Who is Caroline Goldman, and what is her critique of gentle parenting in France?
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. About ten years ago, she began noticing an explosion of behavioral issues in the children she treated — issues she attributes directly to permissive parenting. She argues that positive parenting undermines parental authority, leads to parental burnout, and that tools like the timeout are essential for teaching children where boundaries lie.
Goldman became an inescapable media figure in France, appearing in Le Monde, writing op-eds, and speaking on television. Her charisma and her famous surname — her father Jean-Jacques Goldman is a beloved pop star often compared to a French Bruce Springsteen — gave her an unusual public magnetism. Her book Go to Your Room makes the case for structured discipline, recommending timeouts of at least 30 minutes for children over the age of four.
In 2022, Goldman and over 350 early childhood experts signed an open letter in Le Figaro against positive parenting. The response was swift: 280 early childhood experts signed a competing open letter in Le Monde opposing the use of timeouts. That exchange crystallized just how polarized the debate had become — a battle, as reported on The Daily, between two fundamentally different visions of what children need.
"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 TimesKey facts from the episode
- 2022: Goldman and 350+ experts signed an open letter in Le Figaro against positive parenting
- 280 experts signed a counter-letter in Le Monde opposing the use of timeouts
- Go to Your Room: Goldman's book recommends timeouts of at least 30 minutes for children over four
- 2019: France passed the Anti-Spanking Law, forbidding physical and psychological violence against children
- Isabelle Filliozat's book on positive parenting sold half a million copies in France, giving Goldman a formidable opponent
About Madeline Schwartz
Madeline Schwartz is a reporter for The New York Times based in Paris, covering French society and culture with a depth that is genuinely biographical. 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 and absorbing two very different approaches to childhood, education, and family life.
That bicultural upbringing is not a rhetorical device — it is the lens through which Schwartz reports on a debate that most journalists would approach only from the outside. She has firsthand experience of both the structured discipline associated with traditional French parenting and the more empathic, child-led style that took root in the United States and, more recently, in France itself. Her reporting on the Goldman versus positive-parenting controversy draws directly on that lived perspective, giving her analysis an authority that purely academic or policy-focused observers cannot replicate.