You don’t have to spend much time with Caroline Goldman, France’s most polarizing psychologist, before she turns to her favorite subject: misbehaving children. Children “just don’t hold back anymore,” she told me when we met this spring. “If they want to fart, they fart; if they want to burp, they burp; if they feel like stepping on their neighbor, they step on their neighbor.”
We had been talking about the general outcry this year after France’s national train service announced a special child-free section of business class to “ensure maximum comfort.” Goldman, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychopathology and regularly appears in French media, told the French paper Le Figaro that the rule was understandable. The increase in “child free” spaces in France, she said, was a direct consequence of a parenting style that had become too permissive. “We create children who are unbearable to others, then we are surprised to see an entire economy emerge that is organized around their exclusion.”
French parents once prided themselves on not letting children impinge on their lives. A study of how much time parents in 10 different countries spent on child care found that France was the only one to see a net decline between 1965 and 2012. As the sociologist Romain Delès put it to me: “When you’ve just had a baby, the first thing you want is for those first three months to fly by so the baby can go to day care and you can get your old life back. That’s a very French way of thinking.”
This detached parenting mode was once a model for Americans. They looked in envy at a culture that promoted stepping back before rushing to meet a child’s needs, embraced child care from 2½ months and emphasized day-care menus that taught children to eat three-course meals like adults — much of this subsidized by the state. So much so that a book by an American transplant to Paris, “Bringing Up Bébé,” that detailed how the French raised children who not only ate and slept at set times but also greeted their parents’ guests politely, became a best seller in 2012 and was optioned for a movie with Anne Hathaway.
Such insouciance now seems firmly in the past. The last 10 years have seen a radical transformation in French parenting habits, and the blame, according to Goldman, lies with an American import: positive parenting. With its emphasis on shared decision-making and prioritizing childhood emotions, she contends it has led a generation of children astray. “Everyone talks about children becoming wilder and says that working with children has become extremely difficult,” she told Le Figaro. “I no longer recognize children’s psychological makeup. Impulsiveness is everywhere.”
This shift has fueled a vitriolic debate about the extent to which society should be organized around children. On one side are the positive-parenting experts; on the other, Goldman and her allies. Articles sneer at “gentle” parenting, while podcasts and social media posts warn that sanctioning children means setting them up for emotional instability. Each side has large groups of professionals behind it. In 2022, Goldman and 355 early-childhood experts signed an open letter in Le Figaro stating that positive education was harming children, who had been “abandoned by adults with an exclusively empathetic attitude.” Five months later, 280 other early-childhood experts signed another letter, this time in Le Monde, denouncing Goldman for being “repressive” and “detrimental” to child development.
The root of this disagreement lies in Goldman’s strict embrace of the old-fashioned timeout: sending a child to his or her room to calm down. She has extolled the virtues of this approach on her podcast and on French national radio, where she hosted a show in 2023, giving short lectures about topics like schoolyard bullying or the nature of suffering. So ubiquitous has she become that when she gave an interview to Le Monde in 2023, it was quickly viewed by 2.3 million people (roughly the population of Paris), far and above anything else on the site.
The proponents of positive education accuse Goldman of creating a culture of fear. They have become so concerned about her methods that they moved to counter them officially. When a committee put together a new document for professional caregivers titled “National Standards for Early Childhood Care” last year, they included a clause that read, “When a child does not follow rules, boundaries or prohibitions, punishment (such as belittling words, timeouts or isolation) is prohibited by law; it is counterproductive and harmful to the child.” According to one expert, “this guideline was specifically developed for Ms. Goldman to help calm things down a bit, and it has the force of law.”
Goldman says that her “narcissistic” critics are exploiting her media spotlight to draw attention to what she considers their scientifically questionable, even risible, methods, which she likes to dissect in Instagram posts she generally puts up between 2 and 3 a.m. In 2024, two of her most prominent “detractors,” as she has referred to them, sued her for calling them “delusional” and “out of touch” and questioning their qualifications. It was a “classic intimidation tactic,” Goldman told me. (They eventually withdrew their complaint.)
It is not, Goldman says, that she is against giving encouragement to children. But the problem today isn’t too little encouragement; it’s too much. She sees no point in wasting time explaining to parents who “are being bossed around by their child, because they don’t set boundaries, that they need to use positive reinforcement.” The endless back and forth that positive parenting, as it is practiced in France, entails can lead only to disappointment and burnout. In conversation with me, she pointed to parents who have come to counseling saying, “I don’t recognize myself anymore; I’ve slipped into violence.” If parents lose control — end up yelling or striking their children — the blame rests largely with the new parenting schools. “If someone asks you to do something completely crazy, it’s going to drive you crazy.”
In the American imagination, the French had figured out one of adult life’s trickiest puzzles — how to have children without losing your identity, your career and your verve. The classic fantasy of French parents as two adults conversing over a glass of wine while their neatly dressed children amuse themselves elsewhere has never been far from reality. You’re unlikely to see babies slurping pouches in their strollers or children watching videos on their iPads at a Michelin-starred restaurant. The popular children’s book “That’s Not Allowed!” has no story or central character, just all the rules a toddler must follow, like not pulling their father’s glasses or splashing water outside the tub. France’s official guidance for welcoming a new child emphasizes the importance of preserving intimacy for parents. “Papa ou Maman,” a 2015 box-office hit, told the story of a couple who, when divorcing, fight to not have custody of their children so that they can fulfill their career dreams.
At the same time, French culture has always placed “enormous importance on those things that happen at the very beginning of life,” the French sociologist Claude Martin told me. “The adult responsible for the child’s care must be aware that much of what they do shapes the child psychologically.” A good deal of that advice comes through psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, who have often held a very public role in French culture. In the 1970s, Françoise Dolto, a psychoanalyst and friend of Jacques Lacan’s who had a popular parenting radio show, began promoting the revolutionary idea that children were people in their own right. She advocated talking with and listening to them. Treating the child as a person capable of understanding, still a new idea at the time, was central to developing their psychological health.
But even as parenting culture began to shift, it remained rooted in the country’s rule-bound, Catholic heritage. Dolto herself emphasized the nuclear family and fixed gender roles. Corporal punishment for children was outlawed in France only in 2019, with a new amendment that forbade “physical or psychological violence” under any circumstance. As late as 2024, a survey of 1,007 parents found that 60 percent believed that this law was an intrusion of the French state into private matters.
Positive parenting first began filtering into France from the United States through professional training programs in the 1990s, Martin told me. As the practice made its way across the Atlantic, Isabelle Filliozat, a self-described leading figure of the movement in France, had about 15 books translated from English “to help French parents listen more closely to their children.” Filliozat, who has an eclectic background, says that French therapists accused her of being “too American.’” She had studied psychotherapy but was drawn to the “new trends I was hearing about in the English-speaking world,” she told me. She trained in transactional analysis, a departure from psychoanalytic theory that emphasizes social interactions; she studied body work and neuro-linguistic programming, an approach to communication and therapy that some consider a pseudoscience. In 2006, she began to offer courses at what she called the School of Relational and Emotional Intelligence, now part of the Filliozat Institute, in “emotional intelligence” and “empathic communication.”
While there has never been a “Bringing Up Baby, American Style” for France, Filliozat has written more than 50 books, one of which sold half a million copies. As a vice president of The First Thousand Days, the official French guidance committee on raising children under 3, she is regularly consulted by the government on childhood health. “France is gradually making progress,” Filliozat says, “but it’s a huge ship, and as you know, it takes a while to turn around.”
Filliozat says she was inspired in part by her own parents, who grew up in abusive households, to bring empathy and respect to French parents. She dispenses advice on podcasts and YouTube shows that attract thousands of listeners, eager for guidance on how to deal with kids having meltdowns at the supermarket or refusing to change out of their pajamas to go to school. It’s easy to spot parents who follow her mode of advice: They hug a yelling child (“a magic tool,” she says) or formulate every suggestion in a positive way: “Let’s keep our hat on!”
Much of what Filliozat proposes will seem familiar to American parents: No matter the situation, Filliozat immediately turns to what the child must be experiencing. Asked on a talk show about a 2-year old who is hitting his mother as she tries to change him, she counseled the mother to tell the child, “Stop!” But she then said that, instead of telling the child not to hit, it was important to identify what the mother had done that, inadvertently or not, “encouraged that behavior.” “Children don’t like to be lying down, to have their diaper changed,” she continued. “To have your diaper changed is a situation of lack of power.” The mother can include the child in the process so that he regains a sense of autonomy.
Some of Filliozat’s advice seems a little more unusual. Goldman pointed me to a French parenting podcast on Instagram. To encourage a teenager who doesn’t want to take a shower, she suggested passing through the hallway and just saying the word “shower,” in the hope that the idea would imprint itself on the teenage mind without being perceived as a diktat. A husband who doesn’t want to engage in positive parenting has very likely been traumatized himself, she asserted. She jokingly suggested a French kiss to release oxytocin and calm him down. (She demonstrated to the camera.) “If I last 10 seconds with my tongue, you’ll see, he’ll calm down.” The hosts seemed receptive to Filliozat’s ideas. Goldman responded to the video with 27 different critical comments.
Goldman is 50, with a shock of curly brown hair and a confidence that perhaps comes from proximity to celebrity (her father is Jean-Jacques Goldman, one of France’s most famous pop stars). For most of her career, she worked unassumingly in private practice in Montrouge, south of Paris. But recently, she and her colleagues began to see an “explosion of behavioral issues among our little patients, often tied to a letting-go of parental authority” — hitting, not being able to sit through a meal.
Parents, steeped in positive parenting, have become wary of punishing their children, for fear of causing irreversible psychological damage. The consequences, she says, have been startling. “Some children,” she wrote in a 2019 manual for therapists titled “Establishing Educational Limits,” “have not suffered from any kind of trauma, have excellent family relations, but call out in need of educational limits, sometimes in very noisy ways,” through things like hyperactivity and acting out.
In endlessly explaining every rule, parents forgot that they were meant to be authority figures. Good parenting, she says, is like a large cauldron, heated by love, which allows the child to grow in an environment defined by rules and boundaries. She often asks her patients to draw pictures of their families, and notes with dismay if everyone is drawn the same size, often a sign of waning parental clout. Parents should look at their children as a giraffe might look at an ant, she has written. When proper rules are applied, the parent “observes from above and calmly but firmly carries out the enlightened work of restraint.”
Goldman remains heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. She worships Freud and D.W. Winnicott, best known for his idea of the “good enough mother.” Her descriptions of family life typically present the mother as a source of love, the father as a source of authority. But her appeal rests largely on the decisive nature of her advice. She likes to give parents a “road map” that lists possible scenarios and the best responses. “If I’m going to see a cardiologist, I don’t want them to just say, ‘Well, do whatever you want.’ Can I go on a run or shouldn’t I? What time? How long? At what speed?” She also puts the parents’ needs first at times. Plopping your child in front of the television for an hour and a half a day isn’t so bad, she writes, if it allows tired parents to recoup. “Everyone is allowed to want some peace and quiet for part of the evening.”
‘I think I said “no” more often than I said their names. You have to raise them well — it’s just part of the job.’
For Goldman, everything ultimately boils down to the timeout, which, if a child will not listen, she counsels, can cure him or her in two to three sessions. (She notes that a child who is acting out may have other underlying issues but does not clarify how to identify them.) “Finding oneself systematically isolated behind a closed door after having disobeyed will condition a child to associate those two actions (transgression/isolation),” she wrote in her 2020 book “Go to Your Room!” It also enables both child and parent to calm down. She herself has used the technique with her four children. “I think I said ‘no’ more often than I said their names,” she told me. “You have to raise them well — it’s just part of the job.”
In “Go to Your Room!” Goldman lists behaviors that should be forbidden after age 1. These include “complaining” and “making too much noise.” A 1-year-old might need a timeout if he or she is “throwing dishes and spoons from the highchair, playing with the buttons on the stove, pulling on the tablecloth, stealing the remote, opening the fridge.” This punishment needs no negotiation, discussion or justification. If a child protests, or tries to leave the room, that’s a reason for more punishment. “You’ve just earned yourself 20 more minutes in your room.”
Goldman promises that the timeout method will create pleasant, well-behaved children. As she describes in “Go to Your Room!” dinnertime can become “a central educational rendezvous for the child.” In learning to sit well, to say please and thank you, to listen to others, the child will be prepared for social life.
One child she describes is 7-year-old Héloïse, who rudely rejects everything her mother gives her for dinner. Following Goldman’s advice, her mother begins to send her daughter away from the table for a timeout every time she complains, telling her what she should say instead. (“Thank you, Maman, but I’m not very hungry, please give me only a little bit.”)
One day, the family eats, and everyone silently notices that the dish is a failure. Héloïse ventures, “Maman, your lasagna has an interesting fishy aftertaste!”
Her method, she says, is foolproof. If sanctions start at 1, by 2 the child is generally well behaved. By 3, he or she has finished transgressing and will arrive at preschool ready to live by society’s rules.
Filliozat and like-minded therapists say that Goldman is so frequently cited that even though UNICEF promotes positive-parenting practices, they often get questions from parents wondering whether it’s OK to use Goldman’s methods instead. For them, the answer is clearly no: The timeout is a form of psychological violence, and Goldman is doing nothing less than encouraging parents to mistreat their children.
Pierre Vesperini, a scholar of philosophy who recently wrote a book criticizing Goldman, raised his son in accordance with Filliozat’s methods. For him, Filliozat’s work was something like the “Copernican revolution.” It was not until he read the interview with Goldman in Le Monde that he realized he was in a “very, very small minority.” He was struck by Goldman’s descriptions of a child as an “ant,” not even as a “baby giraffe.” He decided to intervene by focusing his research on the rights of children. Goldman’s methods, he told me, reflect a French authoritarianism that stems partly from the country’s Napoleonic heritage. “Parents are there to be law enforcement,” Vesperini says: They don’t want to educate children; they want to “train” them as you would an animal.
Filliozat told me that Goldman is overreacting to positive parenting because she doesn’t understand what it’s really about. Positive parenting, she said, isn’t a question of being permissive but of talking to young children in a way that will enable them to understand. For Filliozat, it’s very difficult to educate a child by telling them no. Saying no to a child under 3, she says, will just trigger their “stress response.” They’ll slowly do exactly what the parent just told them not to do. “If I say to you right now, ‘Don’t picture a zebra running across the savanna,’ what did you just do? You pictured the zebra.” For a child, she says, such a response is even more likely. “When you tell a child, ‘No, don’t touch that cupboard,’ it’s as if you’d told them, ‘Touch the cupboard!’”
Catherine Gueguen, a pediatrician who also regularly faces off with Goldman in the media, says that good behavior comes from explaining rules in detail, not from administering punishments. “Being a parent takes a lot of patience,” she told me. “You have to repeat things over and over again.” Her parents never punished her or her five siblings, she says, nor did she ever punish her children. When she has her grandchildren to stay over on holidays, they set out rules together. And when one does something wrong, she reminds him or her, “Remember what we said?” Gueguen, who joined Filliozat in suing Goldman for defamation, says Goldman’s attacks came out of nowhere. With positive parenting, “obviously there are boundaries and rules”: “We wanted her to stop saying nonsense about us.”
The problem isn’t children, according to Filliozat; it’s how society supports them and their parents. Parents today face challenges that earlier generations didn’t: They are often far from extended family and are confronted with an overwhelming amount of contradictory parental advice. Children are different, too, she notes. There’s a rise in neurodivergence, and she believes that screen time and ultraprocessed foods may increase childhood hyperactivity.
While Goldman often claims that the timeout is a widely recognized child-rearing tool, her timeout is “nothing like the one used in scientific research — not at all,” Héloïse Junier, a psychologist who is a close colleague of Filliozat’s, told me. “It is a form of punishment, a prolonged, punitive isolation that, in our view — at least among scientists, and for many of us — constitutes psychological abuse; not only is it unnecessary, but it is also counterproductive.” She told me that parents who see her in consultation often arrive “lost,” confused about the debate in French media and Goldman’s suggestions. “Once you bring in scientific research, there’s no more debate.”
Even one of the experts Goldman cites doesn’t agree with her. Alan Kazdin, an emeritus professor at Yale whom Goldman references as the source for some of her ideas about timeouts, says that science justifies only a very short period of separation — not “at least 30 minutes,” as Goldman suggests for a child over 4. “Punishment of any kind, including time out, is not an effective way to change behavior,” he says.
Junier notes that there is another issue with Goldman’s approach: She simply hasn’t kept up. Positive education in France — some therapists prefer the terms “benevolent” or “democratic” education — draws from developmental psychology, neuroscience and attachment theory, which focuses on the relationship between children and their early caregivers. Goldman, by contrast, remains firmly rooted in psychoanalysis and the familial patterns it identifies. In France, “psychoanalysis is almost a religion,” Junier told me. Many forms of mental illness, she says, are still treated through the prism of Freudian ideas. She believes that part of the reason Goldman has so many supporters is that psychoanalysts worry that their credibility is declining.
In 2023, Goldman gave a series of talks on France Inter, a public radio station, many of which rejected settled science on children’s mental health. Depression, she said, came from a lack of love; the diagnosis of ADHD supported Big Pharma; gender dysphoria stemmed from shame. (Mental disorders, she has insisted are often triggered by parental behavior.) The interviews alarmed many listeners and experts. Two mental-health professionals responded with an opinion essay in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Obs headlined: “Mental health deserves better than Caroline Goldman’s summer radio program.”
Where does all this leave parents? If the positive-parenting debates have a clearly identifiable group of losers, it’s them — as some in French media have noted. The nagging stream of advice that greets the arrival of any new child has become only louder and more confusing. No matter what decisions they make, parents have endless reasons to feel they are disappointing someone, not least their own children. They could always have done better, been firmer, been gentler, said no, said yes.
Over the past few years, the number of people becoming parents in France has precipitously declined. In 2025, the total number of deaths surpassed the total number of births for the first time since World War II. President Emmanuel Macron has spoken of the need for “demographic rearmament” to keep procreation going. At the same time, the support network for parents has begun to falter. Cuts to government programs have transformed French early childhood education and care for mothers. Maternity wards have been shuttered; day cares understaffed.
For some watching the positive-parenting debate from the sidelines, these larger questions have sharpened the virulence of the exchange. As Martin, the sociologist, has noted, when support systems decline, it is parents who tend to be blamed. There are cultural headwinds too. No matter how much France leans toward positive parenting, the line between the world of adults and the world of children is far more clearly delineated there than in the United States. Delès, the sociologist, told me there is so little social value given to being a parent in France that French parents have come to suffer from what he calls “parental pessimism,” as they struggle to pretend that their children have not changed their lives. In one research paper, Delès compares France with Sweden, where greater gender equality and openness to children in public spaces mean that parents and children can more easily coexist. “Four percent of Swedish parents say their children limit their freedom,” Delès told me. “In France, the figure was 38 percent.”
To those who see positive parenting as an endless series of demands, Goldman’s timeouts promise a way to take back their lives. Parenting becomes not a practice that needs to be reinvented but a task that can be mastered. Well-behaved children: success. Loud ones: failure. There’s something hypnotic about the simplicity of her worldview. In conversation, I brought up the other stresses parents face: a lack of resources, anxieties about the future, the troubles of juggling ever-demanding jobs with a person they must protect. She always brought the conversation back to the badly behaved child. Larger problems could generally be distilled into questions of child rearing, which, she said were very basic, “common sense” or “not rocket science.”
After a while, I wondered if her method was a form of wishful thinking: the timeout as a solution to inequality, the timeout as a solution to limited time. If it could do so much, who wouldn’t want to promote such an easy answer? After all, as she told me, “all parents want the best for their children.”
Madeleine Schwartz is the editor in chief of The Dial. She is the editor, with the staff of The Dial, of “How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump.”
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