French women are quite giving - after all, they let their husbands have a girlfriend, a mistress and a whore. It only makes sense that generous nature would translate into parenting as well. Even if that sometimes means a laissez faire approach to childrearing.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter and current Paris ex-pat Pamela Druckerman was intrigued by the manners of French children - in a country famous for being rude - so she set out to study what they were doing and then wrote a book on it. It's not an Asian "tiger mom" approach, by any means, but Druckerman says it is less coddling than the American way.
Good luck selling that book. There are lots of Asian parents in America to buy a book by an Asian but not so many French ones. And telling Americans they should want to raise the children to be more French is a tough sell.
How to Parent Like a Parisian by Sheila Eldred, Discovery News
