Pop over for a drink, Tiger Mother?

The recent case of Xiao Xu Wu, the mother accused of leaving her 5-year-old alone in a casino hotel room while she casually gambled away a Tuesday afternoon has stoked the great fires of parenting wrath. Almost simultaneously, newspapers and the blogosphere have been banging on about a new book, ‘Bringing up Bébé: One American Woman Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting’ and the head-turning pronouncement, at least in its Wall Street Journal adaptation, that French parents are superior and their little Jacques and Amélies altogether more polite, compliant, and well-mannered. To be fair, the book’s premise actually focuses on the expectations of French parenting, not the superiority of French parents themselves, (surely every society produces its fair share of deadbeat parents, even la belle France), but it probably didn’t sound as catchy. It’s been a little less than a year since Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother sent jaws dropping, lips flapping, and online forums into overdrive both for and against hypercompetitive helicopter parenting. We must be due for round two.

The case of Xiao Xu Wu caught my attention because we had a similar experience at a friend’s wedding in Providence, Rhode Island. After the rehearsal dinner, which included several young children, most of the group settled in at the hotel bar. While our baby zonked out at our feet in an infant car seat, another couple retired upstairs with their two young children, only to return empty-handed having left their offspring alone in the room. They didn’t have a baby monitor but, as they pointed out, the children were asleep upstairs just as they would be at home, and couldn’t exactly leave. Perhaps they needn’t have worried about attempts to escape. In Xiao Xu Wu’s case, it was her clever little five year old that telephoned the police to let them know he was all alone watching television in a casino hotel room.

My admission of bringing our baby into a bar, (albeit the open-plan hotel variety and not a dodgy, testosterone-soaked sports bar), could, by itself drive some to frothing apoplexy. Those three words - “baby in bar” - have a startlingly polarizing effect. I’ve seen heated Facebook threads pouring contempt on the glossy Brooklyn mums who show up for happy hour, attempt to park strollers between bar stools and juggle babies and bottles while nursing their solitary glass of Zin. And now The New York Times is reporting on the trend for some apartment dwelling city parents to have drinks at their neighbours' or head downstairs to a bar or restaurant below, baby monitor in hand.

Back to the French and their superior parenting, Pamela Druckerman, an ex-pat American, does make a good point. While American families are packing into “family-friendly” restaurants at 5pm, frenetically ordering off children’s menus (where, incidentally, all food options, except ketchup, are yellow) and entertaining their charges with crayons and iPad apps, French families are dining out leisurely and often at an adult-friendly hour. From pleasant dinners to hassle-free bedtimes, the French simply expect their children to be part of their world rather than begging, cajoling, and shoehorning them in.

I hoped the online remixes of Druckerman’s French parenting observations would reveal critical clues that I could employ to preset our children with an instinctive desire to sit patiently at the table and listen intently to our adult conversations without asking on a loop whether they can pee/have ice cream/go home. The trouble is Ms. Druckerman’s epiphany over the serenity of French mothers and the expert power of “Non!” doesn’t come with advice on what to do when your two year old hasn’t napped and is alternately sobbing and falling asleep in his dinner plate at 5:30pm. Nor does it offer a blue print for handling a child who burns her hand on a roasting hot plate, cries hysterically, spies the restaurant’s pet cat, and spends the rest of the evening under the table.

The reality is every book of parenting advice offers the promise of the golden ticket. And for those of us muddling through the parenting minefield and its ever-evolving ages and stages, we’re willing to hang up our hats, clasp our hands, and look for the Holy Grail of parenting perfection. Huffington Post blogger, Josette Crosby Plank, puts her tongue firmly in cheek in her take on the parenting inferiority complex and manages to brainstorm a list of 104 parent types that are unequivocally doing a better job of parenting than we are. Because, after all, whatever method we’ve been cobbling together couldn’t possibly be just fine. Could it?