Pamela Druckerman

What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper that tracked pregnant women who planned to breast-feed. Researchers gave some of the women a two-page handout with instructions. One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, re

rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that.

An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.

psychologist quoted in Maman! magazine says that babies who learn to play by themselves during the day—even in the first few months—are less worried when they’re put into their beds alone at night.

Thompson’s view reflects what seems to be the consensus in France: making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustration turns them into happier, more resilient people. And one of the main ways to gently induce frustration, on a daily basis, is to make children wait a bit. As with The Pause as a sleep strategy, French parents have homed in on this one thing. They treat waiting not just as one important skill among many but as a cornerstone of raising kids.

When I bring Bean to get her first inoculations, I cradle her in my arms and apologize to her for the pain she’s about to experience. The French pediatrician scolds me.

“You don’t say ‘I’m sorry,’” he says. “Getting shots is part of life. There’s no reason to apologize for that.” He seems to be channeling Rousseau, who said, “If by too much care you spare them every kind of discomfort, you are preparing great miseries for them.” (I’m not sure what Rousseau thought about suppositories.)