B and I had a Belgian-German couple over for dinner and party games on the Wii, and one of things we ended up talking about was the need to argue so often to get good customer service in France. For Northern-Europeans, it seems crazy that you have to complain to get something the clerk/salesperson could have given you in the first place (and it does sometimes seem crazy to me too).
Sunday B and I were enjoying the sun in a park and I saw a little boy playing with his parents, and this reminded me of the way I see so many French people raising their kids (there's a connection to the first paragraph, I promise). One of my colleagues complains about her little 2 1/2 daughter, and while I know raising kids is no walk in the park, she talks about her daughter more often as if she were a problem, instead of just being a 2 1/2 year old.
I can't count the number of times on public transportation or in town I've seen parents get angry with young children for some small problem. One time a mother told her daughter not to push the button on the elevator. When the 4 year old girl tested her limits by just touching the wall of the elevator, the mother got as angry as if her daughter had just pressed the emergency brake button. If she had ignored it, the girl probably would have stopped. I saw an assistante maternelle tell a little 2 year old girl she was a pig and filthy because she hadn't told anyone she needed to use the potty.
Anyway, I was talking to B about all this I think the emphasis on negative/forbidding instead of promoting positive behavior as a parenting style might be part of the root of French people's more negative outlook on life and the need to really argue you're way through life instead of just being nice for the sake of being nice. B said I was probably right, but that it seems normal to teach kids one thing is bad (pooping in your diaper) in order to get them to do something different, and the American style is more to promote using a potty and ignore the diaper.
And while most of the French people I know don't seem ruined because their parents punished them more than praised them, I do wonder what kind of an effect it has. A recent book talks about how America has exported it's psychological diagnoses/problems to places where they weren't always needed. I wonder if in 10 years there will be authors on Les Maternelles talking about the latest news in parenting and how you need to praise and encourage the behavior you want more than punish the behavior you don't want.
2 comments:
Good post! I made a comment to somebody the other day about these english iphone app lessons that i'm writing and I told the girl that in the summary of a lesson about "small talk", I wrote that the language had to stay "positive" -- that when we small talk with a stranger it's never something negative. She thought I was crazy for thinking that the French are always negative until I gave her examples -- if they talk about the weather, it's because it's raining and it's always raining, waah waah waah.. if we talk about their holidays, it's always about the only thing that went wrong or "the room was too small" or "the bathroom didn't have unlimited hot water" etc.
In the end she let me keep the segment about positive thinking and speaking, but I think it's important to understand that notion so that you don't always take it personally when you meet somebody who seems to be in a horrible mood.
I think it's also reflected in the classrooms. I remember the first time I sat in on an elementary school class (CM1, if I remember correctly) right before I started teaching. I was shocked at how harsh the teacher was to the students. A kid misspelled something, and the teacher yelled at him, saying, "Do you really believe THAT'S how you spell that? Really? Seriously?!?!" All year I felt that the positive reinforcement that was the M.O. in my schooling as a child was sorely, sorely lacking. And once when the students weren't behaving to me, the teacher told me I had to be more strict.
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