What role did Françoise Dolto play in shaping French parenting philosophy?
Françoise Dolto was a psychoanalyst who profoundly shaped generations of French parenting through her books and a widely listened-to radio program. She is credited with revolutionizing the concept of children's rights in France — championing the idea that children are people who deserve to be spoken to as such. At the same time, she maintained a deeply hierarchical, Catholic bourgeois worldview that reinforced France's rigid cultural rules rather than dismantling them.
Dolto's influence is central to understanding why the French parenting debate feels so loaded today. Her legacy is genuinely dual: she opened a door toward recognizing children's inner lives and dignity, yet she did so within a framework that never questioned the authority of adults or the social structures that governed family life. In France, this created a particular cultural tension — a country that claims to respect children as individuals, while simultaneously expecting them to conform to strict norms around behavior, meals, and hierarchy.
That tension is precisely what Madeline Schwartz explores in her reporting on the debate now dividing French parents. The emergence of figures like psychologist Caroline Goldman — who argues that a generation of French children has been abandoned by adults practicing an "exclusively empathic attitude" — and positive-parenting advocates like Isabelle Filliozat (whose book sold half a million copies in France) can both be traced, in different ways, back to how Dolto's legacy was interpreted and contested over the decades. To understand the current debate, listen to the full episode on Listenly — Schwartz maps it with remarkable precision.
"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 · The Daily, August 2026
About Madeline Schwartz
Madeline Schwartz
Reporter · The New York Times
Madeline Schwartz is a reporter for The New York Times based in Paris. She grew up moving between New York and Paris after her American mother and French father separated when she was a baby, attending school in both cities throughout her childhood. This bicultural upbringing is not incidental to her reporting: it means she absorbed French and American parenting norms simultaneously, firsthand, at the ages when those norms matter most — in classrooms, at family dinner tables, in the everyday texture of childhood. That lived experience gives her an authority on this subject that goes well beyond desk research. When she reports on why the French parenting debate has become so emotionally charged, she speaks as someone who has been shaped by both sides of it. Her depth of knowledge spans the key figures in the debate, from Dolto's foundational influence to the competing camps of Goldman and Filliozat today.
See also
A sociologist studying parenting in France coined the term 'parental pessimism' to describe the stress and overwhelm French parents feel because, while they have access to strong structural support, the cultural pressure to raise children 'correctly' remains intense and creates significant anxiety.
In 2022, Caroline Goldman and over 350 early childhood experts signed an open letter in Le Figaro arguing that too much positive parenting was harming children, while 280 early childhood experts signed a competing open letter in Le Monde opposing the use of timeouts.
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 use punitive or shaming methods.