French Twist Read online

  What I don’t want to do all the time is sit on the sidelines for tennis lessons, hip-hop dance class, cooking club, sewing circle, and on and on. And yet my children have grown so accustomed to having me on hand that it’s been a hard pattern to break. When I learned what typically goes on in the extracurricular world of a French child, my determination was bolstered. In France, if a child takes up a sport outside school—which, by the way, is not nearly as popular there as here—parents don’t hang out for every (or, often, any) practice. In fact, they rarely go to the weekend game, and it’s only for the final match or championships that they will make an appearance. Very few of the parents are on hand rooting until their voices are hoarse and/or fighting with the referees, and yet the kids don’t feel neglected. In the United States, it is intensely important to rigorously, and loudly, support our children in all of their endeavors so that they feel encouraged to find “their thing.” Every few months, we suit up for a different new undertaking—which requires different new equipment, different arrangements, and brand-new registration fees. No wonder we don’t have the energy—or spare cash—to go on a date.

  The whole setup in France is distinct because Wednesday, when there is no school, is the typical day for children to take classes, thus freeing up the weekends for real relaxing—and more sleep. Ducking out of school on Wednesdays is not an option for us, but, inspired by the French, I aimed to sedate the pace of our lives. Again, this was not without its complications.

  At the beginning of the year, Daphne announced that she wanted to be enrolled in tap, sing (I assume voice lessons), “moderen” (four-year-old-speak for modern dance), and pottery. Where did she get such notions? From any number of her pals who bop around to multiple extracurricular activities each week. As this is not sanctioned French behavior, I signed my girl up for exactly zero of these classes. Having barely lived through the nightly witching hour of Oona as a spent, overscheduled kindergartner—one who did ballet, drama, and soccer—I was happy at the thought of how this different, more relaxed lifestyle might affect Daphne, certainly the more “excitable” of my kids.

  Bingo! The increasingly unhurried clip of our lives has made everyone happier. We are slowly, slowly, becoming a decently oiled machine here, and everything from homework to bedtime is rarely racked with the anguish I formerly thought was par for the course. Daphne will have opportunities to learn her ball changes and scales in due time.

  By the way, in addition to taming little Daphnes, I’ve a hunch this French priority of traipsing rather than hurtling through life might account for their more domesticated male offspring. American parents of young, practically feral boys often gaze longingly at me with two comparatively tranquil girls. I’d estimate that about 40 percent of the boys I know have some extra oomph in them and that their woeful parents seem to be waiting it out until the constant urges to jump on other kids mellow out. But damn if that 40 percent doesn’t seem more like 10 percent in France.

  As you can see, the French approach to classes and activities for their kids is certainly less vigorous. Instead of spending all their free time searching for, say, their five-year-old’s talent and life passion, the French keep things more open, flexible. For those classes and sports that French children do pursue, their parents are often not part of the experience. I happened to be in France the afternoon that a friend’s eight-year-old started a new dance class. This little girl, who is half American, had her heart set on learning hip-hop, but there were no such classes offered to children nearby. Pas de problème—she opted for the adult class. Her mom walked her across the busy intersection to the building where the classes were held, because she was still too small to do that alone, but once there the kid was on her own. She came home and reported that at first the teacher was very skeptical but grew less leery when she caught on quickly, and he agreed to let her come back the following week. I keep trying to imagine Oona doing something similar, even with me holding her hand and watching the entire class, but it does not compute. I have heard more than one Frenchie argue that by letting children do things on their own, something that they can practice and tell the family about with pride, the kids end up much happier and more confident.

  This sounds great in theory, yet I have managed to slip away for only one of Oona’s tennis classes. At this point, she prefers when we tell her, rather than she tell us, that she’s doing great. No doubt this is the result of being told throughout her entire life that she is amazing. I fear that she needs endless approbation to do anything vaguely challenging. As you might recall from the carousel scene, French adults do not praise their children with the same frequency and volume as we Americans. Before I committed completely to that approach, however, I needed to do some due diligence to see what the experts make of these two divergent approaches.

  The result? Point to the French.

  At least if you listen to current theorists, who claim that many American kids, lauded at every turn, are suffering the effects of overpraise and hollow praise. All of the kudos appear to be putting a damper on the output of effort, as children either believe that they can’t do any better or they just don’t want to try and risk their perfect standing. But on top of this, kids are pretty smart, and, after about the age of seven, they become skilled at identifying (locally sourced, farm-raised turkey) baloney. If the praise is not sincere (I shudder at the memory of telling Oona that her seal drawing was “stunning”—truth is, I initially thought it was a giant tongue licking a UFO), they catch on quickly, so any form of praise thereafter has little meaning. Dang.

  Somehow, maybe in part because of Dr. Nathaniel Branden and the popularity of his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem, we are obsessed with self-esteem in this country. My friend Sandra, who moved from the south of France to Los Angeles when she was thirteen, loves to tell the story of one of her first weeks in American high school. Her class was engaged in some sort of activity that required them to look in a mirror and tell themselves how important and special they were—listing all of their best attributes. Still in the French mindset, Sandra was utterly confused. “I thought it was ridiculous and meaningless. Why should these nice things mean anything coming from me to me?” I guess Dr. Branden hadn’t really taken off in France in the same way. This same friend remembers the first time she was given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. She genuinely thought someone was playing a joke on her.

  Where we might err on the side of overpraise, the French could stand to step it up a bit and let go of those humiliation tactics. Meet me halfway, France!

  It has been exceedingly hard to deprogram myself from telling my kids how wonderful, bright, beautiful, and, yes, perfect they are fifty times a day. Now I am down to about ten, a good thing as Oona has begun to call me on it: “Are you just saying that because you are my mom and you have to?” This is a difficult question to answer, and I wish she had never thought to ask it. It is not easy to help a child improve on something if you have told them that they already produce genius-quality work.

  It could be that when we fixate only on our children’s happiness and never let them feel wretched, or anything close to it, we are laying the groundwork for future, adult discomfort. Not only will they lack the tools to deal with pain and disappointment on their own, but they will pulse with guilt for not feeling great! All the time! They did, after all, have such amazing (read: martyred) parents.

  It is as though contemporary American parents don’t know where to draw the line—or if there should be a line at all. Eileen, a doctor friend of mine, recently told me a story that chilled me to my core and made me realize how slippery this slope can be. Eileen was in the consulting room with a middle-aged female patient. The patient’s phone rang and she excused herself, telling Eileen that it was an important call. Eileen then listened to her patient trying to console her nearly-thirty-year-old lawyer daughter, who, she could not help overhearing, had just been reprimanded at her new job at a law firm. The next time Eileen saw this patient, she learned that
the lawyer daughter had since been fired from the firm—not because of her poor performance but because her mother had called the head partner in the firm, a man she had never met, to rebuke him for admonishing her daughter. Could the signals be clearer? Cut the cord!

  That’s not easy, of course. I know of what I speak. Not long ago Oona was rejected from a clique of girls in her class, some of whom had previously been close buddies (if that can be said of kindergartners). One night at bath time it all came pouring out, the tears splashing into the sudsy water: “Annabel, Sarah, and Evelyn don’t ever want to play with me. They just want to play alone. And Annabel called me a nuisance!” Sarah’s mother, Megan, is a good friend of mine, and my first instinct was to call a meeting. I was halfway through the sentence “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll call Megan and we will work this out” when I realized that I wasn’t going to do my daughter any favors by having her friends’ mothers force them to play with her. Unfortunately, life does have its hard moments—c’est la guerre and all that unpleasant jazz.

  Oona had grown accustomed to having me or my husband solve all of her problems, and she wanted, even expected, me to call Megan, but I held strong. It was hard for both of us, yet in the end we both came out a little sturdier. Oona pushed herself to seek out other friends and discovered that the world does not end when things do not work out as she’d planned. I was able to detach myself just a skosh from my beloved daughter’s social life (to be honest, it makes me kind of queasy to even write that sentence). It all felt very French.

  A French Frame of Mind

  I haven’t done much acting in my life, except for one appearance as Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof as a high school freshman, but I imagine that if I ever ventured to crack the boards, I would totally go Method (like Shelley Winters)—a conclusion I reached in my attempts to act French.

  To get into the mood, I started swapping in some choice French terms of endearment when I was otherwise about to drop a “darling” or “sweetie.” Maybe it was my imagination, but I swear I was more successful saying things like: “This is the only dinner you are going to get, mon petit chou, so do not leave the table until you are truly finished.”

  Here’s a chart to get you started. Feel it!

  FRENCH TERM

  mon petit chou

  TRANSLATION

  my little cabbage

  USE IT FOR

  sweetheart

  FRENCH TERM

  ma puce

  TRANSLATION

  my flea

  USE IT FOR

  boo boo

  FRENCH TERM

  ma crotte

  TRANSLATION

  my dropping

  USE IT FOR

  sweet pea

  FRENCH TERM

  ma caille

  TRANSLATION

  my quail

  USE IT FOR

  little man

  FRENCH TERM

  mon lapin

  TRANSLATION

  my rabbit

  USE IT FOR

  bunny

  FRENCH TERM

  ma chérie

  TRANSLATION

  my dear

  USE IT FOR

  darling

  NO TRANSLATION: buddy

  Obvious honorable mentions: mon ange, mon bébé, mon amour.

  As parents, it’s not easy to disentangle our own emotions from those of our children, especially when we have never tried. Parents these days seem to view their children as mini extensions of themselves, not as independent beings who need to learn how to navigate the world, for better and for worse. We already know what disappointment, pain, and fear feel like (I do not know anyone my own age who was reared with the same protective and indulgent tendencies we use with our kids) and want to avoid it at all costs for our lovies. The thing is, our kids need these experiences to get along in life; they’re healthy. Somehow, when we surrendered everything to those adorable kids, we lost sight of that fact. Whenever the subject of coddling came up in my conversations with French parents, they always pointed out how very important it is for the children that parents let them be alone, solve their own problems, and experience—and get over—discomfort. Most certainly, it’s important for the parents and their quality of life as well.

  It is even harder to play critic and certainly disciplinarian if you are always in buddy mode with your kids. Last summer, over lunch with a group of French parents just outside Paris, I found myself talking about the American inclination to be pals with one’s child, and, fatefully, I used the word “buddy.” You’d have thought I let out an enormous fart or disparaged the work of Serge Gainsbourg, based on the combination of eye rolls and giggles that rippled around the table. (For the record, I am not especially flatulent and j’adore Serge.) I then learned that in certain French circles the “B word” is a point of ridicule.

  “Oh, we hear it all the time,” one of my lunch companions lamented, laughing. “I work with this American and he can’t seem to stop with it. Things like, ‘Come on now, buddy, don’t be mad at me because it’s time to go. Please, buddy.’ Buddy! Buddy! Buddy! Or ‘Way to go, buddy! You ate your cookie!’ and things like that. I want to say to him, ‘You should try being the father and let the child’s friends be the buddies.’ The poor child cannot do anything without his father buddy, buddy, buddy all over him.”

  Another cringe moment for me. I could hear my own voice from the past echo, usually after a scolding, “We’re buddies, right?” When you think about it, it does sound kind of desperate—not a sentiment that I would necessarily associate with a chief. The French make a real distinction between the parent and the child, with parents on an elevated level. I can see why we have trouble getting our children to obey. Even worse, we find ourselves constantly bowing to the demands of our kids. Why would they think it shouldn’t be that way, seeing as we are all just buddies?

  Always referring to a child as a buddy must take its toll on the parent’s mind as well, and I’m sure this is related to why we feel so wretched leaving our buddies behind when we attempt to go out on a date. Who would leave a good friend screaming, clawing, and begging at the door? If we avoid this dynamic from the kid’s first day, we will dodge, or at least diminish, the torturous scenes at the door.

  By being truly in charge and not a buddy, I have accomplished a change in the house that has me dizzy with delight. One day, I stopped and took a good look at my home, a large three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with spacious dining and living rooms. Not one of the eight rooms was free of kid chaos and clutter. There was an enormous play kitchen in our living room, a wagon full of toys in the dining room, and piles and piles of art supplies in the kitchen, where the walls looked like they belonged to a small art gallery featuring only the scribbles of children. Mini Mondrians they ain’t. Not even the hallways were safe from kiddie trinkets. And I’m not talking things that were left about but toys that “belonged” when they were put away. I also thought back to the dwellings of my French friends, and I realized that it didn’t have to be this way. Sure, my children are a huge part of my life, but just as I had learned that they didn’t have to completely take over my mental space, I discovered the same applied to my physical turf. In the French model, children keep their things in their rooms. The rest of the house is mostly free of kiddie litter. This is somewhat flexible, of course, but the big exception is the living room. There are no toys in the living room. The living room is sacred. Children aren’t banned, but they certainly are not encouraged to use it as a play or storage room. Adults like to sit on living room couches and—ouai!—enjoy a bottle of wine with their adult friends. Thrilling, no? It helps that French kids don’t usually accumulate the same volume of toys as their American counterparts, but they also are raised knowing that there is an aspect to their parents’ lives that does not revolve around them, and that part of adult life requires its own terrain.

  Since my modus operandi in this project is to go rather French with my child-rearing, I took the leap not long ago and remo
ved all toys, scooters, coloring books, adorable fake appliances, sporting goods, mediocre and inspired art projects, board games, and stuffed animals from the living room. While I was at it, I rearranged the furniture—in fact, I had to, because I had so much rediscovered space in there. It felt like Christmas. I beam with mammoth pleasure just thinking about it. Remember, I am not at all a hard-ass, so a few contraband toys and books do creep back to the coffee table, but these things can be whisked away in less than a minute when I want to feel like a grown-up—and not a Toys“R”Us manager. Not long ago, a friend commented that “the living room feels much less stressful,” before she had put her finger on the changes. I had to hug her. Victory was mine!

  One French mother, whose five sons are now grown, confessed to me that she wasn’t always such a hard-ass either: “I am not so strict with this. I used to let them bring their toys in the living room on Sundays. But there was the condition that they had to clean them all out before the weekend was over.”

  What a softy.

  Last spring I spoke with Noémi, a twenty-three-year-old from Bordeaux. She described the controlled kitchen environment in her home when she was growing up: “There were only two drawers that I was allowed to open in the kitchen. Well, one was not really a drawer, it was our little bread box. And the other was a drawer that had crackers and things like that. I was not permitted to go and open the refrigerator and search around. This was the territory of my mother, and my brother and I had to go to her if we wanted some food. Of course, if my parents were away on vacation, we should search through everything! It was very exciting for us.”

  I say “well done” to any mother whose kids get a thrill from opening the refrigerator door. It makes sense that small children not be allowed free rein in the fridge. They are, after all, not the most rational beings when it comes to nutrition. As soon as my kids could manage, they waddled right over to the big white box and went for it. And, for some reason, we did not stop them—until now. I’ve deemed age seven the turning point for fridge freedom. (In France this is considered l’âge de raison—the age of reason—when kids are typically awarded more freedom in many aspects of their lives.) I’ve also been reminding my kids that never, never—never!—should they feel at liberty to examine the contents of their host’s refrigerator when they are guests in another home. It drives me insane when my kids’ friends are so comfortable, or maybe misguided, that they help themselves to ours.