French Twist Read online

  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.

  French Discipline: The Abridged Version

  1. Do not forget that you are the chief (N’oubliez pas que vous êtes le chef). Since when do two-year-olds get to call the shots? This isn’t healthy for anyone in the family, yet the practice seems to be rampant.

  2. Structure/ritual creates discipline (La structure crée la discipline). There are reams of research out there showing that kids tend to thrive when they have structure and routine in their lives. Routines help teach kids how to constructively control themselves and their environments. And they definitely cut down on power struggles: Enforcement becomes expected, and the parent doesn’t have to feel like some evil, haphazard ogre.

  3. Children are tougher than you think (Les enfants sont plus robustes qu’ils apparaîssent). Children don’t “deserve” a say in every disagreement. It simplifies things for everyone if they understand the meaning of “no!” It’s not going to hurt them to respect and trust parental decisions.

  4. Let the punishment fit the crime (Que le châtiment conviène au crime). Little kids are not clairvoyant, and their limited exposure to the ways of the world must be kept in mind when disciplining. It’s important that, when possible, the punishment be related to the offense. For example, if they throw toys, take away those toys.

  5. Do not back down (Tenez le coup). When you make a rule, you must stick to it. If people thought they had only a 50 percent chance of being arrested for illegal activity, I am sure more would try it. If you make a threat, follow through. Too many parents don’t, and kids end up interpreting the threats as “I have a few chances before they’ll do anything.” Endless warnings are far from effective.

  6. Do not be afraid of right and wrong (N’ayez pas peur du bon et du mal). The fact is, children are not rational. It’s your job to teach them not just morality, which is certainly important, but also, quite simply, the right way to do things. You aren’t stifling their creativity when you insist they wear their shoes on the proper feet for a long walk, for instance!

  7. More stuff is not the answer (Ne nourissez pas la rapacité). The outcome of giving children treats and toys when they demand them is that they will demand them more. A little self-control (across the board) goes a long way.

  8. If there is no blood, don’t get up (S’il n’y a pas de sang, pas la peine de se lever). Kids are capable of going from fine to completely off the handle in seemingly no time. They are also just as able to go back to fine in record time, so don’t tire yourself out getting up for every scream.

  Chapter Four

  Homme, Femme, Enfants or How Boundaries Saved My Sanity

  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.

  And the way their kids eat, I doubt many French schools are serving up spelt crackers as a wheat alter
native because of widespread wheat sensitivity. Suffice to say, for the French, keeping boundaries firmly in place starts from birth.

  What about that husband and his claim on my rack, you ask? At the risk of sounding like a Cosmo cover line, there’s something to this. When you surrender everything to your adorable spawn, it can become difficult to find the path back to your own sexy scene. The grip of obsession is fierce, and, as we’ve established, the trend du jour for American parents is to completely fixate on their kids—at the expense of practically everything else in their lives. Not long ago, I ran into a neighborhood mom who declared she was “sleepwalking,” having spent nearly three hours on the Internet the previous night searching for seamless socks for her four-year-old. “She really has a thing about any socks with seams at the toe, and there is always a conniption when she has to put shoes on. It’s scary how much I love flip-flops these days. Anyway, Brad is steamed because he says I’ve ruined our Saturday now. I guess I am a little out of it.”

  Probably didn’t do a whole lot for their Friday night either. And I have a hunch that that kid could learn to tolerate a hint of thread near her toenails. The screwiest bit is that, only a few weeks ago, that same mom had complained to me that her husband was so consumed with selecting the safest car booster seat for this same sock-challenged daughter that he spent hours creating an Excel spreadsheet comparing different models. Clearly, this couple is in desperate need of a date.

  Now, back to les boobs. Once, in a conversation about breast-feeding with a group of French women, I got a lot of strange—horrified, really—looks when it came to the question “How long did you nurse?” In this group of five women, only one besides me had gone as long as six months. “I’d decided to take a year off work, and the time just got away from me,” she explained, almost as though she was apologizing. The others all packed it—them—in by three months. It’s not surprising that, in the Western world, the French rank the lowest in terms of number of months allotted to breast-feeding. I’d nursed Oona for fifteen months and Daphne for eighteen. “Eighteen? Eighteen? Incroyable. Impossible. You must mean eight,” they exclaimed over there.

  I then explained to these completely stupefied madames—and now it sounded as if I was apologizing—that I’d always intended to wean Daphne at fifteen months so that things would be even between my kids. I harbored a fear that if I nursed one longer than the other, and then the one who got extended boob time ended up being a piano prodigy or teenage open-heart surgeon or something, early-weaner would blame me for playing favorites. But when Daphne’s fifteen-month birthday rolled around, she would have none of it, and I failed to seal the deal for another three months. This made absolutely no sense to my French companions, and I had a sensation—one that I was becoming well acquainted with in my interviews with French parents—that I was slightly deranged when it came to certain aspects of parenting. I could not tell if, at that point, they were puzzled more by the length of time that I nursed or by the amount of thought and worry I put into this hypothetical situation of an adult daughter feeling that she did not get her fair share of breast milk. You can imagine why I refrained from describing my many unsuccessful attempts to shut off the valve with Daph, which included a solo trip across the country for three days with the express purpose of “drying up,” various replacement incentives like little puffed fruity things and new stuffed toys if she cooperated, and many other ineffectual schemes. Alas, she was stronger than I—a bit of a pattern when I look back through the history of our battles. I still recall the force with which she brought me to the floor and pulled up my shirt when I returned from my transcontinental experiment. I simultaneously laughed at my toddler’s determination and mourned my failure to reclaim my body after more than a year of suckling. While the French don’t hesitate to wean, I worried that if Daphne was still so attached to nursing, then clearly she needed it. No, I did not admit any of this to the French. They most certainly would not have understood. More than that, they would have been aghast and thought less of me: Why is this baby making the decisions?

  Why indeed.

  The other side of this is that many French moms also don’t understand how completely heartbreaking and devastating it is for many American moms who fail to get the hang of nursing or are faced with a kid who doesn’t take to the tit. The pressure to be the perfect nurser is not there in France. French women are much more likely to be ostracized for nursing past three months than for not. I have heard stories of “rebel” French moms who nurse in secret to escape inevitable stares and aggressive tsk-tsking—and unsolicited advice and warnings about how they are ruining their lives and the lives of everyone they love. The French can certainly be harsh.

  I’ll never forget the complete anguish my good friend went through when she had a difficult time breast-feeding. She wanted to be “the best mom she could be,” so she tried and tried, but it just didn’t take. Before she threw in the burp cloth, however, she invited two representatives from La Leche League to her apartment for a consultation. The meeting resulted in my friend leaking only more tears and feeling like a miserable failure. Breast milk still wasn’t flowing, and the consultants, insisting that she had to find a way if she was “serious” about the health of her child, had managed to upset her even more. Before they left, they admonished her for the size of her bed. According to the Leaguers, my friend’s double—and not queen-sized—sleeping accommodations were restricting the baby’s ability to nurse properly.

  This guilt pile dumped on my bottle-feeding friend was completely unnecessary—and totally un-French. (Although, make no mistake, the French have no problem offering their opinions. They just wouldn’t knock the bottle.) Another pal of mine, who begrudgingly nursed her child well past his second birthday, lamented the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” feeling that is so bound up in this issue. It’s as though we have to choose between doing what we might think is best for our babies and what is best for womankind. Zut alors! I vote that we respect each mom’s personal decisions and not judge one another so harshly.

  Well, to a point. There may actually be too long to nurse. I remember witnessing a somewhat disturbing scene on an airplane a couple of years ago. A child, I’m guessing nearly four years old, was still on the mommy meal plan. He was begging his mother for a little teet, and this poor mom, who had clearly discussed nursing in public with this kid, was frantically trying to fend him off in forced whispers: “Not now. You know the rules.” Finally, the boy desperately pleaded, “Well, can I at least just see them?” In France, it’s largely regarded as obscene—and damn close to child abuse—to nurse longer than one year. Good thing we weren’t on Air France that day.

  In this area, French women have a very public advocate of sorts. And get this: She’s a philosopher! Yep, over there it’s still possible to be a living, valued—even popular—philosopher. After coming across one of the current French faves, Élisabeth Badinter, I understood a little better why French women are so different from Americans in their breast-feeding habits. For years, the feminist Badinter has been attempting to safeguard the role of women in French society and the workforce, which has improved dramatically in the last few generations. La philosophe is read so widely that French women could often find her book Le conflit: la femme et la mère for sale in their local supermarket after its publication in early 2010. The title translates to The Conflict: The Wife and the Mother. Badinter is on a crusade to save French women from losing all of the ground they have gained socially and professionally over the years. Although, by and large, French mothers breast-feed for far less time than we do, Badinter is still wary of a trend she sees developing in her native land toward “natural” parenting. Not only does she vilify the pressure to breast-feed, but she has her sights set on the ever-encroaching burden to provide homemade baby food and cloth diapers, all of which she fears will tether women to their children and their homes. She’s like a modern-day Simone de Beauvoir.

  Part of me—the American part—thinks that
Badinter sounds paranoid, overly bitter, and a little scary. But another part wishes we had our own version of this feisty feminist here. I didn’t want to nurse for eighteen months—that much I remember for sure. Yet I didn’t have the balls (pun intended—ha?) to end it. Ladies, don’t let the pressure and guilt keep you in the same bateau. You’ve got a life too, so be strong if that is what you want.