From Tiger Mothers to Mommy Wars to ill-considered quips on the campaign
trail about working mothers, it doesn’t take much to set off a fresh
wave of collective hand-wringing any time our parenting styles are
thrown into question. Now comes Pamela Druckerman, a former Wall Street Journal
reporter and current mother of three young children living in Paris,
with a new book that questions whether the French approach to parenting
is superior to ours. Intrigued when she noticed a French family with
young children quietly enjoying a meal in the same restaurant where she
and her British husband were struggling to keep their unruly toddler's
behavior under control, her curiosity led to her write a book that has
ignited lively controversy in the U.S. and France, as well as throughout
the English-speaking world.
Join Janet Hulstrand, a writer, editor, educator, and popular Politics & Prose instructor, in a conversation about the book Bringing up Bébé,
which will involve a larger discussion not only of the "the French way"
and "the American way" of parenting, but will also consider why these
issues spark such controversy.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Janet Hulstrand has spent
a large part of her time over the past 30 years in France. She teaches
literature in Paris every summer, and writing workshops in the spring
and fall, in Essoyes, a village in Champagne. She is a regular
contributor to Bonjour Paris and France Revisited, and she writes about travel, literature, writing, and France on her blog, Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road. When
her children were small, she spent many hours sitting in Parisian
playgrounds watching them play; and somewhat less time wondering how
French children were able to sit quietly for so long in restaurants. Bringing Up Bébé has satisfied some of that curiosity.
