tolerance of difference.
Some parents believe in exposing children to a variety of tastes, colours and sights, simply because doing so gives the children pleasure.
This pleasure is the motivation for life and the reason to live.
Génération Dolto
Talking to children like human beings and accepting that children are rational as a first principle.
Teaching them quite a lot while they’re very young. That includes for example, how to eat in a restaurant.
It is crucial that parents tell their babies the truth in order to gently affirm what the babies already know.
The child’s best interest is not always what will make them happy, but will give them rational understanding.
Parents should listen carefully to their kids and explain the world to them and it is important that this world would include many limits and boundaries and that the rational child could absorb and handle these limits.
Preserving Rousseau’s cadre model with the additional measure of empathy and respect for the child.
Listening to their kids and being clear that it’s the parents who are in charge.
Government subsidised crèches/ day care
A communal experience for your child to socialise with other kids.
Children have lots of freedom within firm boundaries and they’re supposed to learn to cope with boredom and to play by themselves.
Energetic discovery: children are left to exercise their appetite for experimentation of their five senses, of using their muscles, of sensations, and of physical space.
As kids get older, organised activities are proposed/offered, but no one is obliged to participate.
Teaching kids patience and to wait. They can't have everything straight away.
Kids are potty-trained; taught table manners; and to those with 'foreign' parents, given French immersion courses.
(French kids are not taught how to read until they start school at the age of 6/7).
Crèche dining experience
Lunch is served in four courses: a cold vegetable starter; a main dish with a side of grains or cooked vegetables; a different cheese each day; and a dessert of fresh fruit or fruit puree.
There are slightly modified versions for each age group; the youngest kids mostly have the same food, but pureed.
Aside from the occasional can of tomato paste,
nothing is processed or precooked. A few vegetables are frozen, but never precooked.
A typical menu:
~
1) Hearts of palm and tomato salad in vinaigrette.
2a) Sliced turkey au basilic accompanied by rice in a Provençal cream sauce
or
2b) White fish in a light butter sauce and a side dish of peas, carrots, and onions
3) A slice of St. Nectaire cheese or blue cheese with a slice of fresh baguette
4) Fresh kiwi or whole apples, sliced at the table
~
Breastfeeding/formula
Breastfeeding after three months is always viewed badly by one’s entourage.
French parents see no reason to believe that artificial milk is terrible or to treat breastfeeding as a holy rite.
They assume that breast milk is far more critical for a baby born to a poor mother in a developing country than it is for one born to middle-class Parisians.
Getting back in shape after giving birth
The French believe that there is no reason why a woman wouldn’t be sexy just because she happens to have children.
It’s not uncommon to hear someone say that being a mother gives a woman an appealing air of plenitude (happiness and fullness of spirit).
Losing the baby weight within three months appears to be the goal in France.
No diets. Just 'paying very close attention' some of the time (eating mindfully). For example, no bread during the week and then eating what you want at the weekend whilst not overdoing it too much.
Sounds like a better concept than 'being good' and having 'cheat days'.
Female identity
As well as getting their pre-baby bodies back, they get back their pre-baby identities too.
French women not only allow themselves physical time off; they also mentally detach from their kids.
In France, the dominant social message is that while being a parent is very important, it shouldn’t subsume one’s other roles. Mothers shouldn’t become 'enslaved' to their children.
An ideal of French motherhood:
She is at her base the most simple expression of female liberty: happy in her role as mother; avid and curious about new experiences; perfect in
‘crisis situations,’ and always attentive to her children, but not chained to the concept of the perfect mother, which, does not exist.
In France, being a woman and a mother are not separate identities. You are both.
According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 91% of French adults said the most satisfying kind of marriage is one in which both spouses have jobs.
Quitting work for even a few years is a precarious choice.
When the kids are grown up, what is your social usefulness?
Detach and relax
The let-them-be principle.
The conviction that it is unhealthy for mothers and children to spend all their time together. They believe there’s a risk of smothering kids with attention and anxiety, or developing a relationship where a mother’s and a child’s needs are too intertwined.
If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child. What happens to the child if they are the only hope for their mother?
Ecole maternelle
France’s free public preschool.
Turning three year old olds into civilised and empathetic French people.
Toddlers discover the richness and the constraints of the group that they’re part of. They feel the pleasure of being welcomed and recognised, and they progressively participate in welcoming their fellow students.
They learn letters, sounds, how to write their own names and taught to perfect their spoken French so that it's rich, organised and comprehensible to others.
A French child learns to observe, ask questions
and make their interrogations increasingly rational.
They learn to adopt a point of view other than their own and this confrontation with logical thinking gives them a taste of reasoning. They become capable of counting, of classifying, ordering, and describing...
Bonjour and au revoir (hello and goodbye)
Greeting adults acknowledges their humanity, recognising someone as a person.
Virtuous cycle
Frenchwomen don’t harp on men about their shortcomings or mistakes. So the men aren’t demoralized. They feel more generous toward their wives, whom they praise for their feats of micromanagement and their command of household details. This praise (instead of the tension and resentment that builds in Anglophone households) seems to make the inequality easier to bear.
If you drop the forlorn hope of fifty-fifty equality, it becomes easier to enjoy the fact that some urban French husbands do quite a lot of child care, cooking, and dishwashing.
One of the great feelings of a couple and of marriage is gratitude to the person who hasn’t left.
Commission Menus in Paris
French ideas about kids and food.
There’s no such thing as 'kids’ food. A four course meal can be chopped/cut up or pureed according to the age of the kids.
Importance of variety. This includes visual and textual variety.
The driving principle of the Commission Menus is that if at first the kids don’t like something, they should try it repeatedly.
Introducing new foods gradually and to prepare the foods all different ways.
For example, with berries, try it first as a puree, then cut into pieces. For grapefruit, give them a thin slice sprinkled with sugar, then gradually serving it on its own. For spinach, mix it with rice to make it more appetising.
Repropose the food in different ways throughout the year; eventually they will like it.
Try a bite of everything.
Everybody eats the same meal at home.
For the French, eating means sitting at the table with others, taking one’s time and not doing other things
Child autonomy
This means leaving children safely alone to figure
things out for themselves and respecting them as a separate being who can cope with challenges. By the time a child is six years old, they should be able to do everything in the house and in society.
* Information taken from 'Bringing Up Bebe' written by Pamela Druckerman *
