Ah! Looks like somebody is trying to pull an Amy Chua by playing up American mothers' insecurities on how much they suck at their job to sell books. Again.
She lost me at "the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old". She either had a completely skewed sample or her sample lied through their teeth. Although... a lot of French houses are built out of rather more solid materials than American ones so I guess when you close the door you can pretend your shrieking infant *is* sleeping.
French toddlers are well behaved in restaurants because they are not welcome there. French parents mostly don't take their kids eating out, and the few you see in restaurants (except maybe McDonald) are 1) self selected and 2) likely having a once in a year experience.
A few more facts. Public schooling starts at 3 (2yrs9months). Kids go to school 8:30am-4:30pm MTThF throughout preschool and elementary school. Middle school run on an 8:30am-5:30pm schedule, MTThF with half day on W or Sa. High school is (as mentioned above) 8:30am-5:30pm M-F. A large majority of French women work full time, local government sponsors after school care. No soccer moms in France, and a lot less emphasis put on sports (no school teams!) and after school activities (there is not much time anyway).
French people are less geographically mobile than Americans, and the scale of the country is completely different. Kids get farmed out to grandparents a lot.
And I really, really wondered in which alternate reality those example French parents lived. The consensus amongst my friends is that if you hear a mother screaming abuse at her child in the US she will always turn out to be doing so in French. The "easy, calm authority" is usually backed by threats (spanking is still very much "in" in France). And let's not mention the school system.
The "n'importe quoi"... IMO the issue is not that American kids have no boundaries, it is that the boundaries enforced on them are in somewhat different places.
The part about food is totally true though.
