12 ms·

French kids know how to play

49 points by bootload 10y ago

Aelinsaar 10y ago
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's like the author has never even heard of the phrase, "The grass is always greener..." and taken a moment to think of why that is. A glimpse of something, at a moment in time, doesn't give you a real sense of it's long-term efficacy or real costs.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  You should put a finer point on it, and say why you think it is. I am 99.999% certain the author, as a writer, has heard the phrase "The grass is always greener...."
  - KC8ZKF 10y ago
    The article's author is making a point that the GP disagrees with, therefore the article's author must not be rational. It's a tired trope.[1] 1. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22knee+jerk%22+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22knee+jerk%22+site:ne...
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      Meanwhile half-assed assumptions about other people based on a single post? I don't know about tropes, but it gets exhausting after a while.
      - KC8ZKF 10y ago
        You're right. I'm sorry.
        Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Apology accepted, thanks for that.
        ktRolster 10y ago
        And yet you still didn't explain what you don't like about the OP.
        Aelinsaar 10y ago
        I did in my original post, just not to your satisfaction apparently.
        ktRolster 10y ago
        Yes, you referred to a bunch of cliches.....you FAILED to show why they apply in this situation. It's easy for me to point out that you are the type of person who doesn't see the forest for the trees.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence - especially when there seems to be a large gap between what's studied and what's applied in practice. A quick search on google scholar didn't reveal any papers trying to find the effects of different ways of letting 'normally abled' children play. People seem to confuse healthy skepticism with "let me shoot down anything I don't like just by being skeptic, without any requirements for my own counter evidence". That's when skepticism isn't helpful anymore (and highly annoying to me). Applied the way you did it, "grass is always greener" can be used for any comparison about anything between different cultures. So what you're saying is, American culture has nothing to learn from anywhere else, i.e. is the most perfect there is?
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Anecdotal evidence is better than nothing, worse than nothing, and is nothing. To your last bit however, no, I'm pretty sure that American culture is in desperate need of help, please don't make those kind of ridiculous assumptions about what I"m saying.
    - m_mueller 10y ago
      Anecdotes give ideas. It led me on a short hunt trying to find some hard data on this question, coming back empty handed. If no one starts thinking about it, no one will go and start actual research about it. So, no, it's not nothing. It's only worse than nothing if there already is enough research about a topic.
      - Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Hopefully, if you're a thinking person, every stimulus "Gives ideas". What anecdote doesn't do, is provide us with evidence to support a given hypothesis with anything like rigor.
ap22213 10y ago
Maybe it depends on where you are?I have several (male) french friends in the DC area, and they are some of the most structured and, frankly, unplayful parents I've ever seen. They almost seem uncomfortable even being around children. But, DC is pretty serious and high strung in general, so maybe it's the type of people the area attracts.
terda12 10y ago
Anecdote, I've stayed at an AirBnB in the outskirts of Paris where the host was a father of a daughter. Daughter had some friends over and they seemed pretty chilled. They just ran around the house talking French and doing whatever kids do. Father was pretty relaxed about parenting. This concept of structured playtime seems foreign to me. I grew up in Thailand where my parents would just let me run around the neighborhood with some friends. We would start fires and explore abandoned buildings. Trying to plan out kids playtime just seems counterintuitive. Seems like helicopter parenting to me.
- riffraff 10y ago
  IMO things are just getting out of hand as time goes by. I grew up in italy and I guess I had similar experiences (at least, I did start fires and explore abandoned buildings :) ). But my friends' kids in my home town don't do that anymore. It seems to me this is in a way a result of the replacement of the "local community" with a wider world, which often brings a sense of uneaseness or unsafety. I.e. if you know basically everyone who lives in your neighborhood you feel kids are pretty safe, and at most tell them not to go play near the "bad people". If you don't know who lives near to you, and you hear a lot of news about kids being abducted/molested/injured (which might have happened before, but it was less often in the news) you get worried about kids running around unsupervised.
bitwize 10y ago
This seems to be a problem mainly among upper-middle-class toffs who are afraid their kids might not get into Harvard if they aren't signed for as much personal development stuff as can fit in a week since they could walk. And a very recent development at that. In a recent article I saw on HN on how ugly, oppressive, and typically American suburbs are, the author stated that the design of suburbs forces children out of unstructured play and necessarily makes their parents structure their free time around play dates. Which conflicts with my lived experience of going to a friend's house in Upper West Burbville, riding bikes and messing around with every kid in the neighborhood. The scenery was bland, but the people made the experience memorable.
eeks 10y ago
It must depend on the neighborhood, or on the social class. As a middle-class frenchman living in the outskirts of NYC and accompanying my kids to plenty of birthday parties or playdates my experiences are anything but "structured". If anything compared to France parties tend to happen more often at stores or specialized venues than at people's home, but schedules are pretty much the same: play, eat, and more play, with light parental/staff supervision.
whistlerbrk 10y ago
I see this a lot in high anxiety parents. People who have rearranged their lives around their children rather than letting their children follow their lead. It's bad for you and them.
- usaphp 10y ago
  Why is rearranging your life around your children is bad for you?
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Because you need to be you. You have a partner and they need that you too. The kids need to understand that adults need to be adults with adult activities. Subverting everything for the children puts you in stasis and doesn't properly teach the children about growing up and being an individual or how to be with a partner. If the children cannot fill the unstructured time then they will never truly be adults.
    - usaphp 10y ago
      So you can stay partying till 1 am and not spend time with your kids, working till 9 and let a babysitter put your kids to bed? Spend your weekend drinking beer and having fun with your friends instead of teaching your kid riding a bike or something else. Until you have kids you won't realize - it is actually fun and joy to spend your day with your kids and they appreciate it when they grow up and will want to spend time with you when they grow up, instead of not knowing their parents because they spend all time with a baby sitter while their parents are being "adults with adult activities"
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Only on a message board would someone think I said that. We are talking about rearranging your whole life. I am most certainly not saying going to the other extreme.
whistlerbrk 10y ago
I see this a lot in high anxiety parents. People who have rearranged their lives around their children rather than letting their children follow their lead. It's bad for you and them.
crucifiction 10y ago
These blog posts are all the same. Effectively this person has discovered she does not like or share the same values as the set of parents she is friends with in the US. Instead of trying to find new friends who take a similar parenting attitude, the rational choice, she has decided the entire country is on the wrong path. Maybe she just needs to find new friends.
aaron695 10y ago
Seriously why are we liking Salon? For more self reinforced rubbish that has zero citations? Left wing person is outrage now about a self perceived issue they once saw! There's plenty of real sites that talk about this re-occurring perceived issue we've all heard a million times before.
gbog 10y ago
> To help kids become more creative, we actually need to start doing less. Yes to doing less, yes to let kids getting bored, because "boredom" is fertile and even necessary. But the aim is not to make kids "more creative", this is not something you really want for your kids as a parent. What you really want is to maximise chances that your kids will have a "good (enough) life".
- Retra 10y ago
  That's entirely unsustainable. If enough people do what you suggest, your children will find themselves facing a Malthusian catastrophe with the wrong values to avoid it. It's also quite selfish.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Depends on what you understand as "good life", and differences in that understanding are probably why we aren't in the middle of that catastrophe yet (at least in this area of life). But if everyone were to raise their kids for optimal job-market value, then yeah, that would start sucking pretty quickly. > It's also quite selfish. Seems that having children in general does that to you. It's something that I hope I'll be able to avoid when I have children of my own.
  - gbog 10y ago
    Well yes and no. Let's take another example, voting. I think an ideal democratic process should be that people vote selfishly for their own "well-understood" interest. This "well understood" is crucial, it means all the "therefores" in this logic: one will vote for one's own interest, therefore in one's country's own interest, therefore in the world's best interest, therefore in our universe's best interest. The same for my kids: I want them to have an happy life, therefore I teach them the values that will help them achieve this modest ambition, and these values are modest but also useful for other people: be friendly, open minded, accept life as it comes to you, do not value money for more than it is, do not expect too much from others, do not let your "underbelly" drive your will or your life, read good books, learn how to "garden" friends, be honest, serious, finish what you've started, etc. To me all of these values are stubornly selfish: they draw the surest and well-know way to a happy life, for a normal human being.
rtpg 10y ago
When growing up I ended up going through both systems (living in Texas and France), so I feel qualified to talk about this: I would finish school at 3 in the US, at 5/6 in France. There's 3 hours of the day that French kids can't spend in structured things. That alone completely changes dynamics. Basically you get to have one structured activity (like learning an instrument) and that's about it. The French education system also doesn't promote much in terms of extracurricular activities. There's gym but you don't have sports in school or whatnot. Most depressing thing for me going from TX to France was losing Orchestra as a school class. Tried signing up to a conservatory but it would have ended up being my "1 thing" that I could do. Honestly I preferred the American system much better. It gives you more flexibility for things like Boy Scouts, sports, or learning to program. And I still had loads of time to go to my friends house to do whatever. So in the end the US system gives you more structured activities AND more unstructured time. School as an educational system is overrated. School as a socialised event organiser (like for Orchestra, Arts, and the like) is way underrated, and totally not a part of the French system. The counterpoint is that I've heard recently that US schools have started giving waaaay too much homework, eating up at the unstructured time. I'm a fan of letting kids investigate what they want to do. Homework's important but so is giving people the opportunity to discover things. Side note about the article: who brings their kids to Yoga class? Is that a thing?
- vmarsy 10y ago
  The elementary school I went to in France would finish at 4:30pm, and most busy days in middle school at 5pm. Did you go to some private school? In elementary school there's the long playground times, one in the morning, one big at lunch, and one in the afternoon. Kids have plenty of time to play soccer. In middle school the Wednesdays afternoon are always free, you have time do extracurricular activities there: soccer, swimming, tennis, music, whatever. There was time to do those things in elementary school, I don't remember exactly when. There was a special extra hours until 6 for those who want to, but basically at the end of those you'd be completely done with your homework.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Oh, yeah, forgot about Wednesdays. Like you said, it's a good opportunity for sports and whatnot. I also had the half days on Wednesdays but basically my classes always ended between 5 and 6PM (This was High School). There are the recesses in between, but it was like 20 minute breaks. I could sit and read, but usually ended up just chatting with friends. A nice break but kinda felt forced for me. I would have much rather taken most of that time and gotten out of school earlier and go to a friend's house or something... The schoolwork thing is a good point, I don't remember having much schoolwork for home in France compared to the US. There were books to read or things to study but I had math homework every day in the US. I think the big thing I dislike about the French system is the lack of many elective courses (apart from art, latin, or something like an extra foreign language). Felt like I had a lot more choice in the US (at least in my well-funded school). On the other hand, the French system isn't just multiple choice questions...
vonnik 10y ago
In books and news articles, France often plays the foil to America, just as it once did to England. The French language serves as a sign of socio-economic distinction, a class marker, and for its disciples, it is probably easy to think that French ways are superior in everything from cooking to flirtation to parenthood. Americans moving to France in search of a more sophisticated lifestyle are confronted with a stagnating economy, a society riven by inequality and racism, and a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good. After an initial lost period, these American immigrants make careers out of France itself, trading off its pre-war reputation. "French women don't get fat", "Why French Parents Are Superior", "Bringing Up Bebe" and "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life" -- these are all real works published by people monetizing their lifestyle choices by preaching French superiority to those they have left behind. Unfortunately, none of it is true. I spent 14 years in Paris, enough time to gauge the average weight of French womanhood and watch many French parents strut their stuff. France is becoming heavier and heavier as fast foods make deeper inroads. And French parenting is often a hystrionic affair that verges on verbal abuse when applied to toddlers. It's shocking, actually. So these articles simply use France as a rhetorical trope to introduce new ideas to American society. Those ideas should be considered independently of the distortions applied to France itself. In fact, someone should build an app that substitutes the word "Utopia" for France in those articles. It will clear the mind and steer the reader clear of the many impasses in which French society is stuck.
- maattdd 10y ago
  Are you actually saying that France is given by inequality and racism compared to the US? Are you actually saying that the US and Germany have a superior food to France? US is superior to France in many ways, but clearly not those ones!
  - yoha 10y ago
    I think the point is that this kind of article tends to present it as uniformly better, rather than contrasting the good and the bad.
- sithadmin 10y ago
yason 10y ago
No longer is it enough to spend the weekend running errands, doing what we normally do, and knowing that my daughter Sophie will find a way to play, whether juggling the grapes in the grocery store cart or throwing rocks into the water at Walden Pond. No: We must pay for playtime, and have it be organized for us. "No longer is it enough?"――and who exactly is forcing this except the parents' own minds?
dasil003 10y ago
Unsolicited parenting advice is a flaming bag of shit on your doorstep.
jasonkester 10y ago
Does this actually happen? Can any American parents here confirm that they actually do structure every free minute of their kids' time and never let them simply run around and play on their own? We raise our kids kinda like the author describes as the "French" way. You know, taking them along as we live our lives, and letting them play however they like. As it happens, we do actually live in France, but it never occurred to me that we were doing anything particularly novel. If anything I thought our way of raising kids was the "American" way, and that the French are too stifling in the way they confine their kids to pushchairs with pacifiers in their mouths to sit quietly in the corner until age 5. The only case I can think of among my acquaintance of the overscheduling described in the article was an English mother. Still, I wouldn't use that as an example to base an article like this on. In short, I don't buy it. Surely nobody actually thinks that is a good idea.

49 points by bootload 10y ago

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's like the author has never even heard of the phrase, "The grass is always greener..." and taken a moment to think of why that is. A glimpse of something, at a moment in time, doesn't give you a real sense of it's long-term efficacy or real costs.

ktRolster 10y ago
You should put a finer point on it, and say why you think it is. I am 99.999% certain the author, as a writer, has heard the phrase "The grass is always greener...."
- KC8ZKF 10y ago
  The article's author is making a point that the GP disagrees with, therefore the article's author must not be rational. It's a tired trope.[1] 1. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22knee+jerk%22+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22knee+jerk%22+site:ne...
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Meanwhile half-assed assumptions about other people based on a single post? I don't know about tropes, but it gets exhausting after a while.
    - KC8ZKF 10y ago
      You're right. I'm sorry.
      - Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Apology accepted, thanks for that.
        ktRolster 10y ago
        And yet you still didn't explain what you don't like about the OP.
        Aelinsaar 10y ago
        I did in my original post, just not to your satisfaction apparently.
        ktRolster 10y ago
        Yes, you referred to a bunch of cliches.....you FAILED to show why they apply in this situation. It's easy for me to point out that you are the type of person who doesn't see the forest for the trees.
m_mueller 10y ago
Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence - especially when there seems to be a large gap between what's studied and what's applied in practice. A quick search on google scholar didn't reveal any papers trying to find the effects of different ways of letting 'normally abled' children play. People seem to confuse healthy skepticism with "let me shoot down anything I don't like just by being skeptic, without any requirements for my own counter evidence". That's when skepticism isn't helpful anymore (and highly annoying to me). Applied the way you did it, "grass is always greener" can be used for any comparison about anything between different cultures. So what you're saying is, American culture has nothing to learn from anywhere else, i.e. is the most perfect there is?
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Anecdotal evidence is better than nothing, worse than nothing, and is nothing. To your last bit however, no, I'm pretty sure that American culture is in desperate need of help, please don't make those kind of ridiculous assumptions about what I"m saying.
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    Anecdotes give ideas. It led me on a short hunt trying to find some hard data on this question, coming back empty handed. If no one starts thinking about it, no one will go and start actual research about it. So, no, it's not nothing. It's only worse than nothing if there already is enough research about a topic.
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      Hopefully, if you're a thinking person, every stimulus "Gives ideas". What anecdote doesn't do, is provide us with evidence to support a given hypothesis with anything like rigor.

ap22213 10y ago

Maybe it depends on where you are?I have several (male) french friends in the DC area, and they are some of the most structured and, frankly, unplayful parents I've ever seen. They almost seem uncomfortable even being around children. But, DC is pretty serious and high strung in general, so maybe it's the type of people the area attracts.

terda12 10y ago

Anecdote, I've stayed at an AirBnB in the outskirts of Paris where the host was a father of a daughter. Daughter had some friends over and they seemed pretty chilled. They just ran around the house talking French and doing whatever kids do. Father was pretty relaxed about parenting. This concept of structured playtime seems foreign to me. I grew up in Thailand where my parents would just let me run around the neighborhood with some friends. We would start fires and explore abandoned buildings. Trying to plan out kids playtime just seems counterintuitive. Seems like helicopter parenting to me.

riffraff 10y ago
IMO things are just getting out of hand as time goes by. I grew up in italy and I guess I had similar experiences (at least, I did start fires and explore abandoned buildings :) ). But my friends' kids in my home town don't do that anymore. It seems to me this is in a way a result of the replacement of the "local community" with a wider world, which often brings a sense of uneaseness or unsafety. I.e. if you know basically everyone who lives in your neighborhood you feel kids are pretty safe, and at most tell them not to go play near the "bad people". If you don't know who lives near to you, and you hear a lot of news about kids being abducted/molested/injured (which might have happened before, but it was less often in the news) you get worried about kids running around unsupervised.

bitwize 10y ago

This seems to be a problem mainly among upper-middle-class toffs who are afraid their kids might not get into Harvard if they aren't signed for as much personal development stuff as can fit in a week since they could walk. And a very recent development at that. In a recent article I saw on HN on how ugly, oppressive, and typically American suburbs are, the author stated that the design of suburbs forces children out of unstructured play and necessarily makes their parents structure their free time around play dates. Which conflicts with my lived experience of going to a friend's house in Upper West Burbville, riding bikes and messing around with every kid in the neighborhood. The scenery was bland, but the people made the experience memorable.

eeks 10y ago

It must depend on the neighborhood, or on the social class. As a middle-class frenchman living in the outskirts of NYC and accompanying my kids to plenty of birthday parties or playdates my experiences are anything but "structured". If anything compared to France parties tend to happen more often at stores or specialized venues than at people's home, but schedules are pretty much the same: play, eat, and more play, with light parental/staff supervision.

whistlerbrk 10y ago

I see this a lot in high anxiety parents. People who have rearranged their lives around their children rather than letting their children follow their lead. It's bad for you and them.

usaphp 10y ago
Why is rearranging your life around your children is bad for you?
- protomyth 10y ago
  Because you need to be you. You have a partner and they need that you too. The kids need to understand that adults need to be adults with adult activities. Subverting everything for the children puts you in stasis and doesn't properly teach the children about growing up and being an individual or how to be with a partner. If the children cannot fill the unstructured time then they will never truly be adults.
  - usaphp 10y ago
    So you can stay partying till 1 am and not spend time with your kids, working till 9 and let a babysitter put your kids to bed? Spend your weekend drinking beer and having fun with your friends instead of teaching your kid riding a bike or something else. Until you have kids you won't realize - it is actually fun and joy to spend your day with your kids and they appreciate it when they grow up and will want to spend time with you when they grow up, instead of not knowing their parents because they spend all time with a baby sitter while their parents are being "adults with adult activities"
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Only on a message board would someone think I said that. We are talking about rearranging your whole life. I am most certainly not saying going to the other extreme.

whistlerbrk 10y ago

I see this a lot in high anxiety parents. People who have rearranged their lives around their children rather than letting their children follow their lead. It's bad for you and them.

crucifiction 10y ago

These blog posts are all the same. Effectively this person has discovered she does not like or share the same values as the set of parents she is friends with in the US. Instead of trying to find new friends who take a similar parenting attitude, the rational choice, she has decided the entire country is on the wrong path. Maybe she just needs to find new friends.

aaron695 10y ago

Seriously why are we liking Salon? For more self reinforced rubbish that has zero citations? Left wing person is outrage now about a self perceived issue they once saw! There's plenty of real sites that talk about this re-occurring perceived issue we've all heard a million times before.

gbog 10y ago

> To help kids become more creative, we actually need to start doing less. Yes to doing less, yes to let kids getting bored, because "boredom" is fertile and even necessary. But the aim is not to make kids "more creative", this is not something you really want for your kids as a parent. What you really want is to maximise chances that your kids will have a "good (enough) life".

Retra 10y ago
That's entirely unsustainable. If enough people do what you suggest, your children will find themselves facing a Malthusian catastrophe with the wrong values to avoid it. It's also quite selfish.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Depends on what you understand as "good life", and differences in that understanding are probably why we aren't in the middle of that catastrophe yet (at least in this area of life). But if everyone were to raise their kids for optimal job-market value, then yeah, that would start sucking pretty quickly. > It's also quite selfish. Seems that having children in general does that to you. It's something that I hope I'll be able to avoid when I have children of my own.
- gbog 10y ago
  Well yes and no. Let's take another example, voting. I think an ideal democratic process should be that people vote selfishly for their own "well-understood" interest. This "well understood" is crucial, it means all the "therefores" in this logic: one will vote for one's own interest, therefore in one's country's own interest, therefore in the world's best interest, therefore in our universe's best interest. The same for my kids: I want them to have an happy life, therefore I teach them the values that will help them achieve this modest ambition, and these values are modest but also useful for other people: be friendly, open minded, accept life as it comes to you, do not value money for more than it is, do not expect too much from others, do not let your "underbelly" drive your will or your life, read good books, learn how to "garden" friends, be honest, serious, finish what you've started, etc. To me all of these values are stubornly selfish: they draw the surest and well-know way to a happy life, for a normal human being.

rtpg 10y ago

When growing up I ended up going through both systems (living in Texas and France), so I feel qualified to talk about this: I would finish school at 3 in the US, at 5/6 in France. There's 3 hours of the day that French kids can't spend in structured things. That alone completely changes dynamics. Basically you get to have one structured activity (like learning an instrument) and that's about it. The French education system also doesn't promote much in terms of extracurricular activities. There's gym but you don't have sports in school or whatnot. Most depressing thing for me going from TX to France was losing Orchestra as a school class. Tried signing up to a conservatory but it would have ended up being my "1 thing" that I could do. Honestly I preferred the American system much better. It gives you more flexibility for things like Boy Scouts, sports, or learning to program. And I still had loads of time to go to my friends house to do whatever. So in the end the US system gives you more structured activities AND more unstructured time. School as an educational system is overrated. School as a socialised event organiser (like for Orchestra, Arts, and the like) is way underrated, and totally not a part of the French system. The counterpoint is that I've heard recently that US schools have started giving waaaay too much homework, eating up at the unstructured time. I'm a fan of letting kids investigate what they want to do. Homework's important but so is giving people the opportunity to discover things. Side note about the article: who brings their kids to Yoga class? Is that a thing?

vmarsy 10y ago
The elementary school I went to in France would finish at 4:30pm, and most busy days in middle school at 5pm. Did you go to some private school? In elementary school there's the long playground times, one in the morning, one big at lunch, and one in the afternoon. Kids have plenty of time to play soccer. In middle school the Wednesdays afternoon are always free, you have time do extracurricular activities there: soccer, swimming, tennis, music, whatever. There was time to do those things in elementary school, I don't remember exactly when. There was a special extra hours until 6 for those who want to, but basically at the end of those you'd be completely done with your homework.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Oh, yeah, forgot about Wednesdays. Like you said, it's a good opportunity for sports and whatnot. I also had the half days on Wednesdays but basically my classes always ended between 5 and 6PM (This was High School). There are the recesses in between, but it was like 20 minute breaks. I could sit and read, but usually ended up just chatting with friends. A nice break but kinda felt forced for me. I would have much rather taken most of that time and gotten out of school earlier and go to a friend's house or something... The schoolwork thing is a good point, I don't remember having much schoolwork for home in France compared to the US. There were books to read or things to study but I had math homework every day in the US. I think the big thing I dislike about the French system is the lack of many elective courses (apart from art, latin, or something like an extra foreign language). Felt like I had a lot more choice in the US (at least in my well-funded school). On the other hand, the French system isn't just multiple choice questions...

vonnik 10y ago

In books and news articles, France often plays the foil to America, just as it once did to England. The French language serves as a sign of socio-economic distinction, a class marker, and for its disciples, it is probably easy to think that French ways are superior in everything from cooking to flirtation to parenthood. Americans moving to France in search of a more sophisticated lifestyle are confronted with a stagnating economy, a society riven by inequality and racism, and a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good. After an initial lost period, these American immigrants make careers out of France itself, trading off its pre-war reputation. "French women don't get fat", "Why French Parents Are Superior", "Bringing Up Bebe" and "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life" -- these are all real works published by people monetizing their lifestyle choices by preaching French superiority to those they have left behind. Unfortunately, none of it is true. I spent 14 years in Paris, enough time to gauge the average weight of French womanhood and watch many French parents strut their stuff. France is becoming heavier and heavier as fast foods make deeper inroads. And French parenting is often a hystrionic affair that verges on verbal abuse when applied to toddlers. It's shocking, actually. So these articles simply use France as a rhetorical trope to introduce new ideas to American society. Those ideas should be considered independently of the distortions applied to France itself. In fact, someone should build an app that substitutes the word "Utopia" for France in those articles. It will clear the mind and steer the reader clear of the many impasses in which French society is stuck.

maattdd 10y ago
Are you actually saying that France is given by inequality and racism compared to the US? Are you actually saying that the US and Germany have a superior food to France? US is superior to France in many ways, but clearly not those ones!
- yoha 10y ago
  I think the point is that this kind of article tends to present it as uniformly better, rather than contrasting the good and the bad.
sithadmin 10y ago

yason 10y ago

No longer is it enough to spend the weekend running errands, doing what we normally do, and knowing that my daughter Sophie will find a way to play, whether juggling the grapes in the grocery store cart or throwing rocks into the water at Walden Pond. No: We must pay for playtime, and have it be organized for us. "No longer is it enough?"――and who exactly is forcing this except the parents' own minds?

dasil003 10y ago

Unsolicited parenting advice is a flaming bag of shit on your doorstep.

jasonkester 10y ago

Does this actually happen? Can any American parents here confirm that they actually do structure every free minute of their kids' time and never let them simply run around and play on their own? We raise our kids kinda like the author describes as the "French" way. You know, taking them along as we live our lives, and letting them play however they like. As it happens, we do actually live in France, but it never occurred to me that we were doing anything particularly novel. If anything I thought our way of raising kids was the "American" way, and that the French are too stifling in the way they confine their kids to pushchairs with pacifiers in their mouths to sit quietly in the corner until age 5. The only case I can think of among my acquaintance of the overscheduling described in the article was an English mother. Still, I wouldn't use that as an example to base an article like this on. In short, I don't buy it. Surely nobody actually thinks that is a good idea.