French Parenting

The expectant mother

[Parenting] books can be useful to people who lack confidence, but [the French] don’t think you can raise a child while reading a book. You have to go with your feeling,

French women signal their commitment to motherhood and their baby's well-being by projecting calm and flaunting the fact that they haven’t renounced pleasure.

During pregnancy, it’s important to pamper your inner woman and above all, resist the urge to borrow your partner’s shirts. A list of aphrodisiacs for mothers-to-be includes: chocolate, ginger, cinnamon and [French] mustard.

The forty-week metamorphosis into mother shouldn’t make you any less of a woman.

The French Health Ministry says eating guidelines favour the baby’s harmonious growth and that women should find inspiration from different flavours. Pregnancy should be a time of great happiness!

Eating

Women who are 'waiting for a child'/ pregnant are supposed to eat the same balanced meals as any healthy adult. One guide says that if a woman is still hungry, she should add an afternoon snack consisting of, for instance, a sixth of a baguette, a piece of cheese,

and a glass of water.

In the French view, a pregnant woman’s food cravings are a nuisance to be vanquished. Frenchwomen don’t let themselves believe that the fetus wants cheesecake. The Guidebook for Mothers to Be, a French pregnancy book, says that instead of caving in to cravings, women should distract their bodies by eating an apple or a raw carrot.

This isn’t all as austere as it sounds. Frenchwomen don’t see pregnancy as a free pass to overeat, in part because they haven’t been denying themselves the foods they love or secretly bingeing on those foods for most of their adult lives.

Giving birth

In French, giving birth without an epidural isn’t called a natural childbirth. It’s called 'giving birth without an epidural' (accouchement sans péridurale).

Sleep teaching for newborn babies

The Pause: Observing to see if your baby is actually awake or if they are just whimpering in their sleep and giving your baby a chance to self-soothe and go back to sleep.

Sleep teaching for babies aged four months and older

'Crying it out' with a French twist:  in the evening, you speak to your baby and tell them that, if they wake up once, you’re going to give them their pacifier once. 

But after that, you’re not going to get up. It’s time to sleep. You’re not far away, and you’re going to come in and reassure then once. But not all night long.

You need to truly believe that a baby is a person who’s capable of learning things and coping with some frustration. A baby might be hungry during the night but they do not need to eat.

The little baby learns in their cradle that they can be alone from time to time, without being hungry, without being thirsty, without sleeping, just being

calmly awake. At a very young age, they need time alone, and they need to go to sleep and wake up without being immediately watched by their parents. 

National baby meal plan

After the first few months, a baby should eat at roughly the same time each day.

Breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack and dinner spaced four hours apart between meals.

Babies should have a few big feeds that fit into the rhythm of the family rather than a lot of smaller ones.

Baby learns to wait patiently and happily between meals.

Delaying gratification

Using the word 'wait' instead of 'quiet' or 'stop'. 

'Sois sage': behaving appropriately, self controlled and calm.

Learning self distraction techniques that make waiting less frustrating. Willpower.

Learning to play by themselves.

'N’importe quoi': means doing whatever or anything they like. This phrase is used when kids have no

boundaries,  when parents have a lack of authority and that anything goes. The complete opposite of the French ideal of kids having very firm limits.

Waiting is not just an important skill among many, but a cornerstone of raising kids.

Awakening and discovering

Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn’t always require the parent’s active involvement.

Awakening trains children how to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment and forge  psychological qualities such as self-assurance and

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

at the same time.

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 *