After reading Rachelle Atkins' Dispatches essay on France and its parenting practices,
I so want to move there. While she admits that the daycare situation
isn't as specatacular as it's cracked up to be (though still far more
affordable than what most Americans pay for childcare), she raves about
the kid-inclusive lifestyle.
But
that's not the most important thing in the story. To me, the most
significant point comes in paragraph five: "For plenty of French women,
the notion of going without wine, cheese,
cigarettes or caffeine for nine months is as crazy as saying a French
man must go through forty years of marriage without taking a mistress."
That's
right: Pregnant French women slurp wine and chew on soft cheeses with
no shame or guilt! If I may borrow a phrase from the comic genius Yakov
Smirnoff (who is not French, but just go with it): "What a country!"
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