Is 'Gentle Parenting' Ruining French Children?

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. 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 Madeleine 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. Madeleine 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. This is a subject, the 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 there in France. Yeah, so 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 Le Monde. She was writing op-eds. Et bonjour, Caroline Goldman. Bonjour, Léa Salamé. She was on television. Caroline Goldman vous répond. It really seemed like she had become an inescapable figure of the zeitgeist. Je suis psychologue pour enfants et dans parmi les signataires. And she's a very charismatic, very media-friendly person who also carries with her a certain amount of misogyny. 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 has retreated from the public eye. And so anytime she would talk, people would really get very excited to hear from her and start trying to kind of analyze what she was saying. And what was she saying? On leur raconte une très belle histoire sur la parentalité qui est vendeuse, mais qui est tout à fait peu réaliste. Karen, 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 U.S. 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 the U.S. published in 2012 by Pamela Druckerman, who herself is 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 U.S. 10, 15 years ago. But for those who did not read it, just remind us what the book did. Yeah, so 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, you know, 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 know, 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, you know, freedom to explore, but also gives parents freedom to just be. And that's also referring to the French structural support around parenting. That means that, you know, there's childcare from the time that a baby turns two and a half months. And even the official French guidance for having a child under three 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 a really hilarious children's book called "Un Papa," which, broadly speaking, means "That's Not Allowed." And, you know, there's no story. It's just pictures of everything a toddler can't do playing with their father's beard, you know, throw water out of the tub. And that is a, you know, if you look up 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 ou Maman," which means "Daddy or 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, 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 parenting? 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 its psychoanalysts. And one in particular has really shaped generations of parenting, a woman named Françoise Dolteux, who Druckerman also talks about in her book, "Bringing Up Bébé." She wrote a lot of books. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah, she also had a very popular radio program. - Françoise Dolteux, psychoanalyst de l'école freudienne de Paris. - 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 rules. - 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 gonna 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, so not falling asleep with a child the way I did last night, and that I frankly do many nights a week, because I'm not French. - 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 seriously. From a very early age, 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 kid's menu. Right. So that means not snacking on chicken 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 slurpy 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 three-course 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, as it's known 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 contrary 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, you know, positive education and gentle 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 reels, suddenly you're getting a lot of those videos. Oh, absolutely. Since reporting this story, my Instagram is just. I can't even look at it. Just incoherently discordant parenting advice. Well, I just know that no matter what I'm doing, I'm doing 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 Fioza. She's 68 now. She's had 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. Interesting. And wanted to do it differently, and 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, you know, what is the child experiencing that led them to behave this way? 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 have I, what has 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 parenters 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 trigger the behavior, which doesn't sound all that traditionally French. Well, 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, a 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. Has 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 Fioza 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. It used 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 greens. 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, seven more times. A hundred 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 things like her. This is why it's time to have a wider conversation about whether positive parenting has gone too far. All right. Well, we're going to take a very quick break and be right back after a short timeout. We'll be right back. 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 a 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 a 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 and 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, you know, they're not going to be able to do what they want to do. The parents aren't really showing themselves to be authority figures to their kids. The parents should be twice as tall as the child. She even uses, I mean, I don't know where this gets us on the tallness scale, but she uses this metaphor of the giraffe and the ant. And so the parent should be a giraffe looking at their child as if they were a teeny tiny ant. And if the child misbehaves, you know, they stand tall and calmly just set the rules. Mm-hmm. 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 talked 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. Mm-hmm. 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. 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 years in a row. and five into some version of timeout when their behavior feels unacceptable. Yeah. So Goldman, you know, really promotes the timeout 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 timeout 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 timeout, I would say, is different from a lot of other people's. How so? So in her book, Go to Your Room. A Bible for timeout, it sounds like. Very much about the timeout. 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 timeout is warranted. And she's pretty dogmatic about it. So in that case, you know, she says, you don't need to justify the timeout. 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 timeout. And she finds this to be effective. Yeah, not only effective, but the book really suggests that if you use the timeout, 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 is, you know, gives her something, she says that she doesn't want it. And after a few rounds of timeout, 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 timeouts. 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. Hmm. 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 at 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 I'll note, 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, corporal 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. 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 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 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, we're going to talk about what French parents are doing with those mixed signals. So we'll be right 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 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 and work 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 are really important to them and i think that's one of the reasons why french parents are so overwhelmed i think a few generations ago weren't really very popular or very common in france in the same way so at the same time that france is debating how best to 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 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 mention 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 in interestingly you know when you talk to french parents they are often sometimes envious of other countries in particular sweden 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 four percent 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 2025 so last year was the first year since world war ii where there were more deaths than births in france and actually president macon 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 that it's time to make babies that is time to make new french people yeah wow i mean do you see a connection between all these things parental pessimism declining birth rate a big public at times messy debate about parenting that might make the unparenting think to themselves i don't know about that yeah i mean it's hard to draw a direct line between the two but i think it's a good 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 support and right and many many challenges and that really shapes the 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 child care 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 system to help me parent yeah absolutely i think a lot of this is about you know systems rather than individual decisions 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 they're 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 antolini with help from alex barron it was edited by wendy door with production assistance from dahlia haddad it contains music by dan powell marian lozano diane wong and pat mcgusker and was engineered by daniel ramirez that's it for the daily on sunday i'm michael bovaro see you tomorrow you