** 11th book of 2021: It’s Me who Decides **
Two things every parent craves: 1. Advice on how to be a better parent. 2. Validation that everybody else they know is doing it wrong. Bebe provides both, making it catnip for bibliophilic parents and singlehandedly launching the multicultural memoir sub-genre in parenting books.
Get beyond the sugar-coated wrapper of delightful french audiobook accents and casual dunking on American parenting styles, and the content about authoritative parenting is still worthwhile. According to Druckerman, French parenting aspires to the cadre model:* a firm frame surrounding a lot of freedom.* French parents are clear that they are both the household authority and will providing for their own needs in addition to those of the children. French parents express this by enforcing children to ‘do their nights’ (i.e. sleep training), setting the expectation that children should eat at regular meal times, greet all adults, and generally maintain a quiet and respectful demeanor. Within these boundaries, children should be free to explore and fail, whether that means going for a weeklong school trip at the age of 6, or performing the occasional ‘small naughties’. Discipline should come from small, polite adjustments based on well established rules.
This parenting style is easier with state sponsored childcare systems plus a year of maternity leave, and the breezy style doesn’t offer serious parenting advice in the same way that a literature review will (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3537564424), but the easy reading and reasonable advice makes it the best in the burgeoning genre of multicultural parenting memoirs.