she’s unable to help; yet when she deliberately acted like a twit, I often looked the other way
and rationalized that it was all part of being a kid. This French attitude also goes a long way to explain why I saw so many children in France over the age of two using pacifiers. It’s not a high-caliber battle for French parents—not nearly as important as their children controlling themselves in public.

Ah, but what about a child who hits others? Surely this would stump the French. One overseas mom said to me, “If he hits, then he is not allowed to play with the other kids. If he does it a lot, I say just go find another child who also hits and put them together. See how he likes it then. That is what my sister did with her son.” I’m not persuaded that this is the best approach, but it is useful in illustrating a different, less overwrought angle than, say, turning to therapy, which I’ve seen several friends enlist for their physical little hotheads. It also goes along with what Jeanne, another French mom I encountered, declared as her parenting philosophy: “This, too, shall pass.” Only it didn’t sound at all New Agey; if anything, it sounded quite the opposite: bored, pragmatic, unimpressed with life’s lumps.

On the subject of excusing bad behavior, I was not surprised to find that the whole business of birth order—as in, “Daphne is rambunctious like every second child; that explains it”—is not a big topic of conversation in the French parenting circles. Did we will it into existence,
à la
the terrible twos?

Picking battles is a recurring theme I have noticed with French parents. They don’t negotiate, but they also don’t
turn everything into an issue. And—
voilà!
—their kids follow suit.

For years I’ve heard tales of these magical European babies who are all potty trained well before they turn two. Sitting down for coffee with a French mother of five sons, I asked her how this was possible. Lord knows I tried to free up my kids from the diapers early on, but it never stuck (until three and a half for one of them): “Well, I do what my mom did. When the babies are about nine months old, you do not put diapers on them after their meals. Then, in a little while (the same hour every day), you put them on their pots. I was working, so I had the babysitter do it for the boys. Well, except for my last boy, who really just liked to wear the diaper. So he wore the diaper. I didn’t make a big deal about it. The others were never doing their poops in the diaper anymore, and then it was easy to teach them the pee-pee.”

I suppose that even if I knew this technique when my girls were babies, they wouldn’t have been French enough to sit still on the potty for any extended period of time—score another point for obedience. Still, had I been a bit more laissez-faire in my attitude, my poor daughter (I refuse to say which) wouldn’t have had such a hard time with it. If I never have to hear the words “stool retention” again, that’ll be too soon. But apparently, according to my books and blogs, this happened because of all the potty-training pressure I heaped on my girl.

Okay, so the bottom line is be strict, very strict—but not too strict on certain things. Got it?! I’m getting there.

Chapter Four
 

There is a certain limit to the number of times parents should have to say to their child, “Don’t lick my nose” or “Keep your hands off my butt.” I’d love to have set the maximum at one, but we passed that marker long, long ago. It was kind of sweet when my girls were breast-feeding infants and would obliviously explore the terrain of my chest, neck, face, you name it, but I should have carved out a real line beneath the underwire at some point. Hugs and kisses are great (always—please don’t stop that, darlings), but what I’ve experienced was quite often akin to groping.
I would tell myself it was normal:
They are just curious and attached to me
. All good, right?

But in truth I didn’t want my body to be open for action, day and night. From the very beginning,
le corps
of a French mother is fiercely protected, whether through a limit on the breast-feeding, the kibosh on children in their parents’ bed, or the all-important message that Mommy’s skirt is exquisite and one shouldn’t stand on it, especially when she’s in it. (Note: French moms almost never sport
les
sweatpants.) Until very recently my kids would often sit on me, hang on me, swing from me. There were no barriers—as though they were under the impression that my existence on this planet was solely for them. Imagine.

“Don’t give everything to the baby. Especially remember that your breasts are for your husband.” I love this quote, a little bit of wisdom imparted to a French friend by her doctor after the birth of her first child. I love this quote for what it suggests—and for how hilarious it must seem to nearly every American mom.

For my husband—ha! That’s the last person I was thinking of when my kids were born. The only time I imagined him in the same setting as a pair of knockers was when I wished he could have grown a pair of his own to help out with the seemingly endless breast-feeding that I’d once so willingly signed up for. But this cautionary lesson is one that French women learn from their environment immediately after, or maybe even before, they give birth.

Over here, we are warned that our children will have low IQs, suffer horrendous allergies, become obese, and
essentially come up short in every endeavor they attempt (unless they want to be serial-killing shut-ins) if we don’t nurse for roughly fifteen years. Over there, the French are cautioned that they will lose their sex lives, their figures, and even their marriages if they hand it all over to the new, precious little sycophant in the family. I have been inhaling my own pro-breast-feeding air here for a long time, so I’m not about to go full French in my attitude, but there is a certain amount of irony in the fact that French offspring rank much higher when it comes to education—and let’s not get started (yet) on the whole obesity thing.