Bringing Up Bébé

3.49

This an amazing book on how to write positively about something totally insane.

It starts out with the two big positive ideas: give children space to adjust on their own and expect more of them because they can handle it.

And then the insanity begins. French parenting is based on Rousseau and Dolto. Rousseau who famously raised no children, giving his away, and wrote a totally crazy impractical and downright abusive book on parenting. Dolto who was a borderline nutjob and whose ideas are often actually child abuse. Together they're responsible for great amounts of child suffering, like France having an age of consent that's just 13 years old (raised to 15 just recently; which is still criminally low). And totally developmentally inappropriate things like telling a 1 year old 15 times per day to say hello. Otherwise, Rousseau says that your kid won't be a good member of society.

Once the insanity starts, it never ends. French women don't mind doing basically all the housework and child rearing. Having their doctors tell them that they need to get into better shape for their husbands. At the same time, everyone is really cold, doing things like cancelling tennis lessons because, oh, they're so inconvenient for the parents now. Never pushing children to exceed in school, to challenge boundaries, to achieve new things.

France has one thing going for it. State support for parents. Everything else, is an unscientific, garbled, unpleasant, cold mess that's 200 years behind parenting in other countries. I cannot believe people read this as a howto manual!

I thought most of the advice was just traditional advice and made perfect sense.

I was pretty skeptical about this book, since it seemed to reek of two things I find generally disturbing: a “parenting philosophy” and Francophilia. So it took me a while to get to this. But I'm glad I did! It was a hugely calming, sanity-inducing look at parenting small children. It's a lovely antidote and inoculation against some of the “cult of total motherhood” insanities around how children are meant to radically transform your identity, your life, and your freedom - an idea that seems increasingly fashionable these days on (mostly/entirely Anglo?) blogs, forums, baby tracking apps, etc. An idea that made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would choose to have kids?!

Jennifer's review hits the nail on the head. This book is basically a “traditionalist” view of babies and small children. The parents are in charge, kids mold to parents' lives (not vice versa), and - as one European relative told me - “we would put the baby in its own room, close the door to his room and to our room, and only return when his screams were loud enough to be heard in our room”. This basically goes against the grain of Dr. Sears-style “attachment parenting”, and indeed, if you believe in the higher powers of baby-wearing, exclusive breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc., then you will probably be annoyed by this book - much shade is thrown.

One good (and common) critique of this book is that it's not that French parenting wisdom is superior to American parenting wisdom, it's that French institutions - paid maternity leave, free childcare, subsidized everything - are superior to American institutions. Yeah. Duh. The American state (or rather, the Republican Party) doesn't seem to believe that women have anything to offer beyond their uteruses and boobs, and there is an enormous institutional apparatus making it hard and miserable to be a parent and a worker while female. So you have working women having to cobble together maternity leave using sick leave and vacation days, pumping breast milk in supply closets. I mean, it's bonkers.

But it's also true that American parenting - especially American motherhood - seems to be consumed by ideological warfare (boob or formula? unmedicated birth or epidural?!), incredibly loaded with judgement and pseudo-science, in a way that other countries are not. And I do think this is a reaction to the messed up institutions. I mean, there's an entire industry of “how to get your baby to sleep X hours by Y age” - and an entire morbid cultural meme around how horrific newborn sleep patterns are - and I really think the only reason everyone is so darkly obsessed with BABY NIGHTTIME SLEEP OH GLOB is because at least one, but often both, parents need to be back to working at the office ASAP.

Another big motivator behind American's obsessive, all-consuming hyperparenting culture is not just the crappy institutions, but also the crappy income inequality. See this interesting WaPo article. I think it's in that article, but there's a stat somewhere about how working moms now spend as much time - per week - on childcare as STAY AT HOME moms did in the 70s.

Anyway, this book is nice. It's inspiring, despite these structural nonsenses. I mean, you don't HAVE to buy into the parenting rat race, even if the institutions and culture are pushing it. I especially liked the “French parenting wisdom” of treating your children NOT as tiny fragile avatars or tiny projects to perfect, but as individuals possessing of (some modicum of) rationality and resilience.

O YA and the book includes a couple recipes! Delightful. Apparently weekend baking is a big “parental wisdom” thing French parents do with their children starting at some early age (2 years old!? I dunno). Who doesn't like cake? Druckerman includes a recipe for a yogurt cake that is apparently the go-to starter cake for these tiny pastry chefs.

Many of these ideas were how I was raised 30+ years ago. I plan on continuing many of them with my lil one. Other ideas were of little interest to me and our lifestyle.
What kept this from getting a higher rating was that many of the anecdotes did not seem to finish, she just moved on. I kept checking to see if I missed something, but they just didn't have a conclusion.

Interesting look at the difference, from one mom's perspective.

This book exceeded expectations! It works as both an expat memoir & as a light parenting manual. Druckerman's observations of the French are spot on with many of the currently popular books on child development (NurtureShock, How Children Succeed). Paris sounds like a perfect place to raise children.

Some interesting and good ideas, but mostly I am glad I am not raising a child in France.

This book made it pretty clear that I would make a good French mother and a terrible American mom. For those who have not heard this book reviewed to death, it relays the experiences of one American journalist and new mother navigating the world of French parenting. Druckerman covers the period from birth to kindergarten and explores cultural differences between American and French parenting in terms of sleeping, eating, discipline, and education. I think one of the failings of Druckerman's book is that she has little firsthand knowledge of life as an American mom. Druckerman relies on correspondence with friends and brief personal observations, mostly in New York City, to compare the the different cultural parenting techniques. As everyone else has observed ad infinitum, French parents have plenty of advantages unavailable in the States, all of which make having children as well as a work-life balance a lot easier. Nevertheless, speaking as a non-parent and someone who feels that children should not take over one's life, most of Druckerman's “French” parenting advice sounds like common sense to me.