Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman

Author:Pamela Druckerman [Druckerman, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Parenting, Social Science, Motherhood, Children's Studies, General, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781101563144
Google: Og6kwSDmOxQC
Amazon: B005I4JG80
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-02-07T08:00:00+00:00

All this goes a long way toward explaining the mysteriously calm air of French mothers I see all around me. But it still doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a crucial missing piece. That ghost in the French mothering machine is, I think, how Frenchwomen cope with guilt.

Today’s American mothers spend much more time on child care than parents did in 1965.6 To do so, they have cut back on housework, relaxing, and sleeping. Nevertheless, today’s parents believe they should be spending even more time with their kids.

The result is enormous guilt. I see this when I visit Emily, who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter. After I’ve been with Emily for a few hours, it dawns on me that she has said “I’m a bad mother” a half-dozen times. She says it when she caves in to her daughter’s demand for extra milk or when she doesn’t have time to read her more than two books. She says it again when she’s trying to make the little girl sleep on a schedule and to explain why she occasionally lets her cry a bit at night.

I hear other American moms say “I’m a bad mother,” too. The phrase has become a kind of verbal tic. Emily says “I’m a bad mother” so often that, though it sounds negative, I realize that she must find the phrase soothing.

For American mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the Internet or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things. We’re not just selfish. We’ve “paid” for our lapses.

Here, too, the French are different. French mothers absolutely recognize the temptation to feel guilty. They feel as overstretched and inadequate as we Americans do. After all, they’re working while bringing up small children. And like us, they often aren’t living up to their own standards as either workers or parents.

The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt. To the contrary, they consider it unhe {sidth="2ealthy and unpleasant, and they try to banish it. “Guilt is a trap,” says my friend Sharon, the literary agent. When she and her Francophone girlfriends meet for drinks, they remind each other that “the perfect mother doesn’t exist . . . we say this to reassure each other.”

The standards are certainly high for French moms. They’re supposed to be sexy, successful, and have a home-cooked meal on the table each night. But they try not to add guilt to their burden. My friend Danièle, the French journalist, coauthored a book called The Perfect Mother Is You (La mère parfaite, c’est vous).

Danièle still remembers dropping her daughter off at her crèche at five months old. “I felt sick to leave her, but I would have felt sick to stay with her and not work,” she explains. She forced herself to face down this guilt and then let it go.

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