Book Review: French Twist: An American Mom’s Experiment in Parisian Parenting

You’d think that after having read Bringing Up Bébé and French Kids Eat Everything (And Yours Can Too) I might be finished reading French parenting-style books written by North Americans. Well after reading French Twist, perhaps I am.

Not because French Twist is the be-all, end-all of American-French parenting books (I actually liked Bébé and French Kids better) but because I am finally tiring of this sub-genre (and have started reading biographies of Canadian political figures, reviews of which don’t really belong in this blog).

French Twist is different than the other two books because the author didn’t actually live in France ever. So this book loses the armchair travel dimension that the other aforementioned books had. Also, it makes her observations about French parenting more indirect. The author has some French-American friends and she gets parenting tips from them. In a way this is helpful because she is using French parenting techniques in a North American context, and something that I found disheartening about the other books was the realization that societal infrastructure (e.g. daycares, schools, close-knit family) that differs between France and North America has a huge influence on the process of raising children.

This book is also different from the other two books because the author attempts a lot of humour. This was okay for about half a chapter but then it felt tedious.

All three of these books really boil down to a few very useful principles though. Some ideas that have stuck with me include:

1. Authority: A French parent is an authoritative parent. There is no bribing (rewarding) your children to do things. They do things because they are told to do things. That’s how it works.
2. Dignity: I’m not sure if this is the right label, but by using the term ”dignity” I mean not always getting on the floor to play with the kids. Children and adults have separate interests, and adults are not expected to drop all of their interests to entertain their children. The children learn to be self-sufficient and entertain themselves.
3. Food: You can never talk about French parenting without talking about food. I think some of the key concepts are that French adults don’t eat junk food, and French kids occasionally eat junk food but then grow out of it. I remember a scene from one of the books where there was a child’s birthday party with cupcakes, and only the children had cupcakes, not the adults present. That’s just not the way we operate in North America. French kids are introduced to a variety of healthy foods from the time they start solids (blue cheese for babies? They do that… but I have not tried yet with RJ. She has, however, had Brie and Camembert). French people, in general, eat fresher and whole foods. The parents eat healthily so the children eat healthily.

These are just a few of the ideas that have stuck with me. If you are interested in reading more about American-French parenting, I would recommend you start with Bringing up Bébé.

Book Review: French Kids Eat Everything (And Yours Can Too)

Do you fantasize about moving your entire family to France? I know I do. And Le Billon, a Canadian who married a French man, did just that and then wrote a memoir about it (I just started typing “momoir” which I have just discovered is an actual word that would also describe this book).

This book was a bit of a downer actually. In reality, being a foreigner is France is not always that great (I related to this because I have also spent a year living in France). France is culturally very different than Canada. Do they have a better food culture? Yes. I felt that this was the case before I read this book, and reading it confirmed it for me, while elucidating the methods whereby this food culture is promulgated.

At the end of the book Le Billon talks about her return to Canada and how certain aspects of French food culture were pretty much impossible to continue in Canada. Farmers markets and local produce are harder to come by and more expensive (although the French spend a higher percentage of their income on food than we do: check out this nifty diagram). French schools and workplaces are equipped with cafeterias with high quality food, and it would be unusual (and probably considered antisocial) for people to bring their own food from home and eat alone.

There are some food habits that Le Billon’s family picked up in France that they were able to continue in Canada. Some of these were: making time for sit down meals, making meals feel special (I liked the idea that tablecloths were used regularly and setting the table was part of setting the mood), not snacking in between meals, not feeding “kid’s food” to kids but having the whole family eat the same thing, and not using food as a reward or pacifier.

This book also had some tasty looking recipes. It was an interesting read, and like Bringing up Bebe, Parenting without Borders, and How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, it is a good reminder that as authoritative as those BabyCenter emails or your mother-in-law sounds, the North American parenting way is not the only, and perhaps not even the best, way to parent your child.

A

Book Review: Parenting Without Borders

Another book in the cross-cultural parenting practices genre. This was my least favourite one. In any parenting book there is always an agenda: how will reading this book make you a better parent?

In Bringing up Bébé, the message I took from it was that complete self-sacrifice for the sake of your child is unhealthy for both you and the child.

When I read How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, it started to dawn on me that some of the difficulties and frustrations I have with parenting are not inherent to the process of raising children, but are very much a part of the way my culture deals with raising children. In a way it is both hopeful and depressing because there are many societal influences on raising children that are beyond our control.

Parenting Without Borders seemed to focus a lot of using scientific studies to confirm that other specific parenting practices around the world are superior to those that are used in America. “Superior in what way?” You might ask yourself. Well, the book jacket tells us that this book will offer “research-based insight into which strategies can help us improve our own children’s chances.” By this I think is meant their chances at doing well in the global marketplace.

And this is the point at which every parent should stop and ask themselves: what is my goal in parenting? Do I believe that society is so competitive that I need to focus on doing everything I can to boost my child’s IQ? Or do I believe that (HERE COMES MY CHRISTIAN BIAS) God will provide and the goal of parenting is to encourage my child’s appreciation of life and their integration into the family unit in a happy and harmonious way that doesn’t necessarily prioritize them above the other thinking/feeling members of the family? (Okay we do prioritize RJ above the cat though).

Christine Gross-Loh focuses a lot on Japan in this book because she has spent time living there. She also talks about a few other countries. Unlike in How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, she provides very little detail about how the concepts in this book have affected her own parenting. The result is a book that replaces that personal memoir quality with descriptions of scientific studies, making it drier and less relatable than Eskimos.

Overall though, this book did have some interesting information in it. One stand-out part for me was its discussion of education in Finland. By international measurements, Finnish students perform much better than American students. They also have shorter schooldays, no homework or grades until grade 11, more recess and teachers all have Master’s degrees and more autonomy over the classroom curriculum.

Although I find the attitude of emulating other cultures so we can be more “successful” a bit suspect, I read this book cover to cover. Would I recommend it to a friend? If you’ve already read Bringing up Bébé and How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm and are still craving something in this genre, then yes, I would. But it’s not as good.

Book Review: Bringing up Bébé

Vive la France, a nation of formula-feeding, makeup-wearing, relaxed mommies who sleep through the night, according to Pamela Druckerman, an American expat living in Paris. This book was recommended to me by a mommy friend and it might be the best parenting book I’ve ever read. I got this from the library at the same time I got a book about attachment parenting. Let’s just say I did not finish reading the attachment parenting book, but I devoured this one which is both informative and entertaining.

One of the most striking things about French parenting (the way it is described by Druckerman) is its emphasis on pleasure. At one point in the book when Druckerman consults Pierre Bitoun, a French Pediatrician and breast-feeding advocate, to find out more about his work promoting breast-feeding in a country with high rates of formula feeding, he tells her that

“he’s found that French mothers aren’t generally won over by the health arguments involving IQ points and secretory IgA. What does persuade them to nurse, he says, is the claim that both they and the baby will enjoy it.”

(Druckerman also mentions, by the way, that “even though French children consume enormous amounts of formula, they beat American kids on nearly all measures of health.”)

Reading Bringing up Bébé opened my eyes to how a lot of our North American parenting practices are not the only way to parent. Looking at our extreme self-sacrificing parenting methods through the lens of another culture gave me some much-needed perspective (because the other book I was reading on attachment parenting absolutely terrified me).

This book made some excellent points about finding balance in one’s life as a parent, prioritizing one’s relationship with their spouse and their own personhood. I greatly admire the idea that rather than focusing on RJ’s IQ or her acquisition of skills that will give her a competitive edge in society, we might focus on enjoying life together as a family, cherishing small pleasures and allowing ourselves to live fully in this time without trying to rush her through milestones.