PARIS // In a quayside restaurant in the French Mediterranean resort of La Londe les Maures, a girl of about 4 attacked her moules marinières as purposefully and with as much relish as her parents and older brother.
Her calm maturity presents a sharp contrast to the portrait of her British contemporaries offered in a brash UK tabloid headline: "They wear nappies, drink cola from baby bottles and don't know how to open a book - one teacher's terrifying insight into the five-year-olds failed by their parents."
The examples prove neither that all French infants are obedient and assured nor that all British ones depend alarmingly on adults for every need.
But Pamela Druckerman, an American author who lives in Paris, has drawn on similar snapshots of childhood in reaching the conclusions about French parenting that underpin her new book, French Kids Don't Throw Food.
Much of the behaviour she comments upon will be familiar territory to attentive visitors to France.
But some of those visitors may question how these responsible, socially adept French children grow up to be French adults demanding the right to say "Non" to any reform affecting their lives, and expecting their governments to offer a compliant "Oui" to every single-interest demand.
Druckerman, married to an English sportswriter and mother to a girl of 6 and three-year-old twin sons, sees the point.
"I certainly don't suffer from pro-French bias," she says early in her book. "Au contraire, I'm not even sure I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up into sniffy Parisians."
The UK title, she says when interviewed by telephone at her Paris apartment, is a play on that used by Mireille Guiliano for her bestseller, French Women Don't Get Fat.
Guiliano's assertion was so contentious that its later French version was amended to Those French Women Who Don't Get Fat. Druckerman concedes that her title, too, is not intended as "a statement of absolute fact"; in the US, the book is more neutrally called Bringing Up Bébé.
"The point of my book is not to pretend French children never misbehave," she says. Rather, she explores "positive ways" of controlling them more effectively than is managed by parents of other nationalities, notably British and American.
It is tempting to think of the book as a clever publishing ruse, turning a catchy phrase into an entire study of one aspect of national life. Guiliano's book, after all, has topped charts, been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than a million copies. There is, however, more than a germ of truth in her observation of French family life, where parents - or at any rate the middle-class parents she is chiefly writing about - find it relatively simple to keep order at home or on outings, expecting rules to be followed without tantrums or defiance.
"I don't think parenting is something the French especially think they do well or even in a particular style," Druckerman says. "The early French response to my book is surprise that an outsider has found something redeeming in the way they raise their kids."
Druckerman says American and British parents are more likely to read and put into practice the lessons of scientific studies on children's upbringing, whereas the French tend to treat sons and daughters as members of the family to be included in family activities without special foods or any expectation that if they want something, from sweets to attention, they will automatically receive it.
On the thorny issue of how young Elodie and Pascal then grow up relentlessly questioning authority and expecting the state to acquiesce in their demands as workers, pensioners or users of public services, Druckerman has her own theory.
"There is a certain solidarity French people share," she says, "It starts young and the songs they sing in school, the tunes certainly but often the words too, are similar to the songs that are sung on demonstrations, about people standing together and achieving something."
Druckerman, whose home is on the route of most of the political protests staged in Parisian streets, may be on to something. Successive presidents enter the Elysée promising overdue reforms before buckling at the first sign of collective unrest, and the French are seen - and often see themselves - as caring more about holidays and time off than material wealth. Reliance on the state instead of self-help is commonplace and considered virtuous.
Ted Stanger, another American writer who lives in France and who has written extensively about his adopted country, once said that if leisure were an Olympic sport, France would win gold every time. When he speaks publicly about life in France, he does so with a mixture of admiration and exasperation.
Stressing the value of reporting what she sees, rather drawing the hard-and-fast conclusions her chosen title suggests, Druckerman informs her readers she has no theory on Anglo-American versus French parenting.
"What I do have, spread out in front me, is a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters and reasonably relaxed parents."
And in learning to get on a little better with France and especially Paris, she has made not only "wonderful friends" - often assumed to be impossible for foreigners settling there - but a minor discovery: "Behind their icy façades, Parisian women need to mirror and bond too. They're even hiding a bit of cellulite."
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
