Who is Isabelle Filliozat, and what does she teach French parents about saying no to their children?
Isabelle Filliozat is a 68-year-old figure at the heart of France's positive parenting movement — widely read, regularly on television, active on Instagram and podcasts, and the author of a book that sold half a million copies in France. Her central teaching is that children under three do not understand the word "no," and that saying no activates a stress response in their developing brains.
Rather than using direct refusals, Filliozat encourages parents to reframe instructions in positive terms. Instead of telling a toddler "don't open the door," she recommends saying "let's keep the door closed" — preserving the boundary while removing the linguistic trigger she links to distress. This approach became enormously influential in French parenting circles, particularly among a younger generation of parents already questioning the country's traditionally strict approach to child-rearing.
What this means in practice
Positive reframing, as Filliozat promotes it, means replacing prohibitions with invitations. "Don't touch that" becomes "let's put that back here." The intent is to guide behavior without triggering what she describes as a child's neurological stress response to a flat refusal. Critics, including psychologist Caroline Goldman and over 350 early childhood experts who signed an open letter in Le Figaro in 2022, argue this approach leaves children without the clear limits they need to develop.
The debate around Filliozat's ideas is part of a broader, fiercely contested national conversation in France — a country whose reputation for strict, structured parenting was long considered settled and even enviable abroad. For a sense of how that conversation unfolded, listen to the full episode 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 reporter for The New York Times based in Paris, covering French society and culture. Her authority on this particular debate is rooted in lived experience: she grew up moving between New York and Paris, attending school in both cities, after her American mother and French father separated when she was a baby. That bicultural upbringing gave her firsthand exposure to two radically different sets of assumptions about how children should be raised — assumptions that are now clashing openly in France. Schwartz draws on that personal vantage point throughout her reporting on the gentle parenting debate, grounding her analysis in cultural observation that goes beyond documentary research. Her familiarity with both the French institutional context and the American parenting conversation makes her an unusually well-positioned guide to a dispute that has mobilized hundreds of child development experts, split opinion pages, and reached all the way into French prime-time television.
See also
What is positive parenting or gentle parenting, and how did it arrive in France?
Positive parenting, as it is known in France, originated in English-speaking countries including the United States and Australia, and began making its way into French family culture through books, social media, and a growing wave of child psychology content.
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 had three children there. The book became a major bestseller in the United States, presenting French parenting as a model of calm authority and structure that American parents found aspirational.
What is the traditional French parenting style and what are its defining characteristics?
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 at the table, and adapt to the rhythms of adult life rather than the other way around.