In books and news articles, France often plays the foil to America, just as it once did to England. The French language serves as a sign of socio-economic distinction, a class marker, and for its disciples, it is probably easy to think that French ways are superior in everything from cooking to flirtation to parenthood.
Americans moving to France in search of a more sophisticated lifestyle are confronted with a stagnating economy, a society riven by inequality and racism, and a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.
After an initial lost period, these American immigrants make careers out of France itself, trading off its pre-war reputation. "French women don't get fat", "Why French Parents Are Superior", "Bringing Up Bebe" and "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life" -- these are all real works published by people monetizing their lifestyle choices by preaching French superiority to those they have left behind.
Unfortunately, none of it is true. I spent 14 years in Paris, enough time to gauge the average weight of French womanhood and watch many French parents strut their stuff. France is becoming heavier and heavier as fast foods make deeper inroads. And French parenting is often a hystrionic affair that verges on verbal abuse when applied to toddlers. It's shocking, actually.
So these articles simply use France as a rhetorical trope to introduce new ideas to American society. Those ideas should be considered independently of the distortions applied to France itself. In fact, someone should build an app that substitutes the word "Utopia" for France in those articles. It will clear the mind and steer the reader clear of the many impasses in which French society is stuck.
Paris sucks though. I half kid but it's kinda true. Polluted and crowded, super expensive, and a lot of people are pretty disagreeable in my experience. A lot of nicer cities exists.
I don't get your point about food either. Unless you are rich enough to shop exclusively Whole Foods or something, the average French food experience is a lot better than an American one. Plus basically all products are higher quality. Compare what you find in an American Walgreens to something like a Monoprix in France. It's pretty embarrassing how much cheap shit has filled American stores.
I was having chicken nuggets or pizza everyday for lunch in my US middle school FFS! How do we let kids live like that? French public school was giving me way better food (though it was like $4 instead of $2). Actual "3 course meal", you could avoid vegetables some days if you wanted to but for the most part super balanced. Agree about Fast Food really making inroads though.
And of course inequality exists, but it's not the US. I have never heard somebody say that someone should "just work two jobs" to make ends meet in France. That's more indicative of US craziness but still. Not from Paris though, maybe Paris has those kinds of people.
France has its problems but for the most part people aren't starving on the street and kids have access to veggies.
You're right. Paris does suck in many ways. And I know the smaller cities have their charms. But none of them prove the points of the authors, that French are better at parenthood, weight control and seduction. None.
We have to try to compare apples to apples with the supermarkets. Monop and Inno are actually at the high end, so you should compare them to Whole Foods or Safeway and you can't compare it to the downmarket chains. And in that case, Whole Foods wins on variety, freshness and health by a long shot, while also beating sparsely stocked places like Naturalia.
Downmarket chains in the US, like Walmart, might be compared to Ed, Champion or the German invaders Aldi and Lidl. And the shopping there is not pretty. Most of the food is processed.
France hides a lot of inequality, so I'm not sure we know it's true measure there. There's a much stronger habit of offshoring one's wealth to places like Switzerland and Monaco (and sure, the US uses the Caymans, but w/e). The rural poverty and alcoholism is pretty bad. Sequestering the immigrant populations in the high-rises of the banlieues is pretty bad.
Many people have a problem finding even one job, let alone two, and they are physically isolated from the rest of the economy.
Homelessness in Paris was actually pretty visible when I was there, in the tent cities around the Canal St. Martin for example. And it wasn't just Afghan migrants, but people that France itself had produced, who had no home. And when you get out of Paris, you can still see shantytowns of tarp and trailers shoved between the freeways.
Happy to concede that French children get more vegetables. I hope that's true.
>a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.
Okay, I was with you until this bit. Food doesn't necessarily need to be fresh to be good or healthy, and there's nothing inherently good in organics. Putting fresh/local and organic food on a pedestal stinks of privilege at best, and represents a rather problematic neo-luddite worldview at worst.
People use 'organic' or 'locally sourced' as a proxy for any kind of food where the seller cares about flavour quality, nutrition, and appearance in equal amounts. The contrast to it, is 'industrial' food is of the sort where crop-yeild was the most important constraint to the seller.
I don't doubt most people would buy GMO foods if they were marketed as being healthier or tastier.
People certainly buy milk infused with all kinds of vitamins that aren't naturally present.
Good food, and innovations in food, follow the money. The money's not really in France. What ideas they had to contribute, other countries have now absorbed. There is as much good food and wine to be had in the Bay area as there is to be eaten in Paris, if not more.
Are you actually saying that France is given by inequality and racism compared to the US? Are you actually saying that the US and Germany have a superior food to France? US is superior to France in many ways, but clearly not those ones!
I feel this is an instance of Flanderization [1]. There are definitely some differences between France and the US, but they get blown out of proportion. And this is not specific to France, other articles take northern countries as the golden examples, or Japan, or China, by focusing on one particular aspect.
On the other hand, it can be good to keep in mind that other models of society can exist, even though they may not be exactly realistic.
Letting children play freely is hardly a new idea lol.
I won't comment the cuisine and racism thing, daily reminder that the US police is murdering black people on the street (and on camera for added entertainment).
Still I agree with you that France is becoming more and more like the US and that worries me because I definitely think it is NOT the way to go at all.
Anecdote, I've stayed at an AirBnB in the outskirts of Paris where the host was a father of a daughter. Daughter had some friends over and they seemed pretty chilled. They just ran around the house talking French and doing whatever kids do. Father was pretty relaxed about parenting.
This concept of structured playtime seems foreign to me. I grew up in Thailand where my parents would just let me run around the neighborhood with some friends. We would start fires and explore abandoned buildings.
Trying to plan out kids playtime just seems counterintuitive. Seems like helicopter parenting to me.
IMO things are just getting out of hand as time goes by.
I grew up in italy and I guess I had similar experiences (at least, I did start fires and explore abandoned buildings :) ).
But my friends' kids in my home town don't do that anymore.
It seems to me this is in a way a result of the replacement of the "local community" with a wider world, which often brings a sense of uneaseness or unsafety.
I.e. if you know basically everyone who lives in your neighborhood you feel kids are pretty safe, and at most tell them not to go play near the "bad people".
If you don't know who lives near to you, and you hear a lot of news about kids being abducted/molested/injured (which might have happened before, but it was less often in the news) you get worried about kids running around unsupervised.
These blog posts are all the same. Effectively this person has discovered she does not like or share the same values as the set of parents she is friends with in the US. Instead of trying to find new friends who take a similar parenting attitude, the rational choice, she has decided the entire country is on the wrong path. Maybe she just needs to find new friends.
This seems to be a problem mainly among upper-middle-class toffs who are afraid their kids might not get into Harvard if they aren't signed for as much personal development stuff as can fit in a week since they could walk. And a very recent development at that.
In a recent article I saw on HN on how ugly, oppressive, and typically American suburbs are, the author stated that the design of suburbs forces children out of unstructured play and necessarily makes their parents structure their free time around play dates. Which conflicts with my lived experience of going to a friend's house in Upper West Burbville, riding bikes and messing around with every kid in the neighborhood. The scenery was bland, but the people made the experience memorable.
I see this a lot in high anxiety parents. People who have rearranged their lives around their children rather than letting their children follow their lead. It's bad for you and them.
This was my biggest surprise in becoming a parent. I had expected that "Me" would effectively come to an end and that "Daddy" would be it from there on out. Everything would revolve around the kids and there would be no time for us parents to do anything just for us. Better get it all out of the system ahead of time because once the kids come, that's it.
But I was completely wrong. Our life just sort of carried on as usual, but with kids along.
Number One had seven stamps in his passport before his first birthday. Any given Saturday, you'll find the kids playing in the sand in the forest next to the boulders that Mom & Dad are climbing. Kids are just that portable.
I'm sure you could still arrange your entire life around your kids, but in reality it just isn't necessary.
Because you need to be you. You have a partner and they need that you too. The kids need to understand that adults need to be adults with adult activities. Subverting everything for the children puts you in stasis and doesn't properly teach the children about growing up and being an individual or how to be with a partner. If the children cannot fill the unstructured time then they will never truly be adults.
It must depend on the neighborhood, or on the social class. As a middle-class frenchman living in the outskirts of NYC and accompanying my kids to plenty of birthday parties or playdates my experiences are anything but "structured". If anything compared to France parties tend to happen more often at stores or specialized venues than at people's home, but schedules are pretty much the same: play, eat, and more play, with light parental/staff supervision.
When growing up I ended up going through both systems (living in Texas and France), so I feel qualified to talk about this:
I would finish school at 3 in the US, at 5/6 in France. There's 3 hours of the day that French kids can't spend in structured things. That alone completely changes dynamics. Basically you get to have one structured activity (like learning an instrument) and that's about it.
The French education system also doesn't promote much in terms of extracurricular activities. There's gym but you don't have sports in school or whatnot. Most depressing thing for me going from TX to France was losing Orchestra as a school class. Tried signing up to a conservatory but it would have ended up being my "1 thing" that I could do.
Honestly I preferred the American system much better. It gives you more flexibility for things like Boy Scouts, sports, or learning to program. And I still had loads of time to go to my friends house to do whatever.
So in the end the US system gives you more structured activities AND more unstructured time. School as an educational system is overrated. School as a socialised event organiser (like for Orchestra, Arts, and the like) is way underrated, and totally not a part of the French system.
The counterpoint is that I've heard recently that US schools have started giving waaaay too much homework, eating up at the unstructured time. I'm a fan of letting kids investigate what they want to do. Homework's important but so is giving people the opportunity to discover things.
Side note about the article: who brings their kids to Yoga class? Is that a thing?
The elementary school I went to in France would finish at 4:30pm, and most busy days in middle school at 5pm. Did you go to some private school?
In elementary school there's the long playground times, one in the morning, one big at lunch, and one in the afternoon. Kids have plenty of time to play soccer.
In middle school the Wednesdays afternoon are always free, you have time do extracurricular activities there: soccer, swimming, tennis, music, whatever. There was time to do those things in elementary school, I don't remember exactly when.
There was a special extra hours until 6 for those who want to, but basically at the end of those you'd be completely done with your homework.
Oh, yeah, forgot about Wednesdays. Like you said, it's a good opportunity for sports and whatnot. I also had the half days on Wednesdays but basically my classes always ended between 5 and 6PM (This was High School).
There are the recesses in between, but it was like 20 minute breaks. I could sit and read, but usually ended up just chatting with friends. A nice break but kinda felt forced for me. I would have much rather taken most of that time and gotten out of school earlier and go to a friend's house or something...
The schoolwork thing is a good point, I don't remember having much schoolwork for home in France compared to the US. There were books to read or things to study but I had math homework every day in the US.
I think the big thing I dislike about the French system is the lack of many elective courses (apart from art, latin, or something like an extra foreign language). Felt like I had a lot more choice in the US (at least in my well-funded school). On the other hand, the French system isn't just multiple choice questions...
Does this actually happen? Can any American parents here confirm that they actually do structure every free minute of their kids' time and never let them simply run around and play on their own?
We raise our kids kinda like the author describes as the "French" way. You know, taking them along as we live our lives, and letting them play however they like. As it happens, we do actually live in France, but it never occurred to me that we were doing anything particularly novel.
If anything I thought our way of raising kids was the "American" way, and that the French are too stifling in the way they confine their kids to pushchairs with pacifiers in their mouths to sit quietly in the corner until age 5.
The only case I can think of among my acquaintance of the overscheduling described in the article was an English mother. Still, I wouldn't use that as an example to base an article like this on.
In short, I don't buy it. Surely nobody actually thinks that is a good idea.
Readit News
Americans moving to France in search of a more sophisticated lifestyle are confronted with a stagnating economy, a society riven by inequality and racism, and a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.
After an initial lost period, these American immigrants make careers out of France itself, trading off its pre-war reputation. "French women don't get fat", "Why French Parents Are Superior", "Bringing Up Bebe" and "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life" -- these are all real works published by people monetizing their lifestyle choices by preaching French superiority to those they have left behind.
Unfortunately, none of it is true. I spent 14 years in Paris, enough time to gauge the average weight of French womanhood and watch many French parents strut their stuff. France is becoming heavier and heavier as fast foods make deeper inroads. And French parenting is often a hystrionic affair that verges on verbal abuse when applied to toddlers. It's shocking, actually.
So these articles simply use France as a rhetorical trope to introduce new ideas to American society. Those ideas should be considered independently of the distortions applied to France itself. In fact, someone should build an app that substitutes the word "Utopia" for France in those articles. It will clear the mind and steer the reader clear of the many impasses in which French society is stuck.
I don't get your point about food either. Unless you are rich enough to shop exclusively Whole Foods or something, the average French food experience is a lot better than an American one. Plus basically all products are higher quality. Compare what you find in an American Walgreens to something like a Monoprix in France. It's pretty embarrassing how much cheap shit has filled American stores.
I was having chicken nuggets or pizza everyday for lunch in my US middle school FFS! How do we let kids live like that? French public school was giving me way better food (though it was like $4 instead of $2). Actual "3 course meal", you could avoid vegetables some days if you wanted to but for the most part super balanced. Agree about Fast Food really making inroads though.
And of course inequality exists, but it's not the US. I have never heard somebody say that someone should "just work two jobs" to make ends meet in France. That's more indicative of US craziness but still. Not from Paris though, maybe Paris has those kinds of people.
France has its problems but for the most part people aren't starving on the street and kids have access to veggies.
We have to try to compare apples to apples with the supermarkets. Monop and Inno are actually at the high end, so you should compare them to Whole Foods or Safeway and you can't compare it to the downmarket chains. And in that case, Whole Foods wins on variety, freshness and health by a long shot, while also beating sparsely stocked places like Naturalia.
Downmarket chains in the US, like Walmart, might be compared to Ed, Champion or the German invaders Aldi and Lidl. And the shopping there is not pretty. Most of the food is processed.
France hides a lot of inequality, so I'm not sure we know it's true measure there. There's a much stronger habit of offshoring one's wealth to places like Switzerland and Monaco (and sure, the US uses the Caymans, but w/e). The rural poverty and alcoholism is pretty bad. Sequestering the immigrant populations in the high-rises of the banlieues is pretty bad.
Many people have a problem finding even one job, let alone two, and they are physically isolated from the rest of the economy.
Homelessness in Paris was actually pretty visible when I was there, in the tent cities around the Canal St. Martin for example. And it wasn't just Afghan migrants, but people that France itself had produced, who had no home. And when you get out of Paris, you can still see shantytowns of tarp and trailers shoved between the freeways.
Happy to concede that French children get more vegetables. I hope that's true.
Okay, I was with you until this bit. Food doesn't necessarily need to be fresh to be good or healthy, and there's nothing inherently good in organics. Putting fresh/local and organic food on a pedestal stinks of privilege at best, and represents a rather problematic neo-luddite worldview at worst.
I don't doubt most people would buy GMO foods if they were marketed as being healthier or tastier.
People certainly buy milk infused with all kinds of vitamins that aren't naturally present.
On the other hand, it can be good to keep in mind that other models of society can exist, even though they may not be exactly realistic.
[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
Still I agree with you that France is becoming more and more like the US and that worries me because I definitely think it is NOT the way to go at all.
This concept of structured playtime seems foreign to me. I grew up in Thailand where my parents would just let me run around the neighborhood with some friends. We would start fires and explore abandoned buildings.
Trying to plan out kids playtime just seems counterintuitive. Seems like helicopter parenting to me.
I grew up in italy and I guess I had similar experiences (at least, I did start fires and explore abandoned buildings :) ).
But my friends' kids in my home town don't do that anymore.
It seems to me this is in a way a result of the replacement of the "local community" with a wider world, which often brings a sense of uneaseness or unsafety.
I.e. if you know basically everyone who lives in your neighborhood you feel kids are pretty safe, and at most tell them not to go play near the "bad people".
If you don't know who lives near to you, and you hear a lot of news about kids being abducted/molested/injured (which might have happened before, but it was less often in the news) you get worried about kids running around unsupervised.
In a recent article I saw on HN on how ugly, oppressive, and typically American suburbs are, the author stated that the design of suburbs forces children out of unstructured play and necessarily makes their parents structure their free time around play dates. Which conflicts with my lived experience of going to a friend's house in Upper West Burbville, riding bikes and messing around with every kid in the neighborhood. The scenery was bland, but the people made the experience memorable.
But I was completely wrong. Our life just sort of carried on as usual, but with kids along.
Number One had seven stamps in his passport before his first birthday. Any given Saturday, you'll find the kids playing in the sand in the forest next to the boulders that Mom & Dad are climbing. Kids are just that portable.
I'm sure you could still arrange your entire life around your kids, but in reality it just isn't necessary.
I would finish school at 3 in the US, at 5/6 in France. There's 3 hours of the day that French kids can't spend in structured things. That alone completely changes dynamics. Basically you get to have one structured activity (like learning an instrument) and that's about it.
The French education system also doesn't promote much in terms of extracurricular activities. There's gym but you don't have sports in school or whatnot. Most depressing thing for me going from TX to France was losing Orchestra as a school class. Tried signing up to a conservatory but it would have ended up being my "1 thing" that I could do.
Honestly I preferred the American system much better. It gives you more flexibility for things like Boy Scouts, sports, or learning to program. And I still had loads of time to go to my friends house to do whatever.
So in the end the US system gives you more structured activities AND more unstructured time. School as an educational system is overrated. School as a socialised event organiser (like for Orchestra, Arts, and the like) is way underrated, and totally not a part of the French system.
The counterpoint is that I've heard recently that US schools have started giving waaaay too much homework, eating up at the unstructured time. I'm a fan of letting kids investigate what they want to do. Homework's important but so is giving people the opportunity to discover things.
Side note about the article: who brings their kids to Yoga class? Is that a thing?
Deleted Comment
In elementary school there's the long playground times, one in the morning, one big at lunch, and one in the afternoon. Kids have plenty of time to play soccer.
In middle school the Wednesdays afternoon are always free, you have time do extracurricular activities there: soccer, swimming, tennis, music, whatever. There was time to do those things in elementary school, I don't remember exactly when.
There was a special extra hours until 6 for those who want to, but basically at the end of those you'd be completely done with your homework.There are the recesses in between, but it was like 20 minute breaks. I could sit and read, but usually ended up just chatting with friends. A nice break but kinda felt forced for me. I would have much rather taken most of that time and gotten out of school earlier and go to a friend's house or something...
The schoolwork thing is a good point, I don't remember having much schoolwork for home in France compared to the US. There were books to read or things to study but I had math homework every day in the US.
I think the big thing I dislike about the French system is the lack of many elective courses (apart from art, latin, or something like an extra foreign language). Felt like I had a lot more choice in the US (at least in my well-funded school). On the other hand, the French system isn't just multiple choice questions...
We raise our kids kinda like the author describes as the "French" way. You know, taking them along as we live our lives, and letting them play however they like. As it happens, we do actually live in France, but it never occurred to me that we were doing anything particularly novel.
If anything I thought our way of raising kids was the "American" way, and that the French are too stifling in the way they confine their kids to pushchairs with pacifiers in their mouths to sit quietly in the corner until age 5.
The only case I can think of among my acquaintance of the overscheduling described in the article was an English mother. Still, I wouldn't use that as an example to base an article like this on.
In short, I don't buy it. Surely nobody actually thinks that is a good idea.