Which country's alleged parenting technique best describes your style?

I don’t think my mother-in-law would disagree that my husband comes from a highly anxious people. In their eyes, if the worst can happen, it probably will.

I grew up largely on my own. My single mom would regularly come home from long shifts at work to find my brothers and I had positioned the trampoline so we could jump onto it from the roof of the house. She never seemed overly concerned about it, and we all survived, although there was that one time somebody took a dart to the eyeball …

Most recently, Serge and I argued over the hardwood staircase in our new home. He doesn’t think we should let our 3-year-old go up and down it alone. I argue that if we constantly carry her or hold her hand we’re making it even more unsafe because she’ll never learn how to safely negotiate the steps on her own. Still, he’s determined to “carpet the staircase.” Sigh. He also wants to get a new TV stand so that our 1-year-old will stop touching the buttons on the DVD player. Me? I think we need to teach Henry not to touch the buttons instead of removing them from temptation. Isn’t that the only way he’ll learn?

Our parental disagreements of this nature are what made this article on the Huffington Post catch my eye. It’s called French Parents: Vive La Difference? In it Debra Ollivier talks about how, in France, they don’t pander to children.  Ollivier’s first child was born in Paris. She writes about how she baby-proofed her apartment so much so that her French neighbor said the place looked like a “psych ward.”

Ollivier uses the anecdote to demonstrate how the French parent differently from Americans and why it quite possibly might be the way to go. I liked this idea. Basically, according to Ollivier’s theory, I’m France and Serge (who is, ironically, half-French) is America.

Ollivier cites her friend, expat Pamela Druckerman, who writes in her upcoming book Bringing Up Bebe that “My French friends didn’t have to hurriedly end phone calls because their kids were shouting for something … They were, overall, just more relaxed. It was a cumulative effect, which led to a ‘hang on, maybe they’re onto something,’ So I decided to look into it.”

What both women, and many other expatriates living in France, apparently discovered is that “where childhood trumps adulthood in the States, the opposite is largely true in France.”

Kids are not king in France — and if you treat them as such, they quickly become tyrants with a sense of entitlement that sticks around well into adulthood. Though they love their kids passionately like everyone else, the French generally don’t subvert their identities to the lives of their children.

Boundaries, in other words, are good, particularly in protecting the sanctity of parents’ private life. (No, Marie-Louise, you may not sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed. And yes, Jean-Pierre, you must sit at the table every night for family dinner and eat correctly.) Kids are essentially expected to adapt to the grown-up world and not the other way around.

And most impressive, perhaps, as Druckerman discovered, “French women certainly don’t suffer the same guilt about everything.” No, they certainly don’t. Guilt seems to be the American mother’s evil stepsister.

My favorite part of Ollivier’s article is when she talks about how, in the past ten years in America, trophy wives were replaced by trophy kids. She couldn’t be more right! One of the things that has shocked me about parenting is how much we (yes, I include myself in this assertion) pander to our children.  This is showcased in how kids’ schedules are jam-packed with extra-curricular activities, how spoiled American kids seem (My Super Sweet 16, anyone?), how GAP Kids and their $49 toddler jeans is still in business, those horrific Toddlers & Tiaras parents, the rise of the Kardashians and the “momager” —  I could go on and on … An uncomfortably large number of parents seem to be living through their kids instead of living for themselves these days, no?

I’m not advocating that children should be seen and not heard (I kind of am!), but in the past ten years it seems as if children have taken over. They now rule the roost and parents are just the two chumps that chauffeur and chef for the kids. I have felt this strange competitive pull when I witness friends waxing poetic about their bilingual, uber-talented children who are barely past toddlerdom. Is my Violet falling behind her peers? And then I slap myself in the face for succumbing to the pressure because, dude, my kid is three.

What happened to kids just playing? Ollivier brings up that life-sucking killjoy Amy Chua and her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother crap as an example of the “latest manifesto to sand-blast fear and doubt into every parent’s heart” … Meanwhile, the French kept doing what they’d done for centuries, parenting with an iron fist and a velvet glove WITHOUT FORSAKING PLEASURE IN LIFE.  (The caps are mine, trademarked by Dooce.)

Druckerman points out that while she assumed that she had to pretty much give up her life once she had children, the French don’t. “They don’t have any illusions, but won’t subjugate themselves entirely to the will of the child.”

This is one area where, I daresay the “mommy blogging” genre has done us a bit of a disservice.  It became fashionable to bitch about parenting.  We were all so excited that we had comrades to vent to via the internet that, in our relief not to have to pretend to be Donna Reed, humorous blog entries about how bad parenting sucks became all the rage.  Not only that, but children became the stars of the show not only in life but on blogs as parents mined their everyday events for fodder, not to mention the thousands of websites overflowing with the “humble bragging” of proud mommy bloggers.

It would do us all well to shove the kids in a playroom, literally and figuratively, and just let them do their thing.  That might be the best thing we can do for them as parents.  I know, I know, I succumb to The Guilt on a daily basis.  Am I playing with my daughter enough, is she being entertained enough, is she watching too much TV and on and on and on and on.  Good god.  If I’m this stressed about her daily activities at three I can’t imagine how I’ll feel when she’s eleven.

I need to incorporate a huge dose of French parenting into my very American life because I want to actually enjoy parenting and, as Ollivier notes, “Being a brilliant parent and a whole person, for ourselves and our children, is what we all aspire to” and perhaps the best way I can do that is to let my children do their own thing while I do mine.

Helicopter parents or free-range kids? How protective should we be?

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