## Metadata - Author: [[Pamela Druckerman]] - Full Title: Bringing Up Bébé - Category: #books ## Highlights - What’s even stranger is that these French babies all eat at roughly the same times. With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about eight A.M., twelve P.M., four P.M., and eight P.M. ([Location 1143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1143)) - Dolto’s core message isn’t a “parenting philosophy.” It doesn’t come with a lot of specific instructions. But if you accept that children are rational as a first principle—as French society does—then many things begin to shift. If babies understand what you’re saying to them, then you can teach them quite a lot, even while they’re very young. That includes, for example, how to eat in a restaurant. ([Location 1652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1652)) - Unusually for a parenting expert, Dolto was apparently an excellent parent to her own three children. ([Location 1672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1672)) - what a child most needs, according to Dolto, is “a structured inner life able to support autonomy and further growth.” ([Location 1698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1698)) - Spock’s giant tome Baby and Child Care seems like it’s straining to contain every possible scenario involving children, from obstructed tear ducts to (in posthumous editions) gay parenting. But Dolto’s books are pocket-sized. Instead of giving lots of specific instructions, she keeps returning to a few basic principles and seems to expect that parents will think things through on their own. ([Location 1717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1717)) - French parents have made Dolto (standing on the shoulders of Rousseau) part of their parenting firmament. When a baby has a nightmare, “You always reassure him by speaking to him,” says Alexandra, who works in the Parisian day care. “I’m very much in favor of speech and language with children, even the smallest ones. They understand. For me, they understand.” ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1733)) - Lara keeps using the French word doucement—gently. (After this, I start to notice that French parents say doucement all the time.) ([Location 1750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1750)) - Scientists have figured out that you can tell what babies know by measuring how long they look at one thing versus another. Like adults, babies look longer at things that surprise them. Beginning in the early 1990s, research using this method has shown that “babies can do rudimentary math with objects” and that “babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do,” writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.11 A study at the University of British Columbia found that eight-month-olds understand probabilities.12 ([Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1759)) - There’s also evidence that babies have a moral sense. Bloom and other researchers showed six- and ten-month-old babies a sort of puppet show in which a circle was trying to roll up a hill. A “helper” character helped the circle go up, while a “hinderer” pushed it down. After the show, the babies were offered the helper and the hinderer on a tray. Almost all of them reached for the helper. “Babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy,” Paul Bloom explains. ([Location 1764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MNNAODK&location=1764))