MomScout Book Review: Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé

Tried to be honest and honestly, I appreciated what she was going for AND (I think) the French style of parenting...

Before you’ve read on in this book review of Pamala Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé, before you’ve made a judgement on how well I know my parental stuff – let me stop you.  My babe is only coming up on a year, I’m addicted to parenting books in general, AND I am also, now admittedly…a Francophile. 

Though I completely lost it, at 6 years old, at my first group French lesson (or perhaps because of it) I have always been attracted to the culture. I relish the fact that my grandma Esther, though I never knew her, gave me a respectable 25% of French-heritage blood running through these little Midwestern veins. When choosing between Spanish or French in middle and high school, the choice was clear. My first *ahem* true love was also a French person during a three week high school cultural exchange and, well, the list goes on.

I admire the French style of cooking, French beauty (Chloé! Dior!), and even, it appears, the French way of parenting outlined in Bringing Up Bébé. With it’s emphasis on encouraging development that ultimately (hopefully) gives us thoughtful, logical, well-mannered little people…it was hard to not be attracted to the idea.

It was one of those books that disappoints you as soon as you start it because you know you’re going to finish it off so soon… 

Druckerman’s writing style feels earnest and slightly nerdy. She is self-deprecatory; for instance (and I’m liberally paraphrasing here) “My children are wild animals that scream if their food touches, while the French kids are sitting there quietly having a spot of chocolat for their one afternoon snack.”

I appreciated the way that she spelled out the basic mechanics of raising a French child (state-funded crèche at 3 months, same for the école maternelle starting at age 3) but also recognized and attempted to unpack the underlying philosophy. French parenting, according to Druckerman, is very, very different than American parenting. Reading it made me feel a little embarrassed for her and  in my own everyday way, to take a step back and ask myself:

“Is how I’m taking care of my little one best for her or best for me? And is there a difference?” 

The point that stuck with me the most was that what is good for the mother and father is assumed to also be good for the child. Druckerman gives an example of having to corral her little boy back from the gates of the small park where she was having a lovely conversation with another French mother. The French maman watches in bemusement for a while and then basically tells her to stop messing around and say no like she means it. She goes through a mild internal dillema but it finally “works” after two or three determined “NONS” – les mères continue their conversation, les enfants play happily within their pre-determined boundaries…

…everyone wins.

I feel as if there are a lot of pressures here in the US to be hyper-vigilant about what-if scenarios that are very, very unlikely to occur. It’s as if moms being in crisis mode all the time is normal and even a mark of a truly great mother. I dislike this because it puts too much pressure on moms and, IMHO, isn’t realistic. Yes we should keep our children very, very safe; no, they shouldn’t be kept in a bubble that excludes them from the real world of cause and effect as it could limit their own personal development (and also make us moms go totally nuts-o crazy with unrealistic expectations). I have more faith in our littles than that!

Overall the book read a little Carrie Bradshaw for my taste but like I said: accessible and interesting. I tend to shy away from any writing that makes blanket statements about “us vs. them” but it was a fun read, and I don’t think too many punches were pulled at the expense of the French women’s movement (hopefully). Druckerman has a few other books, including one about international rites of infidelity – and for a quick, accesible, fun-and-a-little-sexy read, I’d pick it up 🙂 Honestly, I’d pick up her other parenting books too.

You? Have any experience parenting away from your native homeland? Think French parenting is spot-on or too harsh? Have you read Bringing up Bébé and have…thoughts? I’d love to hear from ya in the comments!

<3, Alex (Chief MomScout)

Yeah, it's still going off.

"A mind needs a book like a sword needs a whetstone."
-Game of Thrones

"Dude, did you read the last Turgenev? It's so sick. This dude is like all over the subject of love and serfdom."

Gary Shteyngart's coming out with a new book, Super Sad True Love Story, and during an interview for the NYTimes, proceeded to say some pithy things about Fox News (Fox Liberty Ultra,) the state of literacy in this country, his own path to author-dom, and see-through jeans.

"'Why do you think you write about the present when so many novelists are immersed in the past?'
'How could one not write about today? It’s so fascinating. When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.'"

I loved The Russian Debutante's Handbook, appreciated Absurdistan, and am really looking forward to this next one. He's a funny one, similar in writing style, in my opinion, to Vonnegut and Tom Robbins.

Oh god, okay. Here's an interview he did for the first print issue of Gigantic magazine about meats. It's called On Meat Over Meat: Dinner with Gary Shteyngart by James Yeh. It's literally all about meat products. Enjoy!

I really love when authors give typeface its due right @ the end of the book.

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

FUCK THAT.

"Just like H&M and Walmart, who destroy perfectly good unsold clothing rather than donating it to charity, Borders is apparently planning to destroy tens of thousands of books when they close more than 200 Waldenbooks stores later this month."

via Perez Hilton (good on him)

Email these guys and tell 'em what you think of this:
rmarshall@bordersgroupinc.com (Ron Marshall, CEO)

mbierley@bordersgroupinc.com (Mark Bierley, CFO)

mdavis4@bordersgroupinc.com (Mary Davis, Borders Spokesperson)

***

Addendum:
After thinking about this yesterday, I realize the sale of clearance books vs. the donation of clearance books (what are they selling at Waldenbooks these days anyways?) is not a travesty but is still very frustrating. A better word. I also realize that Waldenbooks is a discount bookseller and that it's great the books there are available to own for less than Borders, Barnes and Nobles, and snobby indie bookstores are selling 'em, but I don't know...I just wish I was a PR maven and could be like, look, I know you don't want to spend practically anything on marketing/advertising in order to keep your consumer base happy, and that's great, BUT I THINK YOU COULD TURN THIS INTO A BLITZKRIEG OF GOOD PR. Have a group of your sickly pale office workers go out into the community and bring a couple of schools/retirement homes some boxes of books. Take pictures. Tell a local newspaper. YOU'LL BE HUGE.

***

AddendumAddendum:
I realize that Borders and Waldenbooks are both already huge. But they could be universally, morally, ground-breakingly huge. In a way that would sew the seeds for future imminent huge-ness, even when small bookstores and the internet and the iTamp/Kindle are really taking over. This corporate strategy is already kind of in place (Target esp. makes a big deal of doing good works/donating to community causes and the United Way) and I just think it's too good to disregard.

RIP Frank McCourt

“After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”

That's an inspiring quote in a great voice.

Love this Cover

Book IMDb

This would be so, so awesome. As someone who likes to watch the entire movie to the end of the credits and all (thanks David Sanford), I would love the opportunity to see whole book production teams online. Having "intelligent reviews" is good too but the lead team is going to have a hell of a time editing all those, and there will most likely be overlap with Amazon et. al. I''m just saying, I mean, if they need help 'n all, they know where to go, right?

http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/10/21/a-dedicated-book-review-site/

http://community.toc.oreilly.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2142645%3ABlogPost%3A2741

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/on/internet_book_database_98668.asp

A Sort of Response.

So cousin Cynthia brought up a good point, that much feminism can be easily discounted as radical and subsequently shallow because those that say "men are to blame for our troubles" are not taking responsibility for their own well-being. I agree that there's really no point in making generalizations in any sense, for instance saying all women hate the idea of nurturing children or that it's the duty of all men to care for and protect their presumably female partner. I also agree that it's the easy way out to get mad at the man who writes against men coddling women - no one should be overly coddled lest that action lead to incidences like the "spoiled rich chick" video

In the preface to "Prone to Violence," the author Erin Pizzey writes this, which I think captures a solid point against radical feminism: (though I tend to believe the more subtle the incident(s) is, the more dangerous and potentially insidious.)

"I remember that I was particularly interested in finding if anyone else had come to similar conclusions on why some people actually choose violent relationships - which is the major theme of this book. But in response I mostly met again the hostility of those people who insisted that all women were simply victims of male oppression.

It seems to me that America's Women's Movement is much more broadly based than its British counterpart. It was with members of the National Organization of Women that we had the best dialogues - at seminars and meetings where people wanted to share a sense of bewilderment arising from the fact that now there were established refuges, so many women seemed to be merely using them like revolving doors. They would come to the refuges when the level of violence got too much, only to return to their violent men for another few weeks, and then come back to the refuges again for help."

The thing that makes me pause and think here is that I'm not saying that women should be fighting/educating themselves/simply being aware of feminism (now in its third wave) so they can extricate themselves from violent situations, nor am I saying that women have to band together to right the wrongs that men are enacting on them at a national level. In fact, there are many men out there that help the cause because, as any logical sane person realizes, the good of humanity (presumably the ultimate goal of said humanity) has a better chance of being achieved if the pool of humans to enact that good is bigger and makes no arbitrary distinctions based on gender.

That said, my response to people like this guy is that he's dumbing down or personalizing women as a whole when he writes out against us. Not all women think that it's a man's fault when they get pregnant, or get pregnant when they don't want to at all. In fact, most women that have any ear to the ground and/or access to education and/or good, strong role models know that there's Planned Parenthoods nationwide. What I'm concerned with is larger-scale social changes for women that have no been enacted because we (I'm guilty) are too lazy or scared to admit that change still needs to be made.

A rant. Not the best, but something.

this looks promising:

:the right to write

also, this looks like a radical opportunity, a real chance to donate my time to an organization that deserves and could benefit from it.

more later, just had to start off the deluge.