A French Perspective on Child-Rearing
Some examples:
In the parks we visited, the kids ran free in the playgrounds (which, by the way, had equipment that would be considered dangerous by American standards). A fence ran the perimeter of the playground, and most of the benches were on the outside of the fence. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, I saw lots of kids, as young as two, running alone through these rather large playground areas, while their parents and friends sat on the benches far away, chatting, or reading the paper. A little guiltily, I basked in the sun with my husband on one of these benches, aware that what I was doing would probably be considered negligient in a comparable park in New York City.
At a marionette show in the middle of Jardin de Luxemburg, all of the kids, as young as toddlers, sat in the first two rows...while their parents sat rows and rows behind them. I kept thinking of the time I'd seen a similar marionette show in Central Park two years earlier and had been annoyed by the parents in the front rows, who had insisted on pulling their kids on to their laps, which meant my kids couldn't see over their heads.
Could their hands-off approach also be the reason why French kids seemed to behave better? My friend Jani, an English professor who has been spending the last year in Nice with her five-year-old son seemed to think so. She confirmed my impressions, telling me that none of the parents would dream of watching their kids' karate class lessons and that kids were always dropped off at the front door of the school--never, ever walked inside the classroom. Jani also said that in her son's French preschool, teachers set very high standards for the kids: they are expected to learn how to write in cursive, use a knife and fork (my ten year old still has problems with that), and are served and eat a proper three course French lunch.
I'm not sure exactly when Americans became so overprotective and coddling of their kids, but it's definitely a relatively recent phenomenon. Just recently I read about a 1991 study which found that the "radius around the home that parents allowed 9-year-olds to wander had shrunk to one-ninth of its 1970 parameters."
Stumble It!
posted by pam at 7:37 PM
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