Bringing Up Bébé

This an amazing book on how to write positively about something totally insane.

It starts out with the two big positive ideas: give children space to adjust on their own and expect more of them because they can handle it.

And then the insanity begins. French parenting is based on Rousseau and Dolto. Rousseau who famously raised no children, giving his away, and wrote a totally crazy impractical and downright abusive book on parenting. Dolto who was a borderline nutjob and whose ideas are often actually child abuse. Together they're responsible for great amounts of child suffering, like France having an age of consent that's just 13 years old (raised to 15 just recently; which is still criminally low). And totally developmentally inappropriate things like telling a 1 year old 15 times per day to say hello. Otherwise, Rousseau says that your kid won't be a good member of society.

Once the insanity starts, it never ends. French women don't mind doing basically all the housework and child rearing. Having their doctors tell them that they need to get into better shape for their husbands. At the same time, everyone is really cold, doing things like cancelling tennis lessons because, oh, they're so inconvenient for the parents now. Never pushing children to exceed in school, to challenge boundaries, to achieve new things.

France has one thing going for it. State support for parents. Everything else, is an unscientific, garbled, unpleasant, cold mess that's 200 years behind parenting in other countries. I cannot believe people read this as a howto manual!