45 pages • 1-hour read
Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
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Part 1, Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Bringing Up Bébé”
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Doing Her Nights”
Many American mothers see infants and toddlers who often wake up and need comforting as an ordinary experience of early motherhood. Pamela’s friends and relatives all have their own ways of handling their children’s sleep needs. She and Simon try various methods, but nothing seems to work, and Bean wakes up every night. When Pamela talks to French parents, she learns that almost all of their children learned to sleep through the night by a few months of age. The secret is what Pamela dubs “The Pause”: French parents do not immediately attend to a baby that wakes crying, but rather observe whether intervening is necessary. Sometimes, babies cry while asleep or between sleep cycles and just need a few minutes to fall back asleep. Disturbing this process can form dependency on parental intervention.
This is exactly what happened to Bean. Upon talking to pediatrician Michel Cohen and researcher Hélène de Leersnyder, Pamela discovered that the Pause method only works until about four months of age. Since Bean was already older, Pamela’s only choice was to allow Bean to “cry it out”—basically, cry until getting worn out and falling back asleep. Pamela and Simon tried it for three nights, after which Bean slept through the night. The couple realized that Bean may have been waking up for their sake, rather than her own, all along. The underlying message is that French parents do not see their babies as helpless, but rather as capable of adapting, learning, and understanding their parents’ needs as well as their own.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Wait!”
Pamela still feels like a foreigner in France. For example, when she and Simon drop Bean off for her first day at daycare, the daycare workers ask about Bean’s meal schedule. Pamela and Simon don’t have set meal times for Bean, which earns a look of disapproval. French parents, she finds, feed their babies four times a day—the accepted default method, like the sleeping techniques. Pamela observes that teaching children to wait is a major theme in French parenting, who pause before picking up crying children and feed them on a schedule.
Pamela contacts Walter Mischel, a leading expert on children and delayed gratification, best known for the famous marshmallow experiment. In this experiment, children were sat in front of a marshmallow and told that if they waited 15 minutes to eat it, they could have two marshmallows. Most of the children were unable to wait. Mischel tracked many of the subjects; years later, the ones who demonstrated delayed gratification skills early in life were more resilient to stress when they were older. The idea is consistent with French parenting and the belief that allowing children to experience and handle manageable moments of stress develops hardiness. This also allows for a calmer and less stressful family life, as parents can tend to their own needs without constant pressure from their children, while children gain inner resources.
Pamela visits a family with two young children. The three-year-old daughter bakes cupcakes on her own while Pamela and her mother talk. Baking is a big part of French culture—a ritual that is an exercise in patience. Eating on a predictable schedule is another staple of French culture: There are three meals and one snack per day. French children are taught to wait between meals; any snacks they buy will have to be eaten during snack time at around 4 pm. French parents observe that American parents struggle to say “no” to their children or allow them to experience frustration. In contrast, French parents consider the ability to handle discomfort an essential skill that all children must be taught; it is not discomfort that is damaging, but rather the lack thereof. Additionally, French children learn that their parents have needs and feelings as well.
When Pamela and Simon try to shift Bean onto the French eating schedule, it takes time and patience, but they eventually succeed. Pamela ends the chapter with a recipe for yogurt cake, a classic dish that young French children learn to bake.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Tiny Little Humans”
Pamela and Simon take Bean to a Saturday morning swimming lesson. The lessons are completely unstructured sessions in which the babies just play around. Pamela finds this odd, but the instructor explains that babies discover the water before they learn to swim in it. It occurs to Pamela that this philosophy connects to centuries-old ideas that are foundational to French parenting.
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Emile, or On Education in 1762, which argued that development should unfold naturally—that children should explore and awaken their senses in their own ways. This runs contrary to typical American ideas of wanting to speed up development and to create “genius” children. Rousseau also prescribed the cadre/frame structure, in which parents create strict boundaries that children to make life predictable and less stressful for children and parents alike. For centuries, children in France were seen as “second-class beings who only gradually gain status” (88). However, in the mid-20th century, the work of psychoanalyst and pediatrician Françoise Dolto transformed this paradigm. Dolto saw babies and young children as capable of rational thought and believed they should be treated with honesty and respect. She encouraged parents to explain the world to kids straightforwardly: Given the chance to understand, kids would do so.
Part 1, Chapters 3-5 Analysis
Druckerman spends a great deal of time focusing on sleep training because a good night’s sleep is at the heart of physical health and psychological wellbeing; the longer parents go without a full night’s sleep, the more difficult it becomes to have the emotional wherewithal to be Raising a Healthy, Happy, Resilient Child. French parents view infants as being capable of sleeping through the night from around three to four months old, while American parents tend to see children waking up through the night for years as inevitable. The French technique called “the pause” stems from this belief: It teaches babies to connect their sleep cycles without parental interference. The approach may seem cold to parents who are used to attending to their baby’s every whim, but Druckerman relies on the authority of a pediatrician and then on the firsthand experiences of other parents to support the efficacy of this approach.
The French tendency to observe first rather than immediately intervening can look like but is the opposite of ignoring children. French parents actively watch and listen, so that if the child needs them, they are there. Ignoring, in contrast, involves parents paying no attention to their child or refusing to do so. Understanding this is important because a parent may feel guilty or like they are doing something wrong if they give a child time to manage their own emotional state. In fact, the parent is supporting the child, just from a healthy distance. Druckerman and Simon realize that Bean was waking in the night for their sake more than her own. Once they let the routine go, she was able to do the same. This speaks to children’s intuitiveness, often overlooked in the US, where children are often seen as vulnerable, naïve, and incapable of reason. In France, even infants are seen as being able to pick up on family cues and needs, as well as whether the parent “believes in” them or not.
Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification confirms the efficacy of the French cultural norm of encouraging children to be patient until it makes sense to indulge—another key feature of raising a healthy, happy, resilient child. Snacks are eaten at certain times, for example, and parents usually wait for their child to stop crying on their own before picking them up. Building resilience in these ways emphasizes the development of a key trait. Druckerman argues that Americans understand frustration—the emotional experience of delayed gratification—as a deeply negative event to be avoided, while the French “treat coping with frustration as a core life skill” (75). This marks another instance of Parenting as a Social Construct: French parents value their children’s ability to encounter and manage frustration, but in America, parents find it challenging to allow their children to experience being upset. Druckerman has to fight through her own American “wiring” to apply these principles to her child, but she finds that it creates the results she hoped for. The idea of waiting doesn’t only apply to the short term, as French parents also value taking their time in allowing a child to develop and discover the world. All of this emphasis on patience seems to create calmer, more collected children.
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