Just when the blogosphere finally drew a collective breath after tearing apart Amy Chua’s indictment of American parenting last year, in came 2012 and a new book that offers its own claim to child-rearing superiority. Replace Chua’s Chinese “Tiger Mother” with her high-heeled French equivalent—as chronicled in Pamela Druckerman’s newly published “Bringing Up Bébé”—et voilà. Let the tearing begin.
As critics were quick to point out, Chua and Druckerman’s manifestos seem to occupy the same literary “niche,” for lack of a better word—from their widely read excerpted previews in the Wall Street Journal to their sharing the same publisher. And both books blatantly tap into the crisis mode that seems to characterize the state of parenting, or of motherhood, in present-day America. For Chua this crisis is best defined by what she describes as a defeatist, “try your best” mentality that American parents bestow on their children; for Druckerman, an American journalist raising her three children in Paris, it’s the lack of an authoritative “no” in the vocabulary of American parents.
This is more or less where the similarities between the two books end. Because while Chua’s ultimate goal in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is to vindicate a society that places the child firmly in the center and pushes him or her to as many accomplishments as they possibly can (and then some), Druckerman mainly seems to be interested in learning how to discipline her children just enough so that she can get her own life back. “In France I regularly see what amounts to a minor miracle,” she writes, “adults in the company of small children at home, having entire cups of coffee and full-length adult conversations.” It’s hard to blame her: as she spends her nights miserably awake with her crying daughter, she is amazed to discover that her friends’ babies all sleep through the night; as her kid throws food in a tantrum, she watches in awe as other children sit contentedly through three-course meals; and as her son treats the playground gate as a dare, she is baffled by the sight of other toddlers happily playing in the sandbox.
As honest and as painfully familiar as these observations may be to parents like her, and as cautionary as they may strike those of us who are thinking of becoming parents someday, the book’s most damning chapter actually isn’t about parenting or motherhood at all. It’s about daycare and preschools. It’s about the difference between a society in which child care is funded by the state and where there’s high quality public education, and another which child care runs on exorbitant amounts of money and guilt. (“I want him to have a little more individual attention,” a friend of Druckerman’s from the U.S. tells her when Druckerman contemplates placing her daughter in a full-time day care, which she takes to mean, “Unlike you, I actually love my child and don’t want to institutionalize him.”) Broadly put, it’s about American mothers’ dire lack of help, and in this respect “Bringing Up Bébé” has less in common with “Tiger Mom” and more in common with Judith Warner’s excellent 2005 book, “Perfect Madness.”
Like Druckerman, Warner spent several years raising her children in France where, she writes, she was able to hire a nanny for about ten thousand five hundred dollars a year, put her daughter through a top-end preschool at the cost of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, and then enroll her at a public school from the time she was three, “without ever hearing, without ever thinking, the word ‘guilt.’ ” Covered by the French social-security system, Warner’s friends were awarded four months of paid maternity leave and received cash grants after their second child was born. Then Warner moved back to America. She found herself surrounded by women who were living in affluent suburbs, leading comfortable lives, but who were thoroughly unhappy. “The sense of waste,” she describes her findings. “The diffuse dissatisfaction. The angst, hidden behind all the obsession with trivia, and the push to be perfect.” Warner recognizes these sentiments as echoing the ones Betty Friedan famously described in 1963, and she terms this new phenomenon “the Mommy Mystique.”
“Bringing Up Bébé” could have offered a complementary view of the link between public policy and social norms. But instead Druckerman largely trails off, providing a series of loose observations that fall somewhere between snarky (“Moms do get a bit fatter as you get farther from central Paris”) and Martha Stewart-y (“We have a collection of colorful melamine plates. But for dinner I use white, which makes the colors of the food pop”). That’s too bad, as the spirited reception for a book like “Bébé” attests to a wish for guidance on behalf of American mothers, and the real need for change in how America handles issues like maternity leave, daycare, and public education. The lack of support for mothers in American society, Warner discerns, engenders an entrenched sense of anxiety and that often leads to “hyper parenting.” Without a cadre, or frame, for childhood, many American mothers feel like they are flying blind and solo—resulting in a kind of perfectionist despair. Fatigued, American parents look overseas for the solution, but just may discover that no amount of French or Chinese will sufficiently change anything.
Illustration by Maximilian Bode.
