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.
