Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

1. The point of the cadre isn't to hem the child in; it's to create a world that's predictable and coherent to her. "You need that cadre or I think you get lost," Fanny says. "It gives you confidence. You have confidence in your kid, and your kid feels it."

2. In France, the idea that kids are second-class beings who only gradually gain status persisted into the 1960s. I've met Frenchmen now in their forties who, as children, weren't allowed to speak at the dinner table unless they were first addressed by an adult. Children were often expected to be "sage comme une image" (quiet as a picture), the equivalent of the old English dictum that children should be seen but not heard.

3. A child who can play by himself can draw upon this skill when his mother is on the phone. And it's a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In another study, of college-educated mothers in the United States and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

4. All this baking doesn't just yield lots of cakes. It also teaches kids how to control themselves. With its orderly measuring and sequencing of ingredients, baking is a perfect lesson in patience. So is the fact that French families don't devour the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven

5. In the book A Happy Child, French psychologist Didier Pleux argues that the best way to make a child happy is to frustrate him. "That doesn't mean that you prevent him from playing, or that you avoid hugging him," Pleux says. "One must of course respect his tastes, his rhythms and his individuality. It's simply that the child must learn, from a very young age, that he's not alone in the world, and that there's a time for everything."

6. He and his colleagues found a remarkable correlation: the longer the children had resisted eating the marshmallow as four-year-olds, the higher Mischel and his colleagues assessed them in all sorts of other categories later on. Among other skills, the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning.

And according to a report that Mischel and his colleagues published in 1988, they "do not tend to go to pieces under stress."