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I Read About the French Parenting War So You Don’t Have To

__DEGRADED__ Something like forty of you sent me the same New York Times Magazine article this week. DMs, forwarded emails, one voice memo left at eleven at night that opened with, “What am I supposed to think?!” It seems that France’s Parenting Civil War — Caroline Goldman, the extended timeout evangelist vs Isabelle Filliozat and the gentle-parenting establishment she’s spent years antagonizing — has clearly reached across the ocean and hit a nerve over here, too. The messages all had the same theme sitting under them, whether or not anyone typed it: Did we get this wrong? Is the gentle thing actually wrecking our kids? Am I supposed to be shutting mine in a room now? I want to be more like the French so does that mean I should be camp Goldman? First, I’m going to address the panic. Here’s what a piece like this does, and what the whole French fight does, and honestly what most of the parenting internet does, and of course what the New York Times Magazine does. It hands you a binary and forces, maybe even dares you, to choose. Discipline or empathy. Boundaries or feelings. The giraffe looking down at the ant, or the mother hugging the kid who’s hitting her (that’s a call back from the article that I’m telling you not to bother with, so just go with me here). It’s built so that whichever pole you pick, you’re currently failing at the other one. That isn’t an accident and it is certainly not rooted in the science of child development — it’s just how you build an audience. Certainty sells. “It depends on your kid, and it’s hard, and some nights you’ll get it wrong” does not a viral article make! So let me do the thing that doesn’t sell (because it’s kind of my signature– though I wonder if I should work on selling harder at the hook and then making the message the same when I explain? That’s for another conversation!). Goldman is right about a few things, and I think it is worth mentioning even though some of the other stuff is absurd. Kids, OF COURSE, need limits. Permissiveness is not safe and cozy though it can feel that way. A home with no boundaries can cause more anxiety in the long run. She’s also right that parents are people. Her defense of parking your fried self in front of a screen with the kid for ninety minutes so you can breathe — that’s not a moral failure. We have convinced a generation of mothers they are meant to do the impossible, and then do so without systems in place to support them. On that, Goldman is more aligned to the developmental literature than her opponents will ever concede. But then she drives straight off the road. Goldman cites Alan Kazdin — former head of The Yale Child Study Center— as a source for her timeout method to change behavior. His research doesn’t come close to aligning with her recommendations. In the article, Kazdin, asked directly, says her version isn’t his. The timeout that has research behind it is short. Not even a minute. It is capped low, a brief pause from attention, done calmly, inside a relationship that’s running heavy on warmth the rest of the day, and with a full admission that it is not effective at changing behavior but may be effective at stopping you or your child from doing something more dysregulated. What Goldman prescribes is a different creature: thirty minutes or more for a four-year-old, timeouts starting at age one (which is never recommended), twenty extra minutes tacked on when the child dares to cry about it, the door shut on a toddler for “complaining” or “making too much noise.” That is not a clinical tool. That is punitive isolation. When the researcher you’re citing tells a reporter that punishment doesn’t even work (as Kazdin did), you don’t get to keep the word “science.” You get to say, “my opinion, at three in the morning,” on Instagram, which is in fact where she posts most of this. Now. The gentle parenting side. I have more temperamental sympathy here and also I’m going to be just as hard on them, because they’ve earned some of it. A lot of what gets sold in France as “the neuroscience of positive parenting” is neuroscience in the way that a horoscope is astronomy. The idea that telling a small child “no” sets off a damaging stress response — that a boundary is a little neural wound — is a reckless over-read of the toxic-stress research, which is about chronic abuse, neglect, and deprivation, not about a parent saying “we keep our hands to ourselves.” The idea that a child hears “no” and thinks “yes” is a decent communication tip but no law of the nervous system. Children understand no. And when the parenting advice includes neuro-linguistic programming — which is about as scientific as a mood ring — I want everyone in this fight to stop handling the word “science” like it’s a garnish.