Book #4: Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

I have been in a reading slump lately. It must be the whole nesting phase, but nothing seems interesting to me except working on and planning our house projects and trying to make progress to get everything ready for the baby. Reading has not been on my radar for the last few weeks--which has been weird! I've been missing books lately in my life so I pulled out this one I read back when I was pregnant with Dane, because I remember it having lots of good ideas and thoughts about parenting, which can't hurt as we're about to embark on a totally new phase in our parenting lives. This book was definitely worth a re-read, because it is such an interesting ethnological study on American and French parenting styles, and it exposes a lot of the assumptions we Americans take for granted and show that they aren't necessarily 100% true. For example, Americans have a whole narrative about how parenting is supposed to be this all-encompassing, self-sacrificing endeavor at the expense of all other aspects of your life (obviously, there's lots of people who argue with that, but the fact that they HAVE to argue with that means that it's still there). And according to Druckerman, French parents don't have those sorts of expectations at all; it's much more expected that parents will have separate lives and ambitions and thoughts apart from their parents.

There's lots of other areas in which American and French expectations about parenting differ, and Druckerman, an American who lives and is raising her children in Paris, is well-placed to analyze and discuss them. The ones that I found most interesting were the practical differences between the sleeping and eating habits of French children and American children, because French kids seem to have got it DOWN in ways that most American parents can only dream. For example, most French babies sleep through the night earlier than American babies. After lots of digging and searching, Druckerman figures out that all French parents tend to wait longer to respond to their babies when they first start crying--they give their babies a few minutes to try to go back to sleep on their own before immediately responding to them. This seems like a genius idea, and I remember trying this with Dane (and he did sleep through the night pretty early on, so maybe there is some truth in it!). I definitely want to make sure we try this with baby #2 as well.