My husband and I make a great team when it comes to educating ourselves on all things related to parenting. I read the literature; he remembers the content.
This actually applies to all books, not just parenting ones. I’m a quick and voracious reader, and outside of spending time with friends and family, reading is basically the only thing I do for fun. The problem is I can barely recall what I’ve read one month—let alone a few years—after finishing it.
My husband, on the other hand, plays the guitar, draws, watches TV, and stays on top of current events, so he spends a lot less time with his head in a book. What’s more, he reads at a snail’s pace, which makes reading feel more like work to him than leisure. Perhaps because he reads more slowly, though, he takes in every morsel—not only of the books he reads but also of the books I read and tell him about. This reality is particularly salient when it comes to parenting books, because unlike the latest beach read or domestic thriller, parenting manuals contain content I want to remember.
The point of making my way through The Whole-Brain Child, for example, isn’t to pass a few hours pleasurably; it’s to learn effective strategies for raising well-adjusted children. Of course, I have to remember the strategies in order to put them into action. I love it when my husband says something along the lines of: “Remember that idea from Hunt, Gather, Parent about involving your kids in chores early on?”
Of all the parenting books I’ve read, I remember of my own accord just one (and I promise, this is not a hyperbolic under-exaggeration). Or, I should say, I remember one concept from one book: le pause, from Bringing Up Bébé. Written by Pamela Druckerman, an American expat living in France while raising children, Bringing Up Bébé explores the differences between French and American approaches to child-rearing. Part memoir, part guide, the book suggests that adopting certain French parenting strategies can lead to desirable outcomes for children and their caregivers.
One of those preferable outcomes is for babies to sleep through the night at an early age. Aside from good health, is there a more desired end for a baby than consistent sleep in their first few months of life? I think not.
To get to blessedly long snooze stretches, Druckerman explains a strategy called le pause, or waiting a moment before responding to a baby in their nighttime awakenings. Le pause isn’t “crying it out” (I wouldn’t dream of tackling such a controversial topic) so much as it is delaying immediate adult intervention when a baby grows restless, thus allowing the baby to learn how to return to sleep independently.
Beyond the sleep-focused days of newborn care, we can continue to practice le pause before helping a toddler zip their coat, intervening in a playground disagreement, suggesting ideas for filling free time, or offering an opinion on, well, anything. Pausing isn’t the default for American parents in the way that it is for their French counterparts, Druckerman argues, but as delaying adult meddling promotes a child’s learning, mindfulness, independence, skill-building, and determination, she thinks it should be.
I love the idea of le pause, but it doesn’t come easily to me. Anxious by nature, I struggle to sit back and wait while my children struggle to learn a skill, solve a problem, or even just mindfully enjoy a moment. I had to spend a lot of energy in my early years of parenting putting le pause into action. Precisely because it doesn’t come naturally to me, I’ve had to cultivate specific habits to make the practice possible, including walking away while my children put on their coats and shoes, hanging out in an adjacent room while they craft, and busying myself with my own plate while they serve themselves food. It’s almost impossible for me not to involve myself in their process otherwise.
Intentionally pausing in parenting has done more than given my children space to learn, make mistakes, struggle, and grow (which I genuinely believe it has). It has also pushed me to examine other areas in my life where pausing benefits me. One of those areas is spirituality.
For instance, I love to listen to podcasts, and I’m quick to queue up one of my favorites each time I begin my commute or lace up my sneakers. Since I’ve been thinking more again about the value of pausing, however, I’ve gotten into the practice of driving in the quiet or walking with attention to my surroundings rather than what’s going on in my earbuds. Waiting before adding more input to my life has created spaciousness within my mind that feels like breath for my soul.
Pausing has also called me to rethink the value I tend to place on efficiency. When planning for a day of work, child care, or errands, I never used to build in time for red lights, let alone chats with strangers, but now I leave more wiggle room so I can pause without being late. Sometimes this extra sliver of time results in meaningful encounters—a nice conversation, for example, or stopping to admire graffiti—and other times it just means I feel less harried as I go about my daily tasks. Either way, when I have intentionally left room for pausing, I’m more likely to notice God’s presence than I was when I had exactly seven minutes to make it from my driveway to my desk.
Part of what I like about le pause in parenting is that it isn’t a practice of addition. It doesn’t require learning a new skill, buying more products, or introducing another routine into my family life. At its very core, le pause is doing nothing. The same thing goes for le pause as a spiritual practice. It doesn’t demand that I read a new book, learn a supplementary prayer technique, or travel outside the home. Le pause simply asks me to wait: to wait before speaking, to wait before doing, to wait, even, before thinking. And in that time of waiting, I make space: space for my children to do their wondrous work and for the Spirit to move. Maybe they are one and the same.
This article also appears in the November 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 11, pages 43-44). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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