Frenchparents Blog: For Parents with an interest in the French Culture

I just posted a question on educational products for kids in Yahoo Answers. Pretty neat, I must say! I’m jealous of course as the one behind the Frenchparents site, because my first goal in creating this platform was to enable parents ( like me) to easily find answers to questions they had on raising and caring for their children, from birth to adolescence. This is the member-only Recommendations area of the site.
I had a particular angle as well: the aim was to offer a place to help connect those parents with an interest in the French culture.

The reason I’m jealous is Yahoo Answers provides a super easy and accessible way to attain this goal. You log in, enter your question and can get an anwer very quickly! Yahoo has a points system that encourages good behaviour, ie, quality answers.

That brings me to one of the limitations I would see to such a seductive system of Q and A:

- Who will respond to my question? Will it be someone I’m close to in terms of background and personality, and even geographically? I mean if my neighbour answered my questions on raising kids, I probably wouldn’t want her advice, because we have so little in common. If someone in the UK answered, whereas i’m in San Francisco, it wouldn’t help me too much either…

The idea behind a closed community like Frenchparents was that:

- It would first of all provide a safe place to ask all sorts of questions, even personal ones
- It would bring together those who took the effort to sign up to the site by filling out a loooong form and to pay a huuuge membership fee ( $20 to $35 a year)!
- It would bring together parents in a given geographical area, with similar references and constraints- like the excessive amount of sunshine and fresh air one gest living San Francisco…

- The other cautionary note to Yahoo Answers is the following. This is another giant mega tera database of us being held by a giant, woldwide company. From the categories we ask our questions in, Yahoo can infer our areas of interest and know yet a little more about us than where we live and our name, which they knew already. It just feels weird to me to have all this personal information held by a large corporate entity thats more powerful than any country governement…

Now with Frenchparents, members know some of the personal information they may provide is stored by a teeny, tiny entity with no power whatsoever!

The web sure isn’t boring these days…

The OECD is again coming out with useful research:

More OECD countries focusing on early childhood as key to education success

19/09/2006 - A new OECD report on early childhood policy, Starting Strong II shows that more countries are making early childhood education and care a priority, with greater attention paid to service quality. Increasingly, it shows, the early years are viewed as the first step in lifelong learning and a key to successful social, family and education policies. Attitudes to education are deeply embedded in country contexts, values and beliefs, and the 20 countries reviewed – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States – all have diverse strategies in this field. Their variations reflect differing attitudes and cultural and social beliefs about young children, the roles of families and government and the purposes of early childhood education and care. Starting Strong II provides a comparative analysis of policy developments and issues, highlighting innovative approaches and proposing policy options that can be adapted to different national contexts. Among other things, it notes: a growing consensus – based on research from a wide range of countries covering demographics, social change and cost-benefit analyses – that governments must invest in and regulate early childhood education and care; a trend towards integrating early childhood policy and administration under one ministry, often education; moves towards greater contact between early childhood centres and schools, and growing use of national curricular frameworks in the early childhood sector; the provision of at least two years of kindergarten before children enter compulsory schooling; growing, but still insufficient, government investment in services; more participatory approaches to quality improvement, based on wide consultation of stakeholders and the engagement of professional staff in documentation and research; clearer ideas at government level of the qualifications needed by staff to engage with rapidly changing social and family conditions; an increase in university chairs in early childhood education and care policy; and a recognition of the need for more country research and data collection in the field.

Finally, if the legislators can direct their glance not only towards higher education but towards those not-so-glamourous early years of education, that would be a great help to us parents who believe early experiences are the crucial stepping stones on which a child will build and develop – and who appreciate every help they can get to provide the best experience for their kids.  And that state investment in those years is among the best investment they can make for the country.
Thanks to the OECD for pushing this thought too!

As a person inpired by both the North American and the French culture, I am struck by the somewhat negative connotation “Discipline” has in English- even more so in “Californian”, the particularly ” PC” English spoken on the West Coast.
In the French culture, it is not so negatively tainted, although this is changing. France is now seeing the results of the “No to Discipline, Yes to the Child”approach to education which is highly prevalent in California. Three-year olds are beating up on their parents over there too.. and on their babysitters, their “friends”, their teachers…
Wow! Can “No discipline” be so great when this is the outcome?

The issue in my view is defining what one means by discipline and if discipline is used in a loving context or not. My very personal acception has nothing to do with using sticks, slaps, or any other physical means of punishment. My definition does incorporate the notion of punishment and of parental responsability. Enforcing some sort of dicipline, however, is only part of raising a happy child. Discipline is easily accepted and even welcomed
when the child feels attention, love and respect from her parents, because she feels secure in this environment.

Enforcing discipline, sorry to those who won’t like it, is, for me, part of raising a child.

Discipline without love and no discipline ( not sure if there’s actually love in this latter case) are both recipes for unhappy, unstable kids- and families.

What I regret in attitudes I’ve witnessed in California and elsewhere is the opposition placed between discipline and love and attention. As if love entailed loosening off on the dicipline, and discipline meant being heartless.. No so!

Demonstrating love does not equate to giving gifts, treats, or “being easy” on this or that..

Love is not so easy to show. It means positive actions and not so positive actions for you, the responsible one.
It’s hard, it takes effort and courage. And it’s what makes you the parent, and a much more complete person because of that too. You learn so much about yourself and the world around you as you try to educate your children in a responsible, disciplined and loving way.

Positive ways of showing love: Just say Yes .. to time together, not toys

Love is there when a parent reads to her daughter, when he plays a game of dominoes with her, when he helps her ride her bicycle, when he listens to her recount of the day and expresses interest in her doodling. It doesnÏ€t need to be many hours every day, what counts is the quality of the time together and the attention the child gets. Another highly qualified and motivated person than the parent could very well provide this sort of love as well. However, keeping time for kids during holidays is important. If kids feel they’re being dropped off here and there by already busy parents, they’ll start resisting, if they haven’t already…Then trying to impose some discipline becomes a nightmare; The tug-of-war is on.

Games, toys, and other material gratifications are nice but are not the most important proofs of love and attention for a child if they cannot share them with those they are closest to. At age 3, what do you think he’ll like better:
For you to make a paper airplane and show him how to throw it or to get a shiny new plastic or wooden one
to play with alone?

Negative ways of showing love: Just say No… to a fuss and to bad actions

Love is also there when a parent insists that his daughter attend her ballet class even though she doesn’t feel like it that day and the parent would rather not have a fight over it..
This is showing interest in her activities, it is not bullying the child. It also shows her the importance of consistency and of perseverance. . The child is reassured by the stability the parent conveys. She doesn’t need to wonder, the next time, if she should decide to attend or not, or what she should ask to do instead, or what other activity she’d now rather do..
“You chose ballet because you said you wanted to do this, now stick to it”, is the simple, clear message. ( Of course if she truly doesn’t fit in the class, or the teacher is terribly poor, a change is in order).
The clearer the message, for a young mind, the better (as well as for any mind!)

Demonstrating love means showing a child what she can, and cannot do!

No matter how smart our children are, a childπs brain does not
have the required maturity to determine right from wrong, good from bad. It is like playdough that is waited to be molded.
When a child grabs another child by the hair at the playground, the responsible action to take
with a two-year-old, for me, is not to negociate at length, it is to say: This is wrong, stop!

Oh, and I’m not just saying this. Neither am I a psychologist, I’m just a parent, applying some principles inspired from Europe and North America. And living in harmony with my family!