What did France's 2019 Anti-Spanking Law actually change — and why are parents and experts still fighting over it?
France's 2019 Anti-Spanking Law forbids both physical and psychological violence against children, including what it terms "ordinary educational violence." The law's critical flaw — and the source of ongoing controversy — is that it never defines what "ordinary educational violence" actually means, leaving parents, practitioners, and legal experts in a genuine grey zone.
That definitional gap has become a battlefield in the broader French parenting debate. Psychologist Caroline Goldman and her allies argue that practices like the timeout — sending a child to their room as a disciplinary measure — are entirely lawful and even beneficial. Goldman's book Go to Your Room explicitly recommends timeouts of at least 30 minutes for children over the age of four, framing them as a healthy, structured consequence that helps children understand which boundary they have crossed.
But a significant bloc of early childhood educators reads the law very differently. For them, timeouts fall squarely within the prohibited category of psychological violence — a position backed by the 280 experts who signed a competing open letter in Le Monde opposing the use of timeouts. The result is a situation where the same parenting tool is simultaneously defended as responsible discipline and condemned as a violation of the law — with no official clarification in sight. The full conversation behind this dispute is available on Listenly in the episode of The Daily.
Key term from the episode
"Ordinary educational violence" — the phrase used in France's 2019 Anti-Spanking Law to describe the category of behaviour it prohibits. The law bans it without ever specifying what acts fall under this label, which is precisely what makes it legally and philosophically ambiguous. Whether a timeout constitutes ordinary educational violence remains a live, unresolved question among French childcare professionals.
"Parents were essentially abandoned by adults with an 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 · The Daily, August 9, 2026About Madeline Schwartz
Madeline Schwartz
Reporter · The New York Times
Madeline Schwartz is a reporter for The New York Times, currently based in Paris. Her authority on the French parenting debate is not merely professional — it is deeply personal. Born to an American mother and a French father who separated when she was a baby, Schwartz grew up dividing her life between New York and Paris, attending school in both cities throughout her childhood. She absorbed both cultures from the inside, experiencing firsthand the contrasting assumptions about childhood, discipline, and authority that now sit at the heart of this national controversy. That bicultural biography makes her a uniquely credible witness: she is not interpreting French parenting from the outside, but reporting on a debate she has lived. Her conversation with Michael Barbaro on The Daily draws directly on this dual experience to illuminate why a seemingly domestic question — how to raise children — has become one of France's most polarising cultural flashpoints.
See also
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.
Caroline Goldman is a psychologist who works as a therapist for children in a suburb south of Paris, and the daughter of famous French pop star Jean-Jacques Goldman. She argues that the rise of gentle parenting has left children without the structure and clear limits they need to develop properly.
Isabelle Filliozat is a 68-year-old major figure in the positive education movement in France, widely read and present on television, Instagram, and other platforms. She champions an empathic, child-centred approach that prioritises emotional attunement over traditional discipline.