By Kevin Meyer
A recent Wall Street Journal article on French parenting methods has been rattling around in my noggin for a week so I've got to do something about it to free up some aging neurons. Yes it is bizarre, especially since I shouldn't relate – my "kids" are named "spontaneity" and "early retirement." Because of that I'm smart enough not to wade into a French vs U.S. parenting style debate – I know every situation is unique, every kid is unique, and it is far harder than I can imagine. But so be it, there were a couple interesting points in the article that could be applied to lean leadership. At least obliquely, so please bear with me.
The primary gist of the article is that French kids are far better behaved than U.S. kids.
Bean [author's U.S. kid] would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks. Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly.
I started noticing that the French families around us didn't look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.
Though by that time I'd lived in France for a few years, I couldn't explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn't just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I'd clocked at French playgrounds, I'd never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn't my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn't their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?
So why is that? The author proposed two points that were of interest to me. The first is independence.
When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.
The French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
This explains something that has bugged me for years – the concept of "boredom." All kinds of people around me seem to get bored, regardless of whether they are highly-educated or not, industrious or not, surrounded by friends and family or not. Turn off the TV for five minutes and they go nuts. I don't get it – I can't remember the last time I was bored. Put me in a room with white walls and I can entertain myself with my thoughts and ideas for days. Hmmm… maybe those should be padded white walls?
In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.
But I grew up in Peru in the middle of a military dictatorship – kids didn't really venture out much. There were only three TV stations, in Spanish. We had to learn how to entertain ourselves. Perhaps this is a vital skill?
And this is where the first concept of self-sufficiency ties in with the second: education vs. discipline.
The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat.
I don't want to imply that organizations and leaders and people are like parents and kids, but there is perhaps a lesson.
Discipline or education? When you go on your gemba walks are you looking for issues to resolve, perhaps by edict, or are you looking to mentor and coach and educate?
Are you grooming a set of managers dependent on you for leadership and decisions, or are you creating a new crop of independent thinking and decisionmaking leaders?
Jayadeep Purushothaman says
Kevin – You might want to read the book, “Unconditional Parenting” by Alfie Kohn, which describes a truly lean and natural way of parenting, not the usual carrot and stick style of parenting.
Chris Mahan says
I was raised in France (left at 17) and now am raising a 6 year old in Los Angeles. I believe in ignoring his bad behavior and interacting with him when he’s being good/interesting. Drives my Japanese wife nuts. He also spends all day with me without complaining because I explain things as I would an adult and he likes it a lot. When he’s tired, though, all bets are off. I just put him to bed and he’s good again when he wakes up.
Jeff says
OK – so French kids are better behaved than American kids, so what?
American adults are members of the greatest most productive nation the world has ever known. Yes, we have problems (everybody does) but the well behaved French kids grow up to be unemployed or marginally employed young adults who create very little, innovate very little and contribute very little to the world in comparison to the American “brats”.
Last year, we hired a 20 something PhD from France. According to him, getting a job in America is something he and his friends dream about – he is the envy of his family.
Rajiv Agrawala says
Good article; this is basically the same treatise proffered by the late George Carlin in his bit on “Child Worship”.
http://youtu.be/h6wOt2iXdc4
(NSFW, obviously.)
Bill Waddell says
Strikes me as a case of cultural excuse-making. For years we heard American manufacturers hiding behind the excuse that lean was a product of Japanese culture and, as a result, could not be expected of them and their American workers. “It’s not my fault we are not lean – my Americanism made it impossible.”
This guy sounds like a similar responsibility ducker. By what leap is the assumption that, because his kid is a misbehaving, spoiled brat, all American kids are brats valid? Works well for him – “It’s not my fault my kid is an out of control pain in the ass – it’s because of my American upbringing.” Seems to me he ought to quit blaming his kid’s behavior on his Americanism and start blaming himself.
Dale Savage says
I find your statement on boredom interesting. I agree that often people are “bored” because they don’t know how to jump-start their minds/thinking without external stimulation. We don’t have a television, movies, radio, or other forms of entertainment/stimulation in our home. Our children (5 of them) are rarely “bored” because they read or use their imaginations to keep from being bored. As a result they have taught themselves much and have become industrious. My oldest son bought his own plumbing company at 19 and my second son was in charge of shipping for his company at 17, dealing with people all over the world. They learned much because they kept themselves from being bored.