How did France's child development experts split into two public camps — through open letters in rival newspapers?
In 2022, psychologist Caroline Goldman and more than 350 early childhood experts signed an open letter published in Le Figaro, arguing that the rise of positive parenting was actively harming children and that kids had been "essentially abandoned by adults with an exclusively empathic attitude." In direct response, 280 other early childhood experts signed a competing open letter in Le Monde, this one opposing the use of timeouts — making the divide between the two camps both sharp and fully public.
The back-and-forth between the two letters captures how thoroughly the parenting debate had moved beyond parenting blogs and dinner tables and into France's most prestigious media institutions. Goldman's camp framed excessive empathy as a form of educational neglect; the opposing experts countered that punitive tools like the timeout were themselves harmful. Two newspapers. Two open letters. Two incompatible visions of what healthy child development actually requires.
"Parents were essentially abandoned by adults with exclusively empathic attitude — and for Goldman and her allies, that is exactly why it is time to go back to a more disciplinary form of education."
— Madeline Schwartz, reporter, The New York Times, on The DailyGoldman's position did not exist in isolation. Her book Go to Your Room recommends timeouts of at least 30 minutes for children over the age of four — a specific, concrete recommendation that her opponents found equally objectionable. Meanwhile, the pro-positive-parenting side had already built a substantial audience of its own: Isabelle Filliozat's book on positive parenting had sold half a million copies in France. The two open letters were, in that sense, the institutional crystallization of a divide that had been building for years. Hear Madeline Schwartz unpack the full story on The Daily.
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Last year, the French government issued new official guidelines for people working in daycares or caring for young children, explicitly stating that if a child misbehaves, caregivers should not resort to punitive measures.
France's 2019 law, known colloquially as the Anti-Spanking Law, forbids physical and psychological violence against children, including what it terms degrading treatment — a definition broad enough to make timeouts legally ambiguous and deeply contested.
Goldman strongly promotes the timeout as a core disciplinary tool, arguing it gives children a clear signal about which boundary they have crossed. Her book Go to Your Room recommends timeouts of at least 30 minutes for children over the age of four.