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

of their lives (grown-ups usually drop the snack).
    You’d think the existence of this national baby meal plan would be obvious. Instead, it feels like a state secret. If you merely ask French parents if their babies eat on a schedule, they almost always say no. As with sleep, they insist that they’re merely following their babies’ ‘rhythms’. When I point out that French babies all seem to eat at roughly the same times, parents shrug it off as a coincidence.
    The deeper mystery to me is how all these French babies are capable of waiting four hours from one meal to the next. Bean gets anxious if she has to wait even a few minutes for a feed. We get anxious too. But I’m beginning to sense that there’s a lot of waiting going on all around me in France. First there was the Pause, in which French babies wait after they wake up. Now there’s the baby meal plan, in which they wait long stretches from one feed to the next. And of course there are all those toddlers waiting contentedly in restaurants until their food arrives.
    The French seem collectively to have achieved the miracle of getting babies and toddlers not just to wait, but to do so happily. Could this ability to wait explain the difference between French and Anglophone kids?
    To get my head around these questions, I email Walter Mischel, the world’s expert on how children delay gratification. He’s eighty years old, and holds a chair in psychology at Columbia University. I’ve read all about him, and read some of his many published papers on the topic. I explain that I’m in Paris researching French parenting, and ask if he might have time to talk on the phone.
    Mischel replies a few hours later. To my surprise, he says that he’s in Paris too. Would I like to come by for a coffee? Two days later we’re at the kitchen table in his girlfriend’s apartment in the Latin Quarter, just down the hill from the Panthéon.
    Mischel hardly looks seventy, and certainly not eighty. He has a shaved head and the coiled energy of a boxer, but with a sweet, almost childlike face. It’s not hard to envision him as the eight-year-old boy from Vienna who fled Austria with his family after the Nazis annexed the country.
    The family eventually landed in Brooklyn, where adapting to America was a trial. When Walter entered school at age nine, he was assigned to kindergarten to learn English, and remembers ‘trying to walk on my knees to not stick out from the five-year-olds when our class marched through the corridors’. Mischel’s parents – who were cultured and comfortably middle class in Vienna – opened a struggling five-and-dime. His mother, who’d been mildly depressed in Vienna, was energized by America. But his father never recovered from his fall in status.
    This early experience gave Mischel a permanent outsider’s perspective, and helped frame the questions that he has spent his career answering. In his thirties, he upended the whole science of personality by arguing that people’s ‘traits’ aren’t fixed; they depend on context. Despite marrying an American and bringing up three daughters in California, Mischel began making annual pilgrimages to Paris. ‘I always felt myself to be European and felt Paris was the capital of Europe,’ he tells me. Mischel, who divorced in 1996, has lived with a Frenchwoman for the past decade. They divide their time between New York and Paris.
    Mischel is most famous for devising the ‘marshmallow test’ in the late 1960s, when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a four- or five-year-old into a room where there’s a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while. If the child manages not to eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll only get that one.
    It’s a very hard test. Of the 653 kids who took it back in the 1960s and ’70s, only one in three managed to