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

A quick trip to grandma's in my family was a trigger for chaos. DD would find out her normal boundaries didn't apply there, so she'd come home and check her boundaries again. My MIL was convinced we were traumatizing DD by putting her on timeouts at such an early age.

I've got MIL within walking distance. About 0.7 miles.

In my world, "sending you to live with grandma" is the gravest threat possible since the normal boundaries don't apply. She's convinced we are far too permissive.

I am not sure who is envious of France. Yes, they have fine history and artistry and all that. But we all know where France stands right now (economy wise).

They work less hours and their GDP is shrinking.

I am not saying their off-hand parenting is bad. Many Americans do that. Most of the working parents do not have time with their children or they want their own time and let the kids play on their own.

One thing I agree is that our kids have too many after school activities. "keeping up with the Joneses syndrome"- our kids want to do what other kids are doing, ballet, music, martial arts, sports, etc...and juggling with school work.

When my DD was 8, she wanted to do all and she became moody and inattentive at school. After taking many activities out, she has more energy and became a sweet girl once more.

I once heard that if the seed is good, it will grow in any soil and bear fruits that are large and sweet but if you plant that seed in good soil and nurture, you will have plenty more fruits that are larger and may be sweeter still.

I believe in moderation. The kids need time to have fun and relax as well as time to stimulate their mind and grow. Of course, adults need their downtime too :-)

But I would rather play family boardgame with my DDs than watching sports with my friends.

"France already discovered that a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day."
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Oct. 10, 2010

No one has proven to me that critical discoveries in science and engineering (or any other field) came from people working themselves to the point of exhaustion as a matter of course.

Sure, the overworked and overtired can write more lines of code for e-commerce Web 2.0 apps and crank out lots of papers that relate to someone else's discoveries. But they won't be figuring out how gravity works anytime soon.

(My point being that too much faith in and reliance on this approach will cripple our ability to make breakthrough discoveries, and I think we've reached that point.)

Very little about why people succeed or fail is ever "proven".
It is my impression from reading the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" and other biographies of accomplished people is that there WERE critical times in their lives where they were obsessed with work. Hours per day worked may be difficult to define. When Einstein was at the peak of his career, he was probably thinking about physics, at least subconsciously, for much more than 8 hours a day.

One of the Indian parents at ds's school would agree. As a doctor, she sees a big difference between the Indian and American ways of preparing students for medicine: the Indian system, according to her, relies on lots of rote memorization, while the American way is to teach students principles of research and expect them to start using them earlier. And she 'voted with her feet', so to speak - she and her husband chose the U.S. to work and raise their family in.

I think a combination of the two cultures' approaches stands to produce potent results - maybe that's why Indian-Americans and Asian-Americans are disproportionately represented among the finalists in both competitions that require memorization (the Scripps spelling bee, for example) and competitions requiring creative, independent thinking (like Intel).

Random thoughts:

1. There is a difference between doing your own creative work because you have a passion for it and cranking away on something straightforward because your boss told you to.

2. Restated: people cranking out lines of code for e-commerce apps are doing this so they'll get paid. Einstein was thinking about physics simply because he wanted to.

3. This paper is peer-reviewed and says a lot of the same stuff.

Anecdote alert: my personal experience has taught me that dull repetitive jobs (even high-paying knowledge-type jobs) make me feel dumb and uncreative. YMMV.

I found myself working as a data center operator alongside several individuals who had been doing it for over 20 years in the same shop. And I was often flabbergasted by some of my peers' over their inflexibility and inability to think beyond the scripted responses.

A few of my peers were from the Philippines and educated there, and I had a meaningful exchange with one of them one day when, during a quiet hour in the data center, he was exercising his mind by attempting to recall the entire text of the Gettysburg Address. He asked me if I recalled any of it... and I said no, why would I want to? He went on to relate how his schooling had been full of such rote memorization drills, and included such documents as the Declaration of Independence, King's "I Have a Dream" speech, etc. As someone educated in America, surely I'm more familiar with these things than he?

And this was when it became apparent to me that he had been taught to remember things, and I had been taught to think... which explains why, after merely 18 months on the job, I was appointed his shift lead.

Great comments everyone.

My take is that if the French social safety net was so superior, then France should be awash in babies. And it is. As is much of the Northern EU.

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1408

But so is the US. And OTOH many other EU nations have declining fertility.

So, it really seems to make no difference. And these birth rates are just as high if not higher among whites. So, something else is going on. It would be interesting to look at the parents to see who they are and what they do. And why they had that third kid.

I would also keep in mind that France is by far the wealthiest nation in the EU. Most French households have little debt and are net savers. And France is energy independent with a very large and vibrant nuke industry. The latter fact along keeps a lot of money in the country.

As for the OP, I work with a lot of nationalities and just about everyone has kids. Only a few kids sleep through the night. The rest run the gamut. We are fortunate to have grandparents who live with us as do many of the nationalities that I work with. Again, we all still have many of the challenges of parents that don't. Sure, it helps to have help. But your parents living with you adds another layer of stress of its own and complicates how boundaries are set.

So, the article has to be taken as a color piece.

Most of the kids I see in TX are very well behaved because parents enforce boundaries and if the kids cross them, they leave the restaurant. I imagine the French are the same.

I recently read this book about a comparison of parenting styles.

http://www.amazon.com/Eskimos-Keep-Their-Babies-Warm/dp/156512958X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1