What did France's official daycare guidelines say about punishing children who misbehave?
The French government issued official guidelines for daycare workers and childcare professionals explicitly stating that if a child misbehaves, punishment of any kind is not allowed — including a timeout. This government-backed position brought the debate over discipline into the institutional sphere, moving it well beyond a disagreement between individual parenting philosophies.
For psychologist Caroline Goldman and her allies, the ban goes too far. Goldman's book Go to Your Room advocates for timeouts of at least 30 minutes for children over the age of four, positioning them as an essential and legitimate tool that gives children a clear, bounded consequence for crossing a boundary. To see the French state officially categorize the timeout alongside all other forms of punishment was, for Goldman, a serious provocation — and a sign that the gentle parenting movement had gained real institutional leverage. In 2022, Goldman and over 350 early childhood experts signed an open letter in Le Figaro pushing back; 280 competing experts signed a counter-letter in Le Monde defending the no-punishment approach.
This official stance sits within a broader legislative trend: France passed the Anti-Spanking Law in 2019, forbidding both physical and psychological violence against children. The daycare guidelines extended that logic further, into the territory of consequences and structure. You can follow the full conversation between Michael Barbaro and reporter Madeline Schwartz on The Daily on Listenly.
"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
About Madeline Schwartz
Madeline Schwartz is a Paris-based reporter for The New York Times who covers French society and culture. Her authority on this particular debate is rooted in lived experience as much as journalism: she was raised between New York and Paris, attending school in both cities, with an American mother and a French father who separated when she was a baby. Growing up at the intersection of two radically different parenting cultures — American warmth and expressiveness on one side, French structure and authority on the other — gave Schwartz a firsthand, embodied understanding of what is actually at stake in this debate. That bicultural background shapes both her reporting instincts and the clarity with which she maps the fault lines between the two camps: those who see discipline as care, and those who see it as harm.
See also
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 reignite debate about where legitimate discipline ends and harmful punishment begins.
Goldman strongly promotes the timeout as a core disciplinary tool, arguing it gives children a clear signal about which boundary they have crossed and allows them to reflect on their behavior. 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 gentle parenting, with its exclusively empathic approach, leaves children without the clear boundaries they need to develop properly.