Wait before you walk in
An American mother in Paris kept meeting babies who slept through the night at two months, and got curious why.
Pamela Druckerman moved to Paris with a newborn and noticed something French parents did that she couldn't name at first: when a baby cried at night, they didn't rush in right away. They waited, often just a few minutes, before deciding whether to step in.
She started calling it the Pause. The logic isn't to ignore a crying baby; it's that infants naturally stir and briefly cry between sleep cycles, the same way adults do, and rushing in immediately can interrupt a baby who was about to resettle alone. Give it a short window first, the reasoning goes, and many babies learn to link sleep cycles on their own within a couple of months.
Druckerman ties the Pause to a broader pattern she calls the cadre, or frame: French parents she interviewed tended to hold firm on a small number of boundaries, like bedtime and mealtimes, while leaving generous freedom inside them, letting a child choose what to do within their room, or which two hours of weekend television to use.
The boundary, in this account, isn't the opposite of freedom. It's what makes the freedom inside it feel safe enough to use.