In this edition of Brooding, Kathryn Jezer-Morton interviews author Pamela Druckerman about what has changed since ‘Bringing Up Bébé,’ her book about discovering French parenting.
, an engaging work of shrewd cultural observation about having a child in Paris from the perspective of an American expat.
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.showing the amount of time that mothers spend with their children in different OECD countries from the 1960s until now.
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.
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.
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.
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