Free French Children Don't Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman Page A

her to sleep through the night. At nine months old, she still wakes up every night at around 2 am. We brace ourselves to let her do controlled crying. On the first night, she cries for twelve minutes. (I clutch Simon and cry too.) Then she goes back to sleep. The next night she cries for five minutes.
    On the third night, Simon and I both wake up to silence at 2 am. ‘I think she was waking up for us,’ Simon says. ‘She thought that we needed her to do it.’ Then we go back to sleep. Bean has been doing her nights ever since.

4
    Wait!
    I’M GETTING MORE used to france. One day, I’m feeling so worldly I announce to Simon that we’ve joined the global elite.
    ‘We’re global, but we’re not elite,’ he replies.
    The truth is, I miss America. I miss grocery shopping in tracksuit bottoms, smiling at strangers, and being able to banter. Mostly, I miss my parents. I can’t believe I’m raising a child while they’re 4,500 miles away.
    Neither can my mother. My meeting and marrying a handsome foreigner was the thing she most dreaded when I was growing up. She discussed this fear so extensively that it’s probably what planted the idea. On one visit to Paris, she takes me and Simon out to dinner, and breaks down in tears at the table. ‘What do they have here that they don’t have in America?’ she demands to know. (Had she been eating
escargots
, I could have pointed at her plate. Unfortunately she had ordered the chicken.)
    Although living in France is easier now, I haven’t really assimilated. On the contrary, having a baby – and speaking better French – makes me realize just how foreign I am. Soon after Bean begins sleeping through the night, we arrive for her first day at France’s state-run day nursery, the crèche. During the intake interview, we sail through questions about her dummy use and favourite sleeping positions. We’re ready with her inoculation records and emergency-contact numbers. But one question stumps us: what time does she have her milk?
    On the matter of when to feed babies, Anglophone parents are once again in sparring camps. You could call it a food fight: one camp believes in feeding babies at fixed times, another says to feed them on demand.
    We’ve drifted into a hybrid. Bean always has milk when she wakes up, and again before bedtime. In between, we just feed her whenever she seems hungry. Simon thinks there isn’t a problem that a bottle or a boob can’t solve. We’ll both do anything to keep her from yowling.
    When I finish explaining our feeding system to the crèche lady, she looks at me like I’ve just said that we let our baby drive the family car. We don’t know when our child eats? This is a problem she will soon solve. Her look says that although we’re living in Paris, we’re raising a child who eats and sleeps – and yes, probably poos – like a foreigner.
    The crèche lady’s look also reveals that on this, too, there are no sparring camps in France. Parents don’t anguish about how often their children should eat. From the age of about four months, most French babies eat at regular times. As with sleep techniques, French parents see this as common sense, not as part of a parenting philosophy or as the dictate of some parenting guru.
    What’s even stranger is that these French babies all eat at roughly the same times. With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about 8 am, 12 pm, 4 pm and 8 pm.
Votre Enfant
(
Your Child
), a respected French parenting guide, has just one sample menu for four- or five-month-olds. It’s this same sequence of feeds.
    In French these aren’t even called ‘feeds’, which after all sounds like you’re pitching hay at cows. They’re called ‘meals’. And their sequence resembles a schedule I’m quite familiar with: breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus an afternoon snack. In other words, by about four months old, French babies are already on the same eating schedule that they’ll be on for the rest