The Best Parenting Advice Is to Go Live in Europe
Pity the American children: No one is writing books about how great they are. Instead, praise has lately been reserved for kids overseas, who—according to a profusion of books and articles in the past decade—possess deep stores of resourcefulness and resilience, those sought-after traits that allegedly set kids up for a lifetime of contentment, or at least success.
These thriving children develop under the guidance of parents who are in some cases carefree and in others completely overbearing. In 2011, the author and law professor Amy Chua detailed the strictures—and the payoffs—of a hard-driving “Chinese” (as opposed to “Western”) approach to parenting in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The following year, Pamela Druckerman, an American writer living in Paris, walked American parents through the seemingly effortless child-rearing techniques of the French in Bringing Up Bébé, telling of “a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents.”
Not all American parents are monitoring, much less trying to emulate, other cultures of parenting, but these books have an audience—Tiger Mother and Bringing Up Bébé have each sold hundreds of thousands of print copies in the United States.
Questioning their own methods, these parents—likely the ones with the most resources and time for fine-tuning their parenting styles—are searching abroad for alternatives. It might be,” says Linda Quirke, a sociologist at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University who studies parenting advice.
