French Children Don't Throw Food - Plot & Excerpts
WHEN I CALL my mother in america to tell her that Bean has been accepted into a state nursery – we call it ‘daycare’ – there’s a long pause on her end of the line. ‘Daycare?’ she asks, finally. Friends back home are sceptical too. ‘It’s just not a situation I want,’ sniffs a marketing consultant whose son is nine months old, about the same age Bean will be when she starts. ‘I want him to have a little more individual attention.’ But when I tell my French neighbours that Bean has been accepted at the crèche, as the full-time state nurseries are known here, they congratulate me and practically crack open the champagne. In America, the word ‘daycare’ conjures images of paedophiles and howling babies in dirty, dimly lit rooms. ‘I want him to have a little more individual attention’ is a euphemism for ‘Unlike you, I actually love my child and don’t want to institutionalize him.’ American parents who can afford it tend to hire full-time nannies, then start easing kids into preschool when they’re two or three.
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