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For more than a decade, American parents have been trying to be more like the French.
Journalist Pamela Druckerman kicked off the trend with the 2012 bestseller Bringing Up Bébé, in which she painted a picture of well-behaved French children who greeted their elders politely, ate their vegetables, and went to bed on time, leaving their parents free to socialize, drink wine, and generally enjoy their lives. Since then, French parenting has been the subject of multiple self-help books (including a followup by Druckerman) and countless TikToks, as the French mother especially has become an object of yearning comparison for many frazzled Americans.
While moms in the US devote ever-increasing amounts of time to their children, even as they also spend more time at work, the French mother has supposedly figured out a way to unplug, to raise children without being overrun by them.
One 2016 study, which received a new round of attention earlier this year, appeared to show that maternal time investment had skyrocketed across wealthy countries since 1965 — except in France, where researchers suggested that it had actually declined.
Harried American parents are intrigued by “the idea of doing less,” says Margaret Quinlan, a professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and co-author of the book You’re Doing It Wrong! Motherhood, Media, and Medical Expertise.
However, there are reasons to be skeptical of the notion that French parenting — if that’s really one specific thing — is the key to familial happiness. In fact, French child-rearing norms have historically relied on a strictness that Isabelle Filliozat, a French psychotherapist who has written many books on parenting, describes as bordering on abuse. “We are a very authoritarian country with children,” she says.
Filliozat is an advocate of positive parenting, a child-rearing style that’s popular in the US and that eschews time-outs in favor of more cooperative problem-solving. This more kid-centric — and more time-consuming — approach is now gaining ground in France as well.
Not coincidentally, French mothers and fathers are beginning to spend more time with their children, says Ariane Pailhé, a researcher at the French Institut National d’Études Démographiques who studies issues of work and family.
American society still has lessons to learn from France, experts say, especially in the area of family policy. Unlike Americans, for example, French parents have access to a generous and varied system of subsidized child care centers. Like Americans, however, they worry about how to raise children and fight with each other about whose methods are best.
If anything, the American idea of “French parenting” is a fantasy of stress-free, confident child-rearing — one which, at least in our era of parental recrimination and judgment, can feel impossibly far away.
Bringing Up Bébé begins with Druckerman and her husband, both transplants to Paris, taking their 18-month-old daughter on her first family vacation. She is, predictably, making trouble at lunch and dinner: running around restaurants, tearing up napkins, and refusing most of the food. Druckerman observes that the French children at the adjacent tables, however, are preternaturally pleasant and well-behaved. “There just seems to be an invisible, civilizing force at their tables — and, I’m starting to suspect, in their lives — that’s absent from ours,” Druckerman laments.
That invisible force, she writes, leads not just to polite children but also to calm and happy parents who get to eat in peace. They don’t have to “rush off the phone because their kids are demanding something” or pick their way through living rooms littered with toys; in general, fans of French parenting argue that French parents have figured out a way to raise children without sacrificing their adult lives. In a popular video from last year, TikTok creator Isabelle Bertolami suggests that in France, “The kids exist in the parents’ world, as opposed to the parents existing in the kids’ world.”
So how does it work? According to Druckerman, a lot of French parenting is about teaching delayed gratification: Parents don’t rush to soothe a crying baby right away, and they don’t drop what they’re doing to satisfy a five-year-old’s demands. “Instead of saying ‘quiet’ or ‘stop’ to rowdy kids, French parents often just issue a sharp attend, which means ‘wait,’” Druckerman writes. These “small delays” help French children develop “the internal resources to cope with frustration,” according to Druckerman, meaning they’re less likely to throw tantrums, or interrupt their parents having a leisurely coffee with a friend.
To hear Filliozat tell it, though, French parenting involves more than just a sharp word here and there. In Europe, “We are known to be the country where we yell at children the most,” she says.
Indeed, while Americans may see French parents as relaxed, other Europeans tend to view them as extremely strict, says Quinlan. France, for example, was criticized for being slow to ban corporal punishment of children, which it finally did in 2019. (That still puts it ahead of the US, where more than a dozen states allow physical discipline in schools). And one 2022 French survey found that 8 out of 10 parents used harsh tactics that ranged from yelling at their children to spanking, humiliation, and blackmail.
French views of children are also deeply rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, which posits that people come into the world full of violent and sexual impulses, Filliozat says. Parents have been instructed to curb those impulses by setting rigid boundaries and limiting physical contact between children and their mothers, including breastfeeding, she says. (Historically, France has had one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in Europe.)
The positive parenting movement in France aims to change this dynamic by spreading an approach based on seeing the child not as an adversary, but as a person to be understood. “In positive parenting, you always ask yourself, ‘Why is he doing that?’” Filliozat says. For example, if a baby drops his spoon from his high chair repeatedly, he’s not trying to annoy or test you — he’s just excited to learn how his hand works.
Filliozat’s advice has caught on, sparking heated debate between her devotees and those who favor a more authoritative (some would say authoritarian) approach, as Lauren Collins reports in the New Yorker.
French psychologist Caroline Goldman, for example, advocates time-outs for children as young as one, and punishments for talking too much, refusing to say hello, or displaying a “contemptuous attitude.” She is the author of a book called “File dans ta chambre!” — or, in English, “Go to your room!”
Goldman says she believes that far from being too strict, French parents are actually becoming too permissive. The country suffers from “an exponential phenomenon of extreme parental tolerance to the incivilities of children,” which is causing problems for schools, she told me in an email.
Druckerman, for her part, told New York magazine in a recent interview that French parents have become “a bit more anxious and a bit more outcome oriented” since her book came out 12 years ago. Le Monde even has a parenting columnist now, Druckerman noted, although the column is “still quite French,” taking on philosophical questions like, “Do our children belong to us?”
Part of the mystique of French parenting has always been the idea that the French don’t need all the discourse and debate that frequently consume American parents — that they have, as Collins puts it, “some collective, ineffable talent for raising children without second-guessing themselves.”
But today, it seems, they are second-guessing both themselves and one another. Americans no longer have a monopoly on parental anxieties and dueling orthodoxies, to the extent they ever did.
It’s not clear whether French parents were ever as relaxed as the American stereotype has made them out to be.
That 2016 study showing French mothers spending less time with their kids since 1965? Though widely cited, it has been criticized for using poor-quality data. (Neither of the study’s authors responded to requests from Vox for comment about it.)
Intensive parenting, the contemporary norm of investing large amounts of time and money into child-rearing, remains less common in France than in the US, Pailhé said. But increasingly, she says, French parents believe “it’s really important to spend quality time with children.”
Raising a family really is easier in France in some respects: For example, high-quality subsidized child care centers called crèches are open to babies as young as three months, allowing parents to go back to work without spending their entire paychecks on day care. French parents also do not face the same stigma around using formal child care that families experience in the US, where some mothers still face the expectation that they should stay home with their children, even if it’s financially infeasible. In France, “the norm is that mothers work even when they have young children,” Pailhé says.
That work may also be more manageable than many American jobs, thanks to the famous French 35-hour workweek, Quinlan noted. French parents may indeed be less overwhelmed than their American counterparts, in part because there’s less work and better child care, she says.
It’s also the case that there is no single French parenting culture — or American parenting culture, for that matter. The parents Druckerman knows generally come from “the educated middle and upper-middle classes” in Paris or its suburbs, she writes. But working-class and immigrant parents in France often have a different experience — for example, immigrants can struggle to access child care, and some experience a significant wage penalty for motherhood, unlike women born in France.
Nor do all American parents idealize, or even care about, French child-rearing practices. Interest in Gallic parenting norms may be more prevalent in “the parenting spaces that white parents are engaged in,” says Mia Smith-Bynum, a professor of family science at the University of Maryland, College Park who has studied how Black families in the US raise kids. Black parents may have their own take on purported French parenting norms, like strictness or expecting children to conform to adult spaces, Bynum says. For example, “it’s a distinctly Black American parenting style” to monitor children and their environments closely because of the unique risks Black children face. “You tend to let your kids have less autonomy than what would be expected, because the risk of making mistakes” can be life or death, Bynum says.
But the interest in a (maybe-mythical) cool and calm French parent reflects a hunger among some American parents for an escape from what can feel like the all-encompassing demands of contemporary family life. “American parenting culture is very child-centric,” Bynum said. That has real benefits, but it also puts a lot of pressure not just on parents but on children, who must bear the burden of their parents’ constant attention and cultivation.
As a parent of two young kids, I even found my heart sinking a little as I spoke with Filliozat. A lot of what she said about child development sounded right to me, but at the same time, positive parenting — in the US or in France — can be taxing. Figuring out why a child is misbehaving takes time and energy, and at the end of that process, the spoon is still on the floor.
Sometimes, I don’t want to be told to work harder on parenting. Sometimes, I want permission to do less.
Perhaps this is what the dream (if not the reality) of French parenting offers Americans. Doing less, Quinlan said, isn’t just about having time to finish a phone call or enjoy a nice dinner. It’s also about giving kids more independence, more of a say in who they are and how they spend their time, and a greater “ability to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them.”
All of that is difficult for parents in the US, where streets are unsafe for playing, adults and children are vulnerable to overpolicing and violence, and norms dictate heavy parental involvement.
It’s probably difficult in France, too. But it feels like a worthy goal to strive for.
