What is the book 'Bringing Up Bébé' and why did it resonate so strongly with American parents?
Bringing Up Bébé was published in 2012 by Pamela Druckerman, an American journalist who moved to France and raised three children there. The book became a major bestseller in the United States because it demonstrated something many American parents desperately wanted to believe: that it was possible to raise well-behaved, independent children while still preserving one's own adult life — a genuine revelation for a generation of parents feeling overwhelmed by the intensive demands of American-style child-rearing.
The book's power lay in what it held up as a contrast. French children, as Druckerman observed, ate what adults ate, sat through meals without drama, and moved through the world with a kind of calm self-sufficiency. French parents, meanwhile, had not dissolved entirely into parenthood. That combination — disciplined children, intact adult identity — struck American readers as almost radical. It offered a model that felt both aspirational and attainable, rooted not in harsh methods but in cultural confidence about what children actually need.
This is precisely the backdrop against which the current French parenting debate unfolds: a country long admired abroad for its structured, confident approach to child-rearing is now questioning that very model from within. You can follow the full conversation on Listenly's page for The Daily.
"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 TimesAbout Madeline Schwartz
Madeline Schwartz is a reporter based in Paris, covering culture and society for The New York Times. Her authority on the French parenting debate is not purely professional — it is deeply personal. Born to an American mother and a French father who separated when she was a baby, Schwartz grew up moving between New York and Paris, attending school in both cities and navigating two distinct educational and family cultures from childhood onward.
That bicultural upbringing means Schwartz has not observed the French-versus-American parenting divide from the outside: she lived it. She knows what it feels like to be held to French classroom expectations and American domestic norms in the same lifetime, which gives her reporting a specificity and credibility that goes well beyond standard foreign correspondence. When she describes why Bringing Up Bébé landed so powerfully with American readers, or why a French psychologist's call for a return to discipline ignited a national controversy, she speaks from a vantage point that is genuinely difficult to replicate.
See also
Traditional French parenting is highly rule-bound, centered on integrating children into adult society through firm boundaries. Children are expected to eat what adults eat, behave calmly at the table, and adapt to the rhythms of adult life rather than the other way around.