Is 'Gentle Parenting' Ruining French Children?

From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. In France, the question of how best to raise children has long seemed like a settled matter. After all, the country's reputation for strict parenting is revered for its results, well-behaved children who from Toddlerdom clean their plates right down to the strong smelly cheese. But a new generation of French parents are questioning those methods, adopting a gentler more American approach and igniting a fierce national debate that has both sides accusing the other of being harmful to kids. Today, my conversation with reporter Madeline Schwartz on why this subject has become so divisive in France and what it tells us about the eternal search for the right way to raise children. It's Sunday, August 9th. Madeline Schwartz, welcome to The Sunday Daily. Hi, it's nice to be here. So you are based in Paris, and from what I understand, this is a subject that one we're going to be talking about that is very close to you because you, yourself, were raised in both the United States and they're in France. Also, my mom is American and my dad is French. They split up when I was just a baby, and so I grew up going between both New York and Paris and went to school in both places. Well, I would argue that that makes you the ideal guest for this conversation that we're about to have about French versus American style parenting because you've experienced both of these cultures in a pretty meaningful way. Yeah, well, I've certainly seen a lot. I'm sure you have. Okay, I'm curious, when were you first made aware of this kind of fierce debate in France about parenting? Yeah, so a few years ago, a woman named Caroline Goldman started appearing everywhere in French media. She's a psychologist, and she was being interviewed in the world. She was writing her beds. And she's a very charismatic, very media-friendly person who also carries with her a certain amount of mystique in large part because her father is a very famous pop star named Jean-Jacques Goldman, who I don't know who the right analogy would be, but is sort of like France's Bruce Springsteen. He's a very, very beloved celebrity who is retreated from the public eye, and so at any time she would talk, people would really get very excited to hear from her and try to kind of analyze what she was saying. And what was she saying? On the other hand, she had a very clear point, which is that she felt that children were being in many ways misled by their parents, that what we might know in the United States as gentle parenting had essentially led a generation of French children astray, and that it was time to go back to a more disciplinarian form of education. So this is quite surprising because we here in the US tend to think about French parenting as quite rule bound, and the word gentle is not the one I would apply to that tradition. Well, for a very long time, French parenting has been very rule bound and very defined by specific rules that children must follow in order to be integrated into society. And I think that a lot of Americans who know about French parenting do so because of a book called Bringing Up Baby, which was published in 2012 by Pamela Druckerman, who herself as an American journalist, who moved to France and had three kids here, and has been a huge bestseller since. Right. I read this book even before I had children. It was just a mega thing here in the US 10, 15 years ago. But for those who did not read it, just remind us what the book did. Yeah. It's really an homage to French parenting. One of the things that I think made it so interesting to American parents is that it describes how you can have kids according to the French way and not have them take over your life. That French parenting is really a mix between encouraging children to live by certain rules, but also giving them a lot of freedom. And that in turn creates children who are well-behaved, polite, eat the food on their plate, and also you can have kids and go on and live your adult life. And as I recall, the revelation, the aha moment for especially American parents who were reading Druckerman's book, was that this could be a model for parents who felt like they were drowning in their obligations to their kids. Yeah. A lot of what Druckerman talks about is how to raise children in a way that gives them freedom to explore, but also gives parents freedom to just be. And that's also reflected in a lot of the French structural support around parenting. That means that there's child care from the time that a baby turns two and a half months. And even the official French guidance for having a child under free really emphasizes the importance of relationships between parents that, you know, having a child doesn't mean giving up on your couple. And all of that, I think, it feels to Americans very different from what the very intensive, all-consuming way that a lot of Americans expect to and end up raising their kids. Give us some examples of how dominant that philosophy became in France. Yeah, well, when I was working on my piece, I came across it a really hilarious children's book called "Om Pupa," which Bradley speaking means, that's not allowed. And you know, there's no story. It's just pictures of everything a toddler can't do, play with their father's beard, you know, throw water out of the tub. And that is a, you know, if you look at that book on Amazon, it has like 400 positive reviews. And even in the culture, the way that parenting is portrayed is very different. There was a big movie about 10 years ago called "Papa With Mama," which means daddy and mommy, basically, which is about a custody fight. I mean, it's a comedy, but it's about a very intense custody fight between a divorcing couple, except that in this case, each of them wants the other parent to get custody so that they can go off and live their lives and pursue their career dreams elsewhere. They're fighting to not raise their children, essentially. Exactly. And that was a box office hit. And what are the origins, based on your reporting, of this more, you could call it detached, you could call it balanced style of French parent, and where did it come from? So a lot of parenting advice really comes from these very long, very French traditions of psychoanalysis and France is a country that really loves it's psychoanalysts. And one, in particular, has really shaped generations of parenting. Women named Francois, who Drugerman also talks about in her book, bringing up baby, she wrote a lot of books. She also had a very popular radio program, and she really put forward, you know, this sort of double way of looking at parenting, where on the one hand, she was the person in France who really revolutionized the idea of children's rights, that children were people, you could talk to children like people. And on the other hand, her view of the world was very hierarchical. She was essentially a Catholic bourgeois grandmother, who really adhered to a lot of France's most rigid cultural roles. Just give us some examples of that structure, what it actually looks like. Yeah, so I mean, take bedtime, I think, you know, traditionally there's been a sense that, you know, the child is going to go to bed at a very specific hour that's setting the schedule for his day. And that also allows parents to then go off and have a conversation, have dinner, have a glass of wine, and live their life as two adults, rather than as two parents. Right. And not falling asleep with a child the way I did last night, and that I frankly do many nights a week, because that is not the French model, no. Well beyond bedtime, what best illustrates this philosophy? Another big area is food and eating, obviously France is a culture that takes food very, very from a very early age children are expected to eat. like adults to eat vegetables to eat complicated foods and to eat them at set meal times. Even in, you know, any daycare that you will go to a child who's just barely one is likely going to be served, you know, a three-course meal, including cheese. The idea is that from the beginning, you want to be encouraging kids to eat like adults to eat healthily and a diverse range of different flavors and tastes, you're not going to be content to have them order off the kids menu. Right. So that means not snacking unchecked nuggets and mac and cheese all day, which is very much the American model if we're being honest. No chicken nuggets, no toddler little slurpee pouches. It's complex meals from a pretty young age. Right. So given the strength of this powerful French parenting tradition that is focused on rules and the recourse meals at age one and making sure that a kid is in his or her place, when did this new way of thinking about parenting that Caroline Goldman sees as problematically permissive start to emerge in France and challenge what you're describing. So gentle parenting or positive parenting of its own here in France starts making its way to France in the 90s. And it comes from English-speaking countries from the United States, from Australia. And compared to what had been the norm in France, it's really focused on centering the child. So in any situation, the way that it's practiced in France, you're really asking, you know, what does the child need in this situation and going from there? Right. It's child centric, by definition. Exactly. And I would say that the influence of positive education in general parenting really picks up steam with social media because that space is full of people, some of whom may or may not have a scientific background, giving advice to parents, and obviously a tired parent that's often the first place they're going to look. Right. And as we know, once you click on one of those wheels, suddenly you're getting a lot of those videos. Oh, absolutely. Since reporting this story, my Instagram is just a can't even look at it. Just incoherently discordant parenting advice. Well, I just know that no matter what I'm doing, I'm getting wrong. Well, who are maybe the biggest figures or figure promoting positive parenting in France? Someone who is a big figure in the positive education movement in France is a woman named Isabelle Fiosa. She's 68 now. She's been a big presence in the French parenting space for a long time, and she's very, very widely read and known, very successful, one of her books sold half a million copies. She is really omnipresent, you know, giving advice on television, on Instagram, on podcasts. She's a really unusual and interesting figure. You know, she says that she came to positive parenting because of her own parents who were abused as children and wanted to do it differently in that she inspired by them, got very interested in positive parenting. And what's a specific example of the kind of quote positive parenting that she is promoting? So one of her big things is that a child under three doesn't understand the word no. And that actually saying no to a child under three is just going to begin to set off his or her stress response. And so if you want to tell a child don't do this, you have to frame it in, you know, a positive way. So instead of don't throw your hat on the ground, it becomes let's keep our hat on. Instead of don't open the door, it becomes let's keep the door closed. Whenever a child is acting out, the parent should immediately start to think like what is the child experiencing that led them to behave this way. So in one of the interviews I watched with her, she's asked about a mom who's changing her child. I think it's a son and the child has started to hit her. And so what should the mom do in that situation? And she says, you know, you say stop to the child. But instead of saying, hitting your mom is bad, you should pause and think, okay, what if I, what is the mom done that could have inadvertently or not encouraged this behavior? And for the diaper changing, you know, she would say, okay, well actually lying down flat being changed, that's a situation where the child has no power. And so in order to get them to stop hitting, you have to start giving them a degree of autonomy by either having them participate in the process or changing them standing up. And then they'll stop hitting their mom. Hmm. So the thinking here is basically replace a lot of that traditional philosophy about rules and discipline with more empathy, more mutual respect, more sensitivity around what the child is going through. Yeah. And the positive parenter say that positive parenting is not permissive parenting. There still are rules, but rather saying you're going to try to explain why the rule exists or why behavior isn't allowed. And if someone acts out, the move isn't to punish the child, but rather try to understand why they acted out. Right. And think perhaps a little bit about what the parent may have done, as you said, to check her the behavior, which doesn't sound all that traditionally French. Well, yeah, I think it's not for nothing that there's been a fair amount of pushback against a lot of this philosophy and, you know, in large part of generational divide about who is choosing to follow one set of rules and guidance and who's choosing another set. Right. Of course, this is why we're making the episode because it feels like this positive parenting movement has caught on in France and so much so that there's now a backlash. Is that been your experience? And if it is, just describe it. Yeah. I mean, I think when you go somewhere where there are young kids, you do hear a lot of the effects of advice such as the ones that feel that and her colleagues give. I mean, one very obvious one is when kids want ice cream, and it wasn't an appropriate time for ice cream to be, you know, no, that's it. And now you hear parents saying, it's not time for ice cream now. We'll have ice cream after the meal. But first, you have to eat your green beans. And then you can have ice cream. And of course, I'm only saying this once, but I think anyone who's been around small kids knows that that exchange can happen. Two, three, four, five, six, 100 times. Yes. So anecdotally, you're seeing the infiltration of this new style. Yeah. And it's not just anecdotally. This has really become part of the French official guidance for young children as well. So much so that last year, for example, the French government put out new guidelines for people who work in daycares or who watch young children. And in those guidelines, it states very explicitly that if a child misbehaves punishment of any kind is not allowed, including, for example, a timeout. Wow. Not even a timeout when a kid is really crossing the line. Yeah. And that's part of what gets someone like Caroline Goodman so up in arms because she says tools like timeout are really essential for raising young children. You know, if you can't use a timeout, there's no way that they'll be able to understand that they've done something wrong. For her and for the people around her and who thinks like her, this is why it's time to have a wider conversation about whether positive parenting has gone too far. Alright, well, we're going to take a very quick break and be right back after a short timeout. So metal, let's talk about what this pushback led by Carolyn Goldman, sorry, American pronunciation, looks like once she makes the decision that this positive parenting movement has gone too far. Yeah. So Goldman is someone who's not without controversy. She's made some polarizing statements about mental health, saying, for example, that depression is an illness caused by lack of love. But that's not really why people gravitate towards her. They're really drawn to what she has to say about positive education and gentle parenting, which is what exactly? Yeah. So Goldman works as a therapist for kids in the suburb of Paris, right to the south of Paris. And she has said that about 10 years ago, she began to see an explosion of behavioral issues that she believes were not tied to anything intrinsic to the children, but were tied to essentially bad parenting that parents were letting go of their authority. And she's seeing this in her own practice. Yes, that she's seeing, you know, kids who are hitting kids who are not able to sit through a meal, and that all of this really has to do with the way that they were raised. She said, you know, essentially, encouragement is great. Love is so important, but what parents really need are setting limits and boundaries, and that the kinds of things that positive parenting encourages, like, you know, for example, repeating the same thing over and over to children is not good for children, because it doesn't teach them what a limit is, and it's also not good for parents, because it leads to parental burnout. And she's written two books about this. One is a guide for, you know, clinical practitioners. One is a guide for parents, which is called Go To Your Room, which I think gives a general sense of her philosophy. You know, in both of those, she talks about her practice and what she's seeing. She uses a lot of tests involving drawings. If a child draws everyone in their family the same size, you know, that might be for her a sign that the parents aren't really showing themselves to be authority figures to the kids. The parent should be twice as tall as the child. She even uses, I mean, I don't know where this gets us on the atormous scale, but she uses this metaphor of the draft and the aunt. And so the parent should be a draft looking at their child as if they were a teeny tiny aunt. And if the child misbehaves, you know, they stand tall and calmly just set the rules from 20 feet in the air, right? Just like a giraffe. Exactly. Madeline, how many people in the psychiatric or psychological world of France are joining Goldman in this viewpoint? So Goldman is definitely not alone in this. And in fact, in 2022, she and over 350 other early childhood experts wrote an open letter in the figure of saying that too much positive parenting was harming children and that kids had been essentially abandoned by adults with exclusively empathic attitude. She also has numerous students who I talk to who really follow her set of rules and who told me, you know, that in many cases what they're seeing in their clinics or with their patients isn't necessarily that the child has a particular set of issues, but that the parents actually are the ones who need more guidance. So she sees a very straight line connection between the importation of this positive parenting style, this empathetic approach from parenting to a set of problems she's seeing over and over again with misbehaving children and parents who are not establishing enough firm boundaries. Yeah, absolutely. And she's been very, very vocal about that. Let me zero in on the time out because I think it will loom very large for a lot of our listeners who are parents or remember being parented. I mean, I remember being put in time out a bunch as a kid. I even recall being sent to my room once during my own birthday party, which I don't personally recommend. But as a parent, I definitely have put both of my children four and five into some version of time out when their behavior feels unacceptable. Yeah, so Goldman, you know, really promotes the time out as a solution to a lot of parenting issues. And she actually has often talked about sending her own daughter. She has four kids into her room during her birthday party. So it sounds like you guys would have a lot to talk about there. But the idea is really that the time out does two important things. One, it gives the child a very clear idea of what the boundary is that they have crossed. And two, you know, it really gives everyone exactly what it says, a time to calm down and avoid escalating the conflict. But Goldman's definition and her use of time out, I would say, is different from a lot of other people's. Also. So in her book, go to your room. A Bible for time out, it sounds like. Very much about the time out. She has a list of behaviors that should be forbidden from the age of one. So, you know, already a really young age. And those include things like complaining, making too much noise, throwing dishes on the floor, opening the fridge, stealing the remote. And she says, you know, that if after having explained one, two, or three times, that that's not acceptable to the child, then a time out is warranted. And she's pretty dogmatic about it. So in that case, you know, she says, you don't need to justify the time out. You don't enter into a discussion. And if the child pushes back, especially an older child, then you can tell that child, okay, you've earned 20 more minutes of time out. And she finds this to be effective. Yeah, not only effective, but the book really suggests that if you use the time out according to what she suggests, you're not only going to have children who know the rules, but polite, well-behaved children. And she has, you know, examples of, for example, a young girl who's really rude about everything that her mom cooks. And every time her mom gives her something, she says that she doesn't want it. And after a few rounds of time out, she's pretty happily eating everything, including the food that everyone admits is like really not well done. The food critics in the house just make sure I understand what's different about her timeouts than the traditional notions of them. Yeah, so, you know, I think there are two main differences. One, you're starting with very, very, very young children, a one-year-old, that's not a very old child. Right. And two, starting at the age of four, she really recommends longer time out, so at least 30 minutes for a child over the age of four, which goes against a lot of what has been studied about timeout, which are generally very short periods, where a child is either in their room or in another space. Well, what are the positive parenters saying about Goldman's view of timeouts? I have to imagine they disagree with it, and especially because the French government's own guidance says this is not a good idea. Yeah, so they are very, very against this. And they say the timeout is the wrong solution, especially this version, which involves very young children and very long timeouts, that it's not a calming way of dealing with a problem. It's isolating for the child and may even go against the rights of a child. And actually, a few years ago, 280 other early childhood experts, not the ones that sided with Goldman, but the ones who are against her signed a different open letter in Le Monde, a different paper this time going against the timeout. So they are very concerned about this. Just to keep score, that's 280 experts versus 350 or so on the other side, which may or may not mean much of anything. But what's fascinating to me is this open war of open letters and how much in French society people are passionately debating the best way to raise children. Yeah, and I think it gets that all sorts of larger questions. I mean, one of the interesting things that came up in my reporting is this other wrinkle to the debate, which is that in 2019, France passed a big law, which is colloquially known as the anti-spanking law. And it forbids physical and psychological violence against children, which all note, you know, is still legal in big parts of the United States. But one of the things that's confusing about this law is it uses this term of ordinary educational violence. That is outlawed, but it never defines what ordinary educational violence is. So you have a situation in which, you know, Goldman and her allies are saying, of course, Corbal punishment, of course, yelling at a child, belittling them. That's all really bad, but the timeout is totally acceptable. And on the other hand, other early childhood educators who are saying that timeout is as bad or should be avoided as much as those other examples. So in their minds, something like a timeout is ordinary educational violence essentially. Exactly. So it sounds like this law in combination with those French government standards, you mentioned earlier are probably entrenching both sides of this now very public disagreement in France about the best way to parent. And I have to imagine that this is putting French parents into something of a bind as they try to figure out the best way to do their job as parents. Oh, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I found really interesting when I was reporting this piece and talking to both sides of the debate is that everyone could agree that parents were really lost, but each side believed it that it was the fault of the others who were giving the wrong kind of advice. What happens for parents is, of course, everything that's being said is so incredibly contradictory, you know, be kinder, be more firm, say yes, say it no. And what are they supposed to do with all these mixed signals? Well, we're going to take one more quick break and when we come back talk about what French parents are doing with those mixed signals. So we'll pay back. So Madeline, how exactly, based on your reporting, are parents in France navigating all of this right now? Yeah. So I think that part of the reason that this debate is so entrenched is that it brings up all sorts of other questions that French parents are really navigating right now about you know, what is the place of children in society and is it up to society to accommodate children or is it up to the children to accommodate the world of adults? And I would say that traditionally in France, having kids is not really a big part of one's public persona. It's not something that people really talk about. It's not something that's totally socially valued and the work of having children and raising children is sort of hidden. And part of the reason why I think this debate is so lively is because we're at a kind of inflection point in the way that parents do want to raise their children. Hmm. Just explain that inflection point. Yeah. So over the course of my reporting, I talked to a sociologist who studies parenting in France who coined this term called parental pessimism, which I don't know if I could think of a more French concept than that. But I thought it was really interesting, you know, he said that one of the reasons why French parents are so overwhelmed and stressed is that they're spending a lot of time obviously with their children, raising their children, thinking about their children, but the world that's valued is the world of jobs and work. Hmm. And I think you do see a change generationally of people who want to do things like bring their kids to restaurants and talk about their kids and things that I think a few generations ago weren't really very popular or very common in France in the same way. Hmm. So at the same time that France is debating how best a parent, French parents are asking whether French society is putting enough value on the very act of parenting. Do you see the debate as causing that question to be asked? I think it's definitely one of the reasons why this debate has lasted so long and why people get so incensed and emotional about it. You know, I think there are a lot of changes that French parents feel about the way that they were raised and the way that they want to raise their children and no one's really figured out the solution just yet. And so it just brings up a lot of emotions for everyone. You know, I, when I was reporting this piece, I just happened to go to a party with a lot of young parents and, you know, how it is, you go to a party and you mentioned what you're talking about. And people were so divided. Some people were very much, you know, Goldman is great, positive parenting has gone too far. Parents really need to, you know, remind themselves that they're adults, that they have lives and thoughts outside of being parents and, you know, on the other side, people saying this is essentially child abuse. Wow. I guess this somewhat tortured party that you went to where all the parents are disagreeing about how to parent strikes me because when we all read bringing up Bebe, decade or so ago, here in America, there was, I think, a somewhat broad sense of envy that the French had figured out parenting. And from what you're describing, the current situation, the current dispute makes me think that the parenting grass wasn't really all that greener to begin with. Yeah. I mean, interestingly, you know, when you talk to French parents, they are often sometimes envious of other countries in particular Sweden. Hmm. Why? So, Sweden is a country that came up a lot in my reporting and in particular, in some of the work done by the sociologist who I talked to, who talks about how in Sweden, compared to France, you know, children are just more visible in public spaces. And there are more amenities for them, you know, you just see them more out and about. And he really links this to parental happiness. He did a study about how much parents complain about their children and found that French parents complain a huge, huge, huge amount and that there was a big difference between Sweden and France. So, in Sweden, 4% of parents said that having a child limited their freedom and in France, it was almost 40. Wow. That's a huge gap. And at the same time, the number of people actually wanting to become parents or becoming parents in France has really declined 20, 25 so last year was the first year since World War II where there were more deaths than births in France. And actually, President Michael has now talked about wanting to have demographic rearmament. That's his term, not mine and send letters to every 29-year-old telling them that the clock is ticking. And then it's time to make debas. It's time to make new French people, yeah. Wow. I mean, do you see a connection between all these things, parental pessimism declining, birth raid, a big public at times, messy debate about parenting that might make the un-parenting think to themselves, I don't know about that. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to draw a dry line because, you know, this is a period where you see declining birth rates all over the world, including in the U.S. and including in Sweden, where all the happy parents are. But I think that, you know, it's kind of highlighting this larger point, which is the parenting advice really focuses on the individual decisions that a parent is going to make. But as a parent, you exist in a wide world with, you know, more or less supported and many, many challenges. And that really shapes everyone's experience. Right. The infrastructure that you're describing may shape the experience of parenting as much if not more than whatever style of parenting you choose to deploy. I think about childcare in the United States, which is, I think we can all acknowledge woefully insufficient for the job. And as many of my colleagues at the Times can tell you when they talk to people about why the birth rate is declining in the United States, many people will say there just isn't a solid system to help me parent. Yeah. Absolutely. I think a lot of this is about, you know, systems rather than individual decisions. Mm-hmm. Well, I do want to end on individual decisions because that's ultimately what we're talking about here. You are yourself, a parent, and of course, you were yourself, parented, and you live in France. So how are you thinking about which side of the ledger you're going to be favoring as you approach the job? Yeah. Well, you know, I had not engaged in the world of parenting advice until I started working on this piece. And it's kind of overwhelming how much of it there is and how contradictory it is. But I think when you're a parent, you know, there are just people telling you all the time like what you should be doing and ultimately you have to trust your own instinct. You can't parent by someone else's rules. Right. You listen to your inner voice and sometimes it's good enough, which is literally one of the many philosophies that now guides parents, the good enough parent. Yeah. And sometimes that's really just the best you can do. Well, Madeline, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Today's episode was produced by Tina Antillini with help from Alex Barron. It was edited by Wendy Dorr with production assistance from Dahlia Hadad. It contains music by Dan Powell, Mary and Lasano, Diane Wall and Pat McCusker and was engineered by Daniel Ramirez. That's it for the Daily on Sunday. I'm Michael Barron. See you tomorrow.