Recently I tried to pull together resources to understand my daughter’s quickening transition to toddlerhood. More specifically, I wanted guidance on her toddler tantrums. They are growing louder. Longer. Should I say: driving me to drink?
So, I upgraded from Instagram parenting accounts and Google searches and went in search of actual books.
It was time to get serious.
Among some American parenting classics I chose a couple of bestsellers about other cultures, like The Danish Way of Parenting (who doesn’t want to parent like a Viking?) and Bringing Up Bébé, a memoir written by an American mother living in Paris.
I threw myself into Bringing Up Bébé. The author, Pamela Druckerman, is a native New Yorker in Paris by way of her British husband. I too am a native New Yorker married to a Brit. I have similarly witnessed what this particular combination can do to a gene pool, what kind of mischievous progeny it can produce.
I felt an immediate kinship with Druckerman, in her American-British-English and her tripping over her husband’s dry irony.
Until I got to the part where she says that French children do not have tantrums.
Excusez moi? Or, in native New Yorker: yougottabefugginkiddinme.
Maybe I’m a bit cagey. I spent five-and-a-half years living a stone’s throw from France, simmering in the British obsession with their neighbours.
Maybe it’s just British women.
There were too many magazine headlines to count (“get that Parisian, I just woke up” sexy hair, “Throw the perfect French picnic au plein air”). And the wish to stay unapologetic and mysterious, like French women, instead of “‘terribly sorrying” every five seconds.
After a while I got tired of it. The Brits have their own thing going on and it’s a pretty good thing in my opinion.
I mean, sure it’s cute and heart-warming to read Druckerman’s portrayal of French children baking and saying bonjour to their elders. And how France provides wonderful, subsidized childcare in the form of local crèches.
But then Druckerman unexpectedly goes for the jugular. She insists that French mothers can keep their kids from screaming in public; American mothers cannot.
I feel betrayed. And suspicious. I read and re-read that paragraph a few times, each time with an increasing sense of whiplash and a curiosity about whether my American mom-friends know about her claim.
It’s an attractive picture, an entire country without tantruming children. I admit that I love it. I know Jorge Luis Borges says heaven is a library, but I’d like to politely disagree. Heaven is a library without a children’s section. Or, heaven is a library with a children’s section, but the children read in perfect silence and bring their parents coffee and pastries over in adult fiction.
Druckerman goes on to explain herself: French people subscribe to a certain cadre, or frame, through which they order their lives. By extension, this cadre includes their parenting approach. There is consensus across the country on how to respond to various stages of child development, including toddlerhood. Everyone more or less believes and does the same thing.
Voila! The result is a tantrum-less mecca.
Druckerman’s words gnaw at me as I continue to research tantrums. A number of sources say that the parent’s role is to help with emotional regulation by being a comforting presence. But then I find an article by a popular pediatrician in Manhattan, Dr Michel Cohen, who says the best thing is to ignore the tantrum entirely so as not to reward the screaming and kicking. As a result, a child will learn that tantrums are a bad way to get what they want, even if what they want is emotional safety.
In short, all the research I find is contradictory. I’m at a loss.
In my mind an image of defeat emerges: a fashionable French mother nibbling on a baguette and scowling at me as her toddler sits cross-legged at her feet reading Foucault.
But then I pause. And it occurs to me. It’s so simple I almost miss it, so elegant in its ordinary wisdom.
Uniformity in the form of cultural consensus has its perks, but I’d like to argue that in our American free-for-all, a spirit of individualism is a bonus when it comes to parenting.
Why?
Well, because regardless of where you live in the world, every child is different. And every parent is different.
Sure, Americans are shamed for our fatness, our bad fashion, our lack of sophistication, and, now, our crappy parenting.
But parenting is all about the long game.
And what looks like success in other cultures might not be at closer inspection.
I mean, French children might be universally polite and well-mannered, but what happens when they grow up?
Maybe tantruming in France just manifests differently.
If you watch the news in France, on any given day you’ll see the same footage: dozens of protests and strikes, cause upon cause, gilet jaunes mobs in Parisian streets that, pardonez moi, resemble one constant and collective adult tantrum.
It’s like an enormous channel of angst has been pushed down by French mothering and the crèche and the French education system until university graduation. Then it emerges like an alien from the guts of the French, in a great, big, angry shouting match with “the status quo.”
One of the handfuls of times I visited Paris from London, a section of the Champs D’Elysses was closed due to a protest. An American couple in their sixties walked by the blockade. The husband was wearing a Cubs hat and a flannel coat; it was cold, December. He glanced at the scene in disgust.
They’re grown ups, he said to his wife. She was nursing a wrapped crepe and glaring perplexed at the crowd.
That guy is in a suit for chris’sake. Hey buddy, go back to work!
The Frenchman heard him. And his response baffled me: he actually stuck out his tongue.
Is this where all the camembert and crème eventually leads?
Look, I won’t hide the fact that my British-American toddler tantrums. She does. If you don’t believe me, come to my house sometime between 10:30-11:30 every morning, particularly when I am preparing lunch.
It’s a phase, nearly all the research suggests, it’s a normal, healthy part of child development. At some point, she’ll grow out of it.
Frankly, I’d rather she go through it the good-old-American way, surrounded by wooden toys or at the nearest McDonalds, sometime between the ages of 2 and 4.
I prefer our American version over the French with their placards and their endless, blocked roads.
And to be honest, I’ve got a really nasty secret: the best pain au chocolat I ever had (and trust me, I’ve inhaled plenty in France) I bought on the Kings Road in London.
Bravo! There is so much in that book that goes against what is known to actually benefit child development long term, it's almost nauseating that it's a best seller. The whole thing could be summed up with "repress the child's emotions for an easy life, they can deal with the fallout when their decisions are no longer your problem"