How Do French Parents Raise Their Teenagers?

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In 2012, Pamela Druckerman published Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, an engaging work of shrewd cultural observation about having a child in Paris from the perspective of an American expat. The book detailed how Druckerman and her husband, fellow journalist Simon Kuper (himself a Brit), experienced pregnancy, childbirth, and the baby years in their adopted city, with special attention to the French approach to sleep training, baby feeding, and state-run day care, which the French call crèche.

The book caused a sensation when it came out, somewhat in the same way that French Women Don’t Get Fat had a few years earlier. But while French Women, written by former Veuve Clicquot executive Mireille Guiliano, struck many American readers as more than a little bit condescending, Bringing Up Bébé had a more anthropological orientation — it was written by an outsider trying to make sense of French habits. Still, it caused frissons among many readers, describing a way of life that was just familiar enough to be aspirational for many American parents but just foreign enough to feel completely unrealistic.

Over the past few years, while watching American parenting become increasingly defined by anxiety and economic stress, I’ve thought of Bringing up Bébé often. If things are this hard in the United States, I’ve wondered, can they possibly be much better in France? So I caught up with Pamela Druckerman over Zoom recently to find out about bringing up French teens and what’s changed in the decade-plus since her book was published.

From your perspective, is French parenting still as distinct from American parenting as it was in 2012? Or are French parents assimilating into a more anxious approach? 

It’s funny, because I think the American bias is always that the French are eventually going to become like us. In parenting and everything else, they’ll come around and see the light. And to a certain extent, the whole world parents a lot like Americans do at this point — intensive parenting, or hyperparenting, or whatever name you want to give it. It’s a global phenomenon.

I saw this when I was out promoting this book. People were spending more time with their kids, and discussing and dissecting, you know, different aspects of parenting to a degree that maybe they had never done before. France was an outlier from all that, and still is.

There’s this amazing chart showing the amount of time that mothers spend with their children in different OECD countries from the 1960s until now. The graph goes up, way up, sharply, in almost every country except for in France, where it has declined.

But I wouldn’t say that parenting here hasn’t changed. It definitely has. There’s much more discussion of this concept of parentalité. In 2009 and 2010, when I was researching the book, I would use the word parentalité and people were like, ‘What? What is that word?’ And now, it’s very much a word you see in the media. Le Monde, which never really used to write about parenting, now has a parenting columnist. They look at parenting around the world. But their parenting discussion is still quite French. It’s a bit philosophical, like there was one that asked, “Do our children belong to us?” It’s generally less practical and more reflective.

Do you think it’s still less outcome oriented than American parenting? 

It’s become a bit more anxious and a bit more outcome oriented, but it’s all relative. A friend of mine was telling me the other day that her school director said that parents are starting to ask about preparing to get into college starting in the seventh grade. To the school director, that seemed incredibly early and anxious, whereas I think in the U.S. we have these concerns from an even earlier age.

I know this is a huge and maybe even impossible-to-answer question, but do you have any theories as to the root cause for this move, throughout the post-industrialized world, toward a more anxious style of parenting? 

I buy the argument that it has to do with economic anxiety, in the U.S., at least. You know, helicopter parenting is not illogical. There are real consequences when it comes to getting your child to replicate your social class, or getting your child into a university in which they’re going to be able to jump a social class. This is often about making sure your child is tracked in a certain way. There are real rules for what it takes to get into a good college. College admissions are one big, structural difference that I’m seeing now with my kids. French universities only look at your last two years of high school. So you don’t have to start worrying about what your math grades are in ninth grade.

And kids can do extracurricular activities if they want, and people do them, but they’re not critical for getting into college. You do write a personal statement, but some schools barely look at those. It’s really just your grades from the last two years and three or four subject-specific standardized tests.

Speaking of structural factors, something I’ve thought about ever since I first got pregnant 14 years ago was how different my life has been from that of my American friends because I had paid maternity leave and affordable child care. One of the reasons I think your book was provocative, and even triggering, for so many American parents was that it’s so hard to cultivate the kinds of habits of French parents in an American context. It’s like, “Oh, you expect me to serve my child a little salad before each meal and go on dates to keep it sexy with my partner? In this economy?” 

I do think there are things you can do outside of those structures to make your life a little bit easier, but I agree with you completely that these structural differences, social differences, have an enormous impact on people’s private experience of parenting. Speaking of college — French universities cost 220 euros a year, right?

Nobody’s taking out a second mortgage on their house. Nobody thinks they’re going to be in debt until they’re 50 paying for medical school or law school. And then there’s health care — the leading cause of bankruptcy in America. Nobody in France is bankrupted because they had to get surgery.

Now that your kids are teens, what are the big concerns among the parents you know? 

School is still a big concern — doing well on the bacc [tests at the end of high school]. Screens are a big concern, and how screens are affecting concentration. There’s also worry about bullying and social media, and about the impact social media has on girls in particular.

Am I wrong in assuming that there’s a bit more of a culture of controlling access to things like screens among French parents? The same way food is somewhat more subject to a kind of control, and also the emphasis on being polite in very specific ways — learning to say “bonjour” from a very early age. But with the phone, is that same kind of access control possible? Or does everyone on earth have the same problem? 

I do get the sense that French parents are more comfortable, at least with little kids, setting limits and saying “no.” But the screens, let’s face it, are a form of child care. You can put your little kid in front of a screen, and that buys you half an hour. In France, little kids are in crèche all day. So you have more help and less reason to resort to screens. On the other hand, screens are an enormous problem here, and the Macron administration has taken it up. There was just a government panel that released a series of findings supposedly based on scientific studies of the effect of screens on kids, and they’ve released some recommendations. But it’s interesting that in the U.S., recommendations come through these self-appointed experts who are on a book tour.  And in France, it’s very much, like, top-down, from the government. (The report is called “À la recherche du temps perdu,” after Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, which is kind of delightful.)

What could the government do? I’m struggling to imagine how guidelines could be enforced inside people’s homes. 

Their recommendation was no screens before age 3, only screens with an adult present until age 6, then no phone until age 11. Internet access from age 13, but no social networks. And from age 15, you can access social networks, but only “ethical sites.” I don’t know if Instagram is considered ethical or not. I think they’re hoping to get some cooperation from the sites themselves. Apparently in China, the sites set limits on kids’ use, and they’re quite strict on that.

Is location tracking common among Parisian parents? 

I have seen some American parents who have full access to their teenagers’ smartphones and who think it’s their right to look at their social media and read their private messages and email. I don’t know how common that is in the US, but I’ve certainly seen it. So it’s not just tracking, it’s like full surveillance. And I haven’t seen that here at all. I mean, I don’t know the passwords to my kids’ phones. I’m not the best example of French parenting because I come with all kinds of American biases, but I think my kids are very aware of the French norms and would be horrified if I expected to read their private messages,

It’s funny, I wrote this book about infidelity, and I talked a lot about this idea of the secret garden, how everyone’s entitled to a private space, but I think it’s true also with kids. In France, they’re entitled to a very high degree of privacy.

And it’s true in terms of adolescent sexuality. If you have the French health-insurance card, which pretty much everyone does, you’re entitled to free birth control, the day-after pill, and condoms, until you’re — I think it’s until you’re 26. Even if you’re a minor, it’s kept secret. So any minor can walk into a French pharmacy and say, “I need the day-after pill,” and get it for free immediately. No questions asked.

Continuing on the subject of privacy, there’s a lot of talk in the States these days about the ethics of sharing pictures of your kids on your own social media. Do you hear much about that in Paris? 

Among a lot of French mothers, you honestly can’t tell that a lot of them are mothers from their feeds.

Oh wow. That is very different. 

You see this in French movies too, like often you’ll only find out halfway through that the woman who is the main character has a child, right? And it’s done unapologetically. You really are allowed to have an identity that is completely separate from your children. I think that’s very healthy. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t care fantastically about your kids.

Is there a stigma, then, around being a mom who posts a million pictures of your kids? 

I think there is. Even though there’s more of a discussion about parenting now, and more interest in different styles of parenting, it’s not socially acceptable, and not seen as good for your kids or good for yourself, to be so focused on being a parent, or to have that be the focus of your life.

The French are suspicious of — and there’s often a backlash against — ideas that require parents to massively sacrifice their own welfare. One of Le Monde’s parenting articles quoted a sociologist who said, “This marketplace of expertise makes parents suffer a lot. By dint of being obsessed by the well-being of their children, we engender a mistreatment of parents.”

Do you think it’s too easy for Americans to idealize French parenting? 

I really don’t want to idealize France. Things are far from perfect here. I’ve benefited tremendously from having grown up in the U.S. and from having an “American” outlook and perspective.

I do think another thing that’s changed since I wrote the book is that Americans, especially mothers, used to blame themselves completely for their inability to make it all work out, and they are now much more likely to apply a political lens to their situation.

And I think the reason why books like mine got written is because around that time, Americans were starting to look at the rest of the world more as a point of comparison, whereas maybe 20 or 30 years ago, we would have just assumed we’re the best at everything and that we don’t need to to look around. It’s become abundantly clear to us that there are other countries that get certain things better and that we can learn from them.