Are French Parents Better?

That’s it. It’s not bad enough that the French have better pastries, better sex lives, and apparently women never get fat. Now, just to really rub it in, evidently we should also know that they are “superior” parents.

While it’s really not a big surprise that France is not a fan of how we do things in the U.S., in this case, we’ve been sold down the Seine by one of our own—an American in Paris.

Pamela Druckerman, an American woman married to a British man living in France and raising her three children there, released a new book this week titled Bringing up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting and it is generating lots of discussion in parenting circles.

In the book, Druckerman writes about her experiences as a new mom who notices early on that there are striking differences between herself and the French mothers around her.

While she struggled to manage her toddler’s behavior, and dreaded public outings, like restaurants, she noticed that French mothers were calm and relaxed -- “they seemed like they were on vacation," she writes.

More intriguing still, their children were curiously serene; content playing on their own, and the real kicker, effortlessly obedient.

And, they ate their vegetables—happily, without complaint.

Clearly she needed to get to the bottom of that! Druckerman set out to understand what French parents were doing differently.

Last weekend in the Wall Street Journal, she shared some of what she learned. The headline declared, “Why French Parents Are Superior.”

Among her observations, she noted that whereas American middle class parents tend to be ultra involved with their children, French parents keep firm boundaries between adults and kids, and make it a point to teach babies to occupy themselves.

While we hover over our children, they have actual conversations with one another—with kids present.

It’s not the first time American parents have been told (or ) that we are so doing this parenting thing wrong, nor will it be the last.

This year it is the French, but last year it was the Chinese who were declared “superior.”

Author and Yale Law School professor Amy Chua raised hackles, and anxiety levels, when she suggested in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that the reason we’re falling behind in the world, and our children are running roughshod over our homes and lives, is because we are clearly not the boss of them.

They lack the drive and discipline that Chinese parents insist upon in their own offspring. It doesn’t come naturally, she argued; they have got to be properly taught.

No play dates, no school plays, and absolutely no grades less than an A are acceptable.

“Resistance is futile” is an understatement.

In this parenting debate, we can’t win; we’re getting it from both sides—we’re too involved, and we aren’t involved enough.

Which is it?

It seems to me that the core difference between American parenting and that of the French or Chinese, is that in those cultures there is a certain degree of consensus about how to do it.

No such consensus exists in the U.S.

We disagree on just about every facet of how to raise our children, and we fight it out with each other.

What we do seem to agree on is that we fiercely guard our right to go our own way. This is thoroughly “American.”

The upside is that at our best, we can be the perfect medium to nurture the iconoclasts and creative visionaries, like a Steve Jobs, who can and do change the world.

But at our worst we can certainly be very inconsistent and wishy-washy. Anyone who ever watched an episode of “Supernanny” could tell you that is simply “unacceptable.”

So maybe it’s less about arguing about superiority. Let’s just start with consistency?