Ecoutez bien!

The French make it look easy: small babies sleep through the night, toddlers calmly eat four-course lunches, well-dressed mothers chat on the edge of the playground rather than running around after their children, and they hardly ever shout. Pamela Druckerman left New York for Paris and soon found herself with an English husband and several children. While her daughter was throwing food around a restaurant, French children of the same age would be enjoying the cheese course. Druckerman embarked on a painstaking study of parenting à la française. The result is amusing, helpful and charmingly self-effacing.

Druckerman was disappointed when she found out that getting pregnant in Paris does not give you carte blanche to eat cheesecake and bond with strangers. While she was memorising pregnancy books and comparing parenting philosophies, her French counterparts were carrying on with their lives: ‘They don’t treat pregnancy like an independent research project.’ The few guides that exist in France suggest staying calm and savouring the experience. One American pregnancy book cautions against sex, and if the situation should occur, it recommends taking the opportunity to do pelvic floor exercises. Druckerman starts out in the American camp:

New York likes its women a bit neurotic. They’re encouraged to create a brainy, adorable, conflicted bustle around themselves.

In France ‘neurotic’ isn’t a self-deprecating half-boast; it’s a clinical condition.

This culture of honouring anxiety seems to have made some anglophone parents lose their common sense. It turns out that French babies sleep through the night because their parents wait a few moments before rushing in to pick them up when they cry, to check if they really are awake. Parents talk to their children as if they are rational humans, and it turns out they are.