Is 'Gentle Parenting' Ruining French Children?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:35)
From 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.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (1:53)
Hi. It's nice to be here.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:55)
So you are based in Paris. And from what I understand, 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.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (2:12)
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.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:24)
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.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (2:40)
Yeah, well, I've certainly seen a lot.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:43)
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?

**Madeleine Schwartz** (2:56)
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.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:10)
Bonjour Caroline Goldman.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (3:12)
She was on television.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:13)
Caroline Goldman, vous répond.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (3:15)
It really seemed like she had become an inescapable figure of the zeitgeist.
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, The first one is sort of like Francis Bruce Springsteen. He's a very, very beloved celebrity who is retreated from the public eye. And so anytime she would talk, people would really get very excited to hear from her and try to kind of analyze what she was saying.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:54)
And what was she saying?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:54)
We tell her a very beautiful story about parenting, which is a seller, but which is not very realistic.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (4:00)
Every appearance she had had a very clear point, which is that she felt that children were being in many ways I think it's really important to remember that the French people were not just led 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.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:25)
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.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (4:43)
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 Bebe, which was 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 best seller since.

**Michael Barbaro** (5:11)
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.