How French Men Figured Out The Secret To Happiness
RE Blogged from askmen.com
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It’s eerie to read about your life in someone else’s book. In my wife Pamela
Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé (which is now outselling
all my own books by a sobering factor), she describes the moment our doctor in Paris told
us we were going to have twins.First Pamela recounts her own ecstasy: “I
feel like I’ve been given an enormous gift: two pizzas.” Then she notices that
I’m possibly already having a heart attack:“I’ll never
be able to go to a café again,” he says. Already he foresees the end of his
free time.“You could get one of those home espresso
makers,” the doctor says.But four years later, I still get coffee
in the cafe every day. I buy my wife’s argument that French parenting is good for
kids. (I know I have to say that, but I really do believe it.) But perhaps more
importantly: French parenting is good for dads. My life with three children is full-on and
frequently insane, but not as insane as it might be in another country. A basic idea in Bringing Up Bébé is that French parents
don’t live in the service of their kids. They don’t attend every soccer
practice or stand in the rain waving through every ride on the merry-go-round. At bedtime
here, the kids are supposed to stay in their rooms and let their parents have adult time.
There’s no, “OK, just one more ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,’ and
then…” Kids here learn that parents have needs too. In short, French
parenting isn’t just about sacrifice. And generally speaking among French
parents, sacrifice isn’t anything to boast about.
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I’d always sensed that was what I wanted. A fortnight after my first child was
born, a friend came to stay. He was getting divorced. It was a Saturday, and we sat
watching a random English
soccer game on TV. “Doesn’t your wife mind you watching soccer on the
weekend?” he asked.“She encourages it,” I explained.He said his wife insisted that their weekends belonged entirely to the children.
He mostly agreed with that, he said, except that after a stressful week’s work he
would have loved just one cappuccino in a café on Saturday morning.
“You’re not allowed that?” I asked. I’d always assumed that coffee
in a café was a human right. But his wife had forbidden it.They order
this matter better in France. The French view, as Bringing Up Bébé
explains, is that a useful gift you can give your children is two happy parents in a happy
marriage. I admire parents who can be happy never having coffee in a café, but
I’m not one of them. If I sacrificed the café, I’d resent my kids. And
it would be illogical, too. Should you sacrifice cafés and everything else for your
kids, just so that they can grow up and sacrifice everything when they have kids? Call me
selfish, but the endless cycle of adult sacrifice doesn’t appeal.So when
we became parents, we gradually started copying most French parents around us. When our
kids were very young, we put them into the excellent state crèches
(daycares). In playgrounds I often read the paper instead of cheering on the children
every time they went down the slide. At my daughter’s ballet class now, I drop her
off and go to get coffee. No parent stays to watch. I suspect you aren’t even
allowed to.Even then, life is still hardly endless days in cafés. I
sometimes envy husbands with stay-at-home wives, guys who can call from the office and
say, “Honey, the boss is keeping me here till 10 tonight.” But I am not one of
them. My wife works (she spent three years researching French parenting, contrary to the
suggestions of certain pundits that she just wrote about a couple of rich Parisians she
happened to meet). I don’t have a boss. I just
sit alone in a room writing articles. So if I need to be home at 4 p.m., I can be. I
have no excuse.A lot of childcare is fun. A lot isn’t. Children are from
Venus and adults are from Mars. We often find their conversation as dull as they do ours.
I want time with my children and also time with a café crème. So far — vive
la France — I’ve just about hung onto both.Pamela
Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé is available on Amazon.