Review: Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This book was imperfect, but I'm glad I read it. It's written by an American who marries a British man and has two babies while they live in Paris. She notices a lot of differences between how Americans treat babies and how the French treat babies, from pregnancy through toddler-hood. This book is an analysis of that set of observations.

At first, she points out a lot of appealing things that French babies do, like sleep through the night after 8 weeks, eat full meals out late in restaurants, play independently at parks and dinner parties. Some of the things she points out seem to make a lot of sense - like "The Pause" (how the French don't respond to babies right away, they wait a moment to see what the child will do), training them to eat just four times each day, and nearly universally sending them to state-run day cares. Pregnancy is handled with much less focus on worst-case situations, and more focus on general health.

However, I lost a bit of faith in the book when she contrasted the French attitude towards daycare to the American, saying that upper middle class Americans would never send their kids to daycare (surprise! we do.) It made me wonder what generalizations she was making about French society that were equally inaccurate. I was also strongly aware that while there is a simplicity in how French may not focus on any achievement-oriented activities for little kids (swim lessons are just about splashing, for example), they also live in a Socialist society which has different values from ours.

From a logistical point of view, I also disliked that the second half of the book was a restating of the first half, just in bite-sized tidbits numbered from 1-100. Finally, I didn't think that many of the things that the French do were things I was going to be able to execute myself in the US - for example, even if I wanted to put Sash on a 4x/day eating plan - what would I do about how she is fed in daycare or at birthday parties or even how we eat as American adults?

All that criticism aside, there were a few things I did pick up reading this - mostly that kids can be taught to wait a moment. Also that at Sash's age - 20 months - their being happy and comfortable at daycare, and learning how to socialize with other kids is what's important, nay, not just important, but critical.



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