Bringing up bébé(s): 5 years later (part 1)

Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and infant sleep

This spring will be five years since we moved to France, just slightly west of Paris. During my first days here, among unpacked boxes, fighting off first trimester nausea and vomiting, I started reading Bringing Up Bébé (or French Children Don’t Throw Food, as it’s called in its UK edition) by Pamela Druckerman. At that point, I had a 15 month old, who was born in Ireland, and another baby on the way. That 15 month old is now 6 years old, the babe that was in my womb is 4. We also have a 9 month old baby, our second child born in France. I’ve navigated pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, crèche, school, and everything else here for 5 years - the longest I’ve lived in one country in my adult life.

I thought it would be fun to reread the book now that I have a fair bit of experience under my belt, and compare notes with Druckerman. A few key differences I should note between my experience and hers: I am married to a French man, which she is not; I don’t live in Paris proper (we are in the suburbs), which she did; and she wrote her book 12 years ago, so things have probably changed a bit - the French have been influenced by social media parenting gurus too, although perhaps not as much.

This will be a series of 3 or 4 parts, but I haven’t finished the reread yet, so I can’t be sure. Nor am I sure when the next parts will come… within a few weeks or a few months, who knows? Thanks for putting up with my rather haphazard approach to this Substack.

Ok, that’s enough by way of an introduction. C’est parti!

Pregnancy

Much of what Druckerman says about the experience of being pregnant in France rings true for me. I don’t recall any doctor or midwife telling me what I shouldn’t be eating or drinking - no one is going to call you out on the occasional glass of wine or a bit of unpasteurised cheese - but there was a lot of emphasis on my weight. When I was pregnant with my second, I cried after a midwife expressed shock that I had gained so much weight since my previous appointment. I meekly offered that I had been out for dinner the night before and eaten more than usual, and she scoffed that “you don’t gain that much weight from one meal!”

The evening before my third was born. I don’t think I’m hiding my “get this baby out” feelings very well…

This experience was more or less repeated when I was pregnant with my third child, and at each appointment I was admonished to keep an eye on my weight gain. The apparently outlandish amount of weight I put on, coupled with the fact that all my babies have been big (9lbs, give or take), has led almost every French medic I’ve encountered to be convinced that I must have gestational diabetes. No matter that I did the test during each of my pregnancies and easily “passed” - they treated me like I must have fudged the results, or somehow cheated the system.

Not that it’s the point, but I didn’t even gain a particularly large amount of weight compared to non-French standards. (Also, I know that GD is not about weight gain, and that plenty of women with GD are very healthy. Apparently French medics missed the memo.)

Birth

Her account of giving birth in France also very much reflects my experience: it is absolutely assumed that you will have an epidural, and if you seek an unmedicated birth, no one is impressed. It’s just a choice, possibly a slightly masochistic one. She writes, “In France, giving birth without an epidural isn’t called ‘natural’ childbirth. It’s called ‘giving birth without an epidural’ (accouchement sans péridurale).” It is standard to meet with an anaesthetist a few weeks before your due date to run through any previous adverse reactions to epidurals, to talk about possible side effects, and so forth. In my second pregnancy, when I had planned to attempt a VBAC, I mentioned that I was hoping to avoid an epidural. The anaesthetist smiled and said, “sure, no one will force you”, but he did not seem particularly convinced that I would succeed in my endeavour.

In my third pregnancy, I explored the option of a VBA2C, and was referred to a hospital which is known to be supportive of low intervention births and vaginal deliveries after c-sections. When I checked the stats, the hospital did indeed have substantially lower rates of epidurals, c-sections, forceps, and other interventions. So, it is possible to pursue low intervention births if you wish, but generally, not many people do. It certainly isn’t a topic of conversation during pregnancy, and there is no implication that one way of giving birth is better than another. After my c-sections, people expressed sympathy for the recovery process but no one ever pitied me for having “missed out” on a vaginal birth. I was doing well and so were the babies, and nothing else was anyone’s business.

My view from my hospital room, complete with the Eiffel Tower

Breastfeeding

Druckerman doesn’t have much to say about breastfeeding, beyond the fact that most French mothers don’t do it for long. This is indeed my impression, although I haven’t interrogated any French mums about how long they breastfed their babies. That said, our family doctor always seems surprised that I’m still breastfeeding at 6 months, 7 months, 9 months. She mentioned that she tried to breastfeed her own children but it was too painful and so she decided to formula feed. She certainly doesn’t discourage me from breastfeeding, but she also lauds my increasing use of a bottle as sensible, good for me, and good for the baby.

On the one hand, it seems much psychologically healthier to remove much of the pressure and emotion around breastfeeding. I don’t get the impression that many French mums are beating themselves up for not breastfeeding at all/long enough/whatever. Before giving birth, I was asked if I intended to breastfeed and when I said yes, an appointment was made with a breastfeeding specialist for a day or two after delivery. No one was trying to push me one way or the other, though.

On the other hand, if extended breastfeeding is a goal for you, I think it would be difficult to find support. Breastfeeding beyond a year would be considered by many to be eccentric at best, and indicative of some kind of Freudian nightmare in action at worst. I can’t recall ever having seen another mum breastfeeding in public, and when I’ve had occasion to do so myself, I’ve felt very self-conscious (although no one has ever said anything).

Jesus was definitely too old to be breastfeeding by the flight into Egypt. (The Rest on the Flight into Egypt c.1620, Orazio Gentileschi)

Infant sleep

This is where I felt that Druckerman’s assertions were unfounded, or at least vastly exaggerated. It’s true that, as she says, the question “il fait ses nuits?” (essentially, “is he sleeping through the night?”) is posed with great frequency, starting from when the baby is a couple of months old. However, her claim that almost all French babies are sleeping through the night by four months old does not tally at all with what I’ve heard from French mums. I’ve heard plenty of stories about babies still waking at night beyond the first year, and even of children of preschool age who won’t stay in their beds all night. I have never had the impression that French parents are able to emit some kind of cool confidence in their babies’ ability to sleep for long periods that magically leads to a 2 month old sleeping for 12 hours overnight.

I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind about Druckerman’s claims. She mentions in passing that sleeping “through the night” is considered by French parenting manuals to mean sleeping for stretches of 8 hours, but she never unpacks this further. The fact is, though, that in most western Anglophone cultures, a reasonable bedtime for babies and young children is usually considered to be in the ballpark of 7-8pm. Even if wake up time is 6am, that means at least a 10 hour night. Meanwhile, bedtime for French children seems to be substantially later. My impression is that most of my kids’ peers - who are 4-6 years old - go to bed around 9-10pm, possibly even later. Babies, too, are put to bed later than seems typical in my Anglo experience. So even if babies are “sleeping through the night”, that means something quite different than it would elsewhere.

I think she is probably right, though, that French parents are less likely to go in for “branded” sleep approaches, where the parents follow a particular book or philosophy. Equally, they are unlikely to think that there’s anything wrong with letting your baby cry for a while to see if they can fall back to sleep of their own accord, but would probably find the idea of leaving your baby to cry endlessly to be bizarre and unnecessary. They would also probably find the idea of bedsharing, for any reason other than trying to catch an extra hour or two of sleep in the morning, to be bizarre and unnecessary. Of course, this is mainly speculation, based on what I’ve picked up from passing conversations with the parents of my kids’ friends, and the advice/expectations of doctors.

Ok, now for an anecdote.

After my second child was born - the first baby I delivered in France - there were no private rooms available, and so I had to share a room with another woman. She had just had her third baby, Émilie, and seemed a little neurotic (hey, no judgement, I’m a little neurotic too). My son had been born around 10.30pm, but by the time I made it back up to the ward after recovery and such, it was nearly 4am. After a bit of broken sleep, I wanted to call my mum at 7am. I could see that my roommate was already awake, so I asked her if she would mind if I made a call.

“Please wait until 7.30, so that Émilie can learn to sleep through the night.”

Just a reminder: Émilie had also been born the day before. If she had said “please wait until the baby wakes up”, that would have seemed fair, but my mind absolutely boggled that a baby sleeping for literally the first night of her life was already being coached in how to “sleep through the night”.

So maybe those are the mums Druckerman was talking to. All jokes aside, I think that where Druckerman is completely right is that the French are much more inclined to see their babies as being capable of learning good habits from a very young age, including learning that their parents have needs - such as sleep - too. She writes that, “They view learning to sleep as an aspect of learning to be part of the family, and adapting to what other members of the family need”. This, I think, is a fair observation, and on this matter in particular, I’m fully with the French.

Day 3 in hospital, so obviously he was already sleeping through the night like a champ. (Reader: he was not sleeping through the night like a champ.)

In fact, I think this is a core part of what distinguishes French parenting from UK/US parenting. The French have a deep respect for their child’s autonomy, but they equally believe that the child must respect the autonomy of others. This means that whilst of course parents adapt their lives when they welcome children, they do not expect that their lives should be turned completely upside down. Their own need for an identity beyond parenthood, for sleep, for a social life, and so on, must not fall prey to the whims of a tiny human. The idea of the “martyr mum”, which I think is expected and praised at least to some extent in the UK and US, is abhorrent to French sensibilities.

This theme will definitely come up again in the next parts of this series. Thank you for reading! À la prochaine!