Although French parents may be becoming more anxious and outcome-oriented… they still maintain a distinct approach to parenting compared to Americans.
Reference: Found here
In The News:
Over the past few years, while watching American parenting become increasingly defined by anxiety and economic stress, I’ve thought of Bringing up Bébé often. If things are this hard in the United States, I’ve wondered, can they possibly be much better in France? So I caught up with Pamela Druckerman over Zoom recently to find out about bringing up French teens and what’s changed in the decade-plus since her book was published.
From your perspective, isFrench parenting still as distinct from American parenting as it was in 2012? Or are French parents assimilating into a more anxious approach?
It’s funny, because I think theAmerican bias is always that the French are eventually going to become like us. In parenting and everything else, they’ll come around and see the light. And to a certain extent, the whole world parents a lot like Americans do at this point — intensive parenting, or hyperparenting, or whatever name you want to give it. It’s a global phenomenon.
I saw this when I was out promoting this book. People were spending more time with their kids, and discussing and dissecting, you know, different aspects of parenting to a degree that maybe they had never done before. France was an outlier from all that, and still is.
It’s become a bit more anxious and a bit more outcome oriented, but it’s all relative. A friend of mine was telling me the other day that her school director said that parents are starting to ask about preparing to get into college starting in the seventh grade. To the school director, that seemed incredibly early and anxious, whereas I think in the U.S. we have these concerns from an even earlier age.
