Bringing Up Bébé

The Spinach Won't Bite

There is a scene Pamela Druckerman could not get out of her head for years. She is on vacation in a small French seaside town with her husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter, and they decide to eat in restaurants twice a day. It turns into a disaster. The little girl knocks over the salt shaker, tears open the sugar packets, screams to be let out of the high chair, then runs off toward the port. The parents eat in shifts. One of them gets ten minutes with the fish while the other chases the child. They leave enormous tips, because somebody has to be thanked for the cleanup.

At the next table sit two French children of exactly the same age. They are not watching anything, and nobody has handed them a cookie to keep them quiet. They are just sitting. Waiting for their food. Then they eat the fish and the vegetables, and when their parents order coffee, they stay at the table. There is nothing on the floor. This is where Druckerman starts to suspect that some invisible, civilizing force hovers over French tables, and that it is missing from hers.

Druckerman is an American journalist. She is no Francophile, and she never set out to write a book about raising children. She moved to Paris because of a British journalist, had her three children there, and was simply exhausted and curious. So she started treating dinners and playground afternoons as reporting assignments: a notebook in the diaper bag, questions for the neighbors, interviews with doctors and researchers. What came out of it is this book, which is not a collection of tips but a long, self-mocking piece of reportage about how children are raised in another culture.