Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Why French Parents Are Superior

A friend's daughter ( who is TAG) lived in France during her junior year in high school as an exchange student. She went to school M-F 7 am to 5 pm. She had an hour and a half at lunch to go home and eat with her family. Saturday's were from 7 am to 1 pm.

There are no after school lessons or sports. Kids go home and stay home. Maybe the kids are just too tired to but the adults? LOL

I know I'm exhausted after a full day of driving kids to school, sport events, lessons etc.

Yes, dd11--I thought it was due to my wonderful parenting. Then I met dd4. Not so much. ha!

I read this book (UK version) and it is well worth reading.
The article doesn't do it justice.
I wrote more than this, but I'm moving it to my blog instead.

The assertions made about kids in that article were explained really well in the book. I can see how the French methods could work.

If you are wondering more about the book, I'd be happy to tell you more.

You can leave your post here and still post it on your blog.  I was unsure because I asked when we were working on lucounu's gifted wiki project.  The answer is yes, you keep the rights to put your words in a forum and in a blog and in a wiki, as long as the words you're "sharing" are your own.  I think they said if you copy your own post into the gifted wiki it was called "gifting".   I guess.  That's the way I understood it.  Also it's bad form to delete stuff from your forum posts because it changes the conversation.  It's fine to edit for clarity, edit to add new information, or post that you've changed your mind.  AFAIK.

On topic, my boy was born grown.  He sat nicely in a restaraunt in a chair or lap, never a high chair.  He just always acted so grown up.  Then we got a baby girl.  OMG the boy acts like a boy now!!  It comes and goes weither he's a rude pest or excellent child.  I mean stuff like interrupting me on the phone.  The American brand parenting books I'm trying to osmosize are "the nurtured heart workbook" and "playful parenting".  They both suggest his "annoying pest" days are because his "cup" is feeling low.  (energy, love, self-worth).  

An old Cherokee told his grandson, "My son.  There is a battle between two wolves inside us all.  One is Evil.  It is anger, jealousy, inferiority, resentment, lies, and ego.  The other is Happiness, kindness, empathy, and truth.  
The boy thought about it and asked, "Grandpa, which one wins?"
The old man quietly replied, "The one you feed."

It's an old wives tale.  But the New American Parenting that  nurtures the self-esteem that these articles are referring to are based on "feeding" the beast that you want your kid to be during the good times so it grows larger.  Eek!  Not sure what to do with the bad times yet.  I think "feeding the good wolf" during the good days is a large part of the success of the Superior Chinese and French Parenting paradigms as well.  Has to be.  Seems like the (fictitious) French handle the bad wolf days by not losing their cool, and the (fictional) Chinese handle the wolf days with a taser and a cage.  And the lowly Americans with tears and empty yelling.  Yeah, it happens.  

On a personal note, I'm stuck trying to implement the American way when my preschooler pushes my toddler.  And I yell when he interrupts the toddler's nap too many times, too many days in a row.  Obviously she doesn't go to sleep instantly. Some weeks he tries to keep her awake.  Stuff like making fun-sounding noises in the hallway.  Help me out here, nurtured heart crowd.  We usually do something just me & him when she sleeps, usually his choice.  He does this intentional.  These two things are my biggest buttons on the "negative energy reward."

Texican,
I mostly decided to do the review in my blog because I've been meaning to write it for a few days... and also because if I post a bunch of thoughts here and go write it there, it will sound very similar and the all-mighty search engines will see my blog post as "stolen" content which is very bad. And I think I deleted it before anyone read it, but I'm not 100% sure.

But besides that...
On the "annoying pest days" theory, I definitely think it is true. DH and I read the five love languages and it suggests that you have to try to keep your partner's "love tank" full. For awhile there we would use that same language. Inevitably, when one of us got 'low', we'd start arguing more and act unhappy. Spending time together and feeling loved usually fixed it. (Well my love language is quality time and his is appreciation, so when we gave one another those things. Now we seem to have no time for that stuff. ;-( )

We went to my in laws a few weeks ago and everyone was paying attention to DD. I could tell her 4 year old cousin was jealous and when his mom came home (she works a lot and goes out a lot) he started acting up because all he wanted was some alone time with her. I could see it, but at the time, she couldn't. She just kept reprimanding him for acting up and he eventually cried. I think it is harder to see what is going on when you are inside the situation.

When I have another child and DD is waking that baby up repeatedly, I don't know what I'll do. I suspect it won't be playful parenting, though.. It will probably just be a strict rule about letting the baby sleep. Annnnd... I'll let ya know how that works out! Ha.

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.

You have to catch him being good and praise that even if you have to look really really hard to find it. So in the 12 seconds between the time that you put her down for her nap and the time that he would otherwise start making the noises in the hall, let him know: "I really like how you are letting the baby sleep." or "Wow, you're being such a good big brother!" or "Thank you so much for letting her sleep, even when you'd rather be playing with her right now. That shows a lot of self-control! You are really helping me take good care of her." Repeat often. If he starts it up, and you tell him to stop, and he does, recognize that. Recognize and acknowledge any shred of a sliver of progress toward the kind of behavior you want to encourage, and you will start seeing more of it, and more importantly, he will develop a concept of himself as someone who can behave well and who can work to accomplish things even when they are hard.

HTH

ETA: This does not mean that logical consequences are out. I would make it very clear to him before she goes down for her nap that there will be fun things for the two of you to do together while she is sleeping, but if she is awake, then you will need to pay attention to her, and the fun things won't happen, not because he is being punished, but because his behavior will have changed the conditions that need to be in place (a sleeping toddler) for them to happen. Then you have to be prepared to stick to it.

Thanks for a different view of things.
This is absolutely another Amy Chua book and I'm honestly really excited to wade into all the commentary that is going to come out on it. (Partially from a parenting perspective, but mostly from a sort of amateur anthropologist one. ;D)

If you want to judge the book from a wider perspective, try this:
http://www.amazon.com/Sixty-Million-Frenchmen-Cant-Wrong/dp/1402200455

A balanced peek at French vs. US education can be read by "looking inside" and searching for "Chabert" (first few pages of chapter 13). If you are interested in education and the school system, read on and/or skip to p.183 (or search for "dutifully").

Thanks for your comments SiaSL! The slack thinking evident in that article drove me crazy. Non-representative samples? Check. Anecdotal evidence? Check. Ignoring other causal factors? Check. Confirmation bias? Check.

What's especially crazy-making is that it's such a mish-mash, and there are elements of truth mixed in. Like you say, she's right about the food thing. She's also right that there's a tendency for (some) American parents to doubt their own authority.

I'm glad the author learned that calm-authority thing from her friend at the playground. (I like to say that being a university professor has prepared me for parenthood. Managing undergraduates with calm authority is the same skill-set as parenting a toddler!) But seriously, this is a point that's been known for years -- "authoritative" parenting works better than either "authoritarian" or "permissive."

But American parents vary widely on where they fall on that spectrum. They're not all push-overs. And on the flip side, French parents may be more uniform in their parenting style, but they are (as SiaSL points out) way more towards the "authoritarian" end than the author portrays it.

Again, it's a mixed situation, one that deserves a nuanced analysis of the complexities. This book isn't that.