Book of the week: Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman

(Penguin, $26)

Here comes another bomb in the international parenting wars, said John Allison in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Once again, the word from abroad is that Americans are raising their children all wrong and that a different, older culture knows better. “But unlike last year’s incendiary device, Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” this “modest” manifesto from an American mother living in Paris should reduce parental anxiety rather than raise it. Granted, Pamela Druckerman’s indictment is stinging: By coddling and micromanaging their offspring, U.S. parents are both making themselves miserable and raising selfish, ill-mannered brats. In Druckerman’s preferred French model, parents establish a framework for appropriate behavior—le cadre—to teach kids both limits and self-sufficiency.

It’s hard not to be jealous of the “uncannily confident” Parisian mothers we meet in the book, said Susannah Meadows in The New York Times. Druckerman meanwhile proves a “likable guide,” one you easily identify with when her children throw tantrums, and food, while French moms look on aghast. But if her advice seems sensible, it’s also nothing we don’t already know. Rather than rush to the cradle at the sound of a cry, French parents wait five minutes, we’re told. They believe in teaching their children to be patient, to learn to accept non as an answer, and to adapt to adult routines rather than vice versa. Beyond that, the book’s argument is simply unfair: When the author has trouble disciplining her children, “all 50 states are indicted” for not teaching her better parenting skills. When a Parisian infant sleeps through the night, “the entire country gets a medal.”

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But Drucker­man and Chua have sounded a wake-up call to parents that was long overdue, said Suzanne Venker in NationalReview.com. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Druckerman’s French adults aren’t afraid to teach their children to sit when told, to eat what’s in front of them, and to amuse themselves when bored. If you think this is simply common sense, you haven’t spent enough time with a whole generation of U.S. parents who practically have to “beg their kids to do what they say.” Somewhere along the line, champions of childhood self-esteem convinced us that kids can’t handle the word “no.” Sadly, it has taken “outlanders” to set us straight.