When my lovely wife was a smidge younger, she was fortunate enough to have been part of a college student exchange program which took her to the wild and wooly world of France. While there not only did she develop a penchant for le socialisme français (For full disclosure my significant other is a raging conservative-styled Democratic Socialist. Yes, that’s possible.) she became enamored in their culture. Generally to most Americans a comment like this leaves a sour taste in their mouths. But the stereotypical snooty and arrogant attitude that we usually associate with the French is mostly restricted to Parisians, not the rest of the country.
Anyways, in one conversation on the topic of our “freedom fries,” and how stupid that particular reaction was, she made a point to me that most Americans don’t even understand how much present day French culture is similar to the America that used to be. In other words, it’s all about family. She then made a comment to me that I will never forget. She said, “In order to raise our children in a truly traditional American sense, you would have to leave America and live abroad.” This comment astounded me.
She then continued and clarified her position further by stating that America’s culture is suffering an identity and confidence crisis brought on by our mass-media and mass-marketing agendas and it has infected the attitudes of our families, parents, and children. As a country, we no longer believe in authority figures and that the goal of parenting now seems to be to just give the kid what they want so they will shut-up.
This was all pretty powerful to me because it was coming from a woman who is so far left that she feels American liberals and progressives are nothing short of addled brained soft-Leftists, incapable of fully committing to their own philosophies.
Now, I hadn’t thought about this conversation in specific terms in quite some time until I read this interesting article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. I highly recommend reading it with an open mind and if you are a Gen X’er or older it may remind of how the family situation in America used to be.
But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn’t follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.
Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.
Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.
But these public services don’t explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
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More on the conversation at Memeorandum.
Related articles
- Why French Parents Are Superior (neatorama.com)
- “While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety.” (althouse.blogspot.com)
- S’il-Vous-Plait: Raising Your ‘Bebe’ The French Way (npr.org)
- Are French Parents Better? (blogs.wsj.com)
“…wild and wooly world of France…” brought back a photo of Madonna from many years ago with seriously bushy pits……thanks, Mike, it`ll take me another 25 years to forget it again. As for education and discipline of children -when I was just a nub I was given a bb gun, a fishing pole and allowed to roam in the woods and waters without supervision, what you touched and ate educated you – if it hurt you did`nt touch it again, if it made you puke you did`nt eat it again. Discipline was the lesson learned by not tying my friends horse properly and spending the night in the woods eating grass soup in the 10 hours or so it took to walk back – stupid horse.
Exactly, RIck. I don’t want to narrowly define parenting the French model, but there is an overall theme that most Americans are forgetting. They are the parents and the kids are the kids. People have a tendency to hover over their kids too much and in the end all it tends to do is wear them [the parents} out.
So, when it comes time to discipline the kids they don’t have the energy and submit to the child’s wants.
75% of French students aspire to work for the gov’t. Maybe not because of the parenting but there’s something seriously wrong with that.
Agreed, Bandito. When you aspire to become a government technocrat I think you should have your head examined. However, the larger point still remains that middle-class parents are inadvertently becoming servants to their children, not parents. This probably has to with how risk averse we are nowadays and unfortunately its how we are training a great majority of our kids. Maybe the French are onto something with their “free-range” parenting techniques. We used to do it and the world didn’t end.
Oh come on now! She said “In order to raise our children in a truly traditional American sense, you would have to leave America and live abroad.” While I don’t think that’s a bad idea, that is absolutely not AT ALL a traditional American pattern. Europeans can drive a few miles (or take one of their quaint “trains” that they seem to like so much) and be in a different country, they have visitors from other countries all the time. They have neighbors from outside their countries all the time. Their businesses are far more likely to be international because each country is relatively small and the foreign markets are not far away. Europeans tend to learn to speak foreign languages and might actually have an opportunity to use them at some point with people who don’t speak their language.
None of that is anything like the traditional American pattern. Since when has any more than a minute percentage of Americans even left the country for a weekend, let alone “living abroad”?
Like I said, I think it’s a good idea to get some perspective on what things are like here compared to other places in the world by visiting or even living for a while in those places, but that’s not remotely a traditional American pattern.
Brian, her point was not concerned with the technical differences between our world and the Europeans or anyone elses. Nor was she claiming that other countries offered an American styled model.
The traditional middle-class American family model, mostly parenting, is being replaced by medicating our children, relying on television to baby sit, using video gaming systems for stimulation, and computers for educaton. And not to mention the facts that our children are continually bombarded by oversexualization and are specifically targeted by marketing campigns to train them to become little conumsers. I am also left to wonder how many families even sit down and eat together or have a conversation anymore. People can live the better part of a lifetime together and not even know each other. Our society no longer embraces or try to conserve our more traditional values from our not do distant past. We have thrown them into the ashbin of history with no adequate replacement. Thus we are left with a void that we continually try and fill with useless and momentary stimulants.
In order to avoid all of this bullshit my wife’s point was that you may have to leave your own country to avoid the cultural carpet-bombing to raise your kids in a healthy American manner. Not have them influenced by the merits of another society.
Have you really ever tried like the old saying goes, turn on, tune in, and drop out? It’s difficult to do by yourself in our socity let alone with a family.
Bullshit. And I’m gonna avoid an agonizing urge to rant and leave it at that.
On the other hand, take care bro. I”m gonna miss our dialect.
Don’t worry, I would gladly call bullshit on your agonizing rant. However, check up the follow up to this post, it’s worth checking out.
it`s just bad manners to change the dialect mid scream……
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Mike: I very much agree that the whole “youth culture” phenomenon, anti-intellectualism in school, confused parents, and a variety of other things are really screwing kids up in the US and have been for a long time now. That’s all true. I just think that a lot of the things described in the original article about things like the tradition of “living abroad” are just absolutely not traditional American aspects of how kids grow up. That’s a completely European (and probably rather upper class) thing to do. I’m not saying that this is good. I’m just saying that it is true.
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