'Bringing Up Bébé' : Critiquing the Newest Parenting 'It' Book

What would happen if Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame had three children, settled in France instead of Italy, then read Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua's diatribe against American parenting with both horror and assent, and sat down to pen her own book? You'd have something akin to the new "it" book about parenting, Bringing up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, by Pamela Druckerman. It smacks of an attempted repeat run to the bank exploiting American's parental insecurity with another foreign-mothers-are-better book. (And in defense of my own cynicism, all three books share the same publisher.)

There's much in this book to critique. The style is annoyingly chatty, the evidence for both her allegations and her adulation largely anecdotal. There's more fault to find, but this book, though sans mention of God or any spiritual reality beyond the material, raises an essential question that matters to parenting women of faith.

But first, for those who haven't read it, here's what you need to know. Druckerman, a former writer for The Wall Street Journal, moves to Paris with her British boyfriend and daughter, has twins, and while immersed in early motherhood notices an ocean of difference between French and American parents and parenting styles. The French are, simply put, calm and relaxed. Their children don't act up in public. They happily eat every kind of vegetable. Babies don't throw food from high chairs. They learn to sleep through the night by three months. French mothers don't gain much weight while pregnant, regaining their skinny, sexy figures soon after. They don't breastfeed or stay home with their kids. They put their babies in all day state-run daycare with anticipation rather than guilt. They maintain their parental authority at all times, but give their children freedom within a few simple, enforced rules. And many more feats besides: Vive la France! How do they do it?

American parents, well, just aren't as clever or capable. American mothers give up sexy clothes and stilettos and don sneakers, diaper bags, and extra weight. Parents readily sacrifice their own schedules and pleasures for the betterment of their offspring. Many approach childrearing as a project or a race, speeding their child through her developmental stages as though toward a finish line. This hypermanagement and overscheduling yields guilt-ridden, anxious, and exhausted parents. The children are worse: demanding, spoiled, and rude. They don't eat their vegetables or sleep through the night until they're a year old. Quelle diffférence!

Druckerman is clearly over-dazzled by the French, but she does have a point—or, several points. Who doesn't get annoyed with badly behaved American children, and doesn't it seem that there are a lot of them? Who hasn't been squeamish around mothers infantilized by their children, who slavishly attend to their child's every want and need? And we all know parents with racing stripes on their diaper bags. (Christian parents are not off the hook here; In fact, I believe they're more likely to engage in these excesses than any other group of parents.)

But Druckerman's solutions can be exasperating. After all, who wouldn't be calmer with state-subsidized 8 am-6pm daycare, where most women park their infants soon after birth? Life indeed would be quieter if we felt no obligation to play with our children at the park but sat at an adjacent café sipping crème lattes while they played. American mothers would indeed be more relaxed if they created a lifestyle and a culture that banished mother-guilt entirely.

To bridge the gap, Druckerman explains these behaviors: "What fortifies them is the belief that it is unhealthy for mothers and children to spend all their time together. They dread the risk of developing a relation fusionnelle, where the needs of both are too intertwined."

If the author has aptly characterized the French, then they are right about this essential point: Parents should not attempt to be the be-all, end-all in their children's lives. As I've stated elsewhere, parenting is not our highest calling. Such beliefs are often unhealthy for both parent and child, no matter the age of either. And this belief is partly to blame for some of the excesses of American over-parenting. But the efforts to ameliorate the intensity, sacrifice, and humble labor of child-rearing with a return to full-time work soon after birth, all-day daycare, and an unyielding grip on grown-up freedom and pleasure, is hard to adulate. Parenting is not our highest calling—but neither is work, or our own wants and pleasures.

The most common Christian response to the intensity of parenting has been to heighten and valorize it with a theology that lays the primary burden of producing children who were smart, successful, and most of all, saved and godly, at the feet of mothers. To get this done, mothers need to spend as much time as possible with their children, until the current expectation in some circles that Christian mothers spend virtually all their waking hours with their kids. For some Christian parents, a relation fusionnelle is not the fear but the goal of parenting.

Both sides err. The corrective to the stresses and anxiety of parenting is not diluting our commitment to our children with a greater commitment to ourselves and to the workplace. Nor is it distorting Scripture to teach women that their exhaustion is for the best of all causes: the saving of their children's souls. The corrective is real wisdom, found in the first commandment: to love God first, above all others. Here is relief, hope, rest, wisdom, and the ability to love our children—and ourselves—with God's own love and grace. Here is a way forward that teaches us to treasure the fleeting hours of childhood without idolizing either our children or our mothering.

Bringing up Bébé will not take you there. But you'll find some amusement and enlightenment in Druckerman's struggles, and you'll learn a little French along the way. Pourquoi pas?

Leslie Leyland Fields is the author of seven books, including Parenting Is Your Highest Calling … and Eight Other Myths. She is a columnist for Christianity Today, a mother of six, and lives in Kodiak, Alaska.