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

Pretty much (e.g., we didn't usually have 3 courses in restaurants when DS was a toddler), yes. We stopped while we were ahead - I can easily believe that our next child might have been very different. That said, I also have a strong intuition that parenting and cultural norms affect the odds. You can hardly travel in Europe and the USA without noticing differences in children's typical restaurant behaviour, for example. [ETA And I have to say that I don't think the idea that French children don't get taken to restaurants is right at all; they seem to get taken to restaurants a *lot* more than UK children do, anyway. In fact that's commonly given as an explanation for why they are on average better behaved in restaurants than their UK counterparts: they get practice.]

(Which is not to say that I agree with everything in that article - far from it. It nearly lost me, too, at babies sleeping through the night at 2-3 months!)

I'd be interested to read about what you thought of the book. If you wouldn't mind, perhaps post a link to your blog entry?

Thanks for posting this. I am always interested in other educational systems.

The universities are similar to our universities and community colleges. Grand Ecoles are more like our liberal arts colleges or other higher colleges.

I've raised kids in Europe and here in the US. I think as a family we were a lot closer when we lived in Europe, we were together much more, there was much less pressure to participate in everything and be the best at it, we lived in a much smaller home, we didn't have a car and our world in general was much smaller, even though we used to travel much more and I think we visited more museums and zoos because it was much cheaper there.

Our income tax rate was 55% (and we wouldn't have classed ourselves even as middle class), we had to contribute to our healthcare on top of that, our daycare wasn't subsidized and college wasn't free. Our property taxes were comparable to here and sales tax was 20%. And yet somehow we had more money than we do here.

I am not shocked that French babies sleep at 2-3 months. I was in breast feeding support group with a new mom who was an anesthesiologist. She drank wine one evening a week to get some sleep. During "parents' time" I think they are drinking the wine...

I am reading this and it really seems too trite for a gifted forum.

The wine may possibly have helped her sleep, but it will have had no effect on the baby. It's a myth that babies can get enough alcohol via breastmilk to make them sleepy; do the back of the envelope calculation, bearing in mind that alcohol goes into breastmilk at about the same concentration it goes into blood, and that a blood alcohol concentration of around 0.4% is fatal.

Again, we digress. I am not a physician. This anesthesiologist did it specifically for her baby to sleep. Since she was an expert on this particular issue, I think she would know. She was a "gas passer" by profession.

The other key difference between us and our European counterparts is their inherent family structure. As OP mentioned, we are much more mobile here in the states, and often end up raising our children away from extended families.

A trip to grandma's would've gone a long way to restoring our sanity!

Well, they don't breastfeed much over there, so it can't be that.

I don't know why, but I do like books like these. We talked about Tiger Mom for days and this book seemed very similar to me and I've read both.

Our DD was wonderfully well-behaved at restaurants as a toddler, and she received a number of compliments as a result. At one restaurant in particular where we were regulars, DD used to attract a number of genuine smiles from the staff, and brief visits from other staff members who weren't assigned to our table.

Unlike the writer of that article, though, we clued in pretty quickly that DD hated the high chair (though she would only throw her toys to the floor in protest). Before she was 1yo she was sitting next to us in the booth. Having wiggle room did wonders for her behavior.


This isn't a comment about French/American parenting, it's a comment about allowing children unstructured play time by themselves versus helicopter parenting. Perhaps the author has spent too much time in France soaking up gross generalizations about how parenting happens in the US.


Hurr, durr, authoritative parenting.

I suppose it's lovely to envision that foreign cultures have secret wisdom to offer us, but all the writer is really revealing here is her own ignorance on the subject of parenting.