Going on results, the Australian way of bringing up kids beats many others says Cassandra Wilkinson, who compares popular parenting fads...

No evidence that any fad parenting style has created significantly better adults

   By Cassandra Wilkinson*

While it may be the Year of the Dragon, the Asian way of parenting appears to be ceding ground to a new craze in child-rearing.
   The Tiger mums have been usurped by the Tricolour ‘mamans’ as the world of mother-worry discovers the French way to familial bliss.
   According to Pamela Druckerman, whose book Bringing Up Bebe has the English title French Children Don’t Throw Food, French mums know how to say no to their kids.
   She says French children do as they are told, are respectful to old people and are so tidy their mothers can wear suede and pastels with no fear of providing a canvas for vomit, banana or chocolate pudding frescos.
   But the argument for this “French” discipline is as lacking in evidence as the trend for “Tiger mum” discipline was.
   In both cases, the selling proposition is the lie that English-speaking mums are oppressed by their children.
“Parents may claim they are slaves to their children’s demands”
   Druckerman says mothers in America are chasing around after their children, making sure their every need is met and entertaining irrational requests for junk food, impulse purchases and time, time, time.
   She makes a virtue of the supposed discipline of French mothers, which seems to involve ignoring their children, kicking them out of bed, refusing to breastfeed and forcing them to eat artichoke hearts.
   Commentary on the book has been equally fact-free, defending an equally imaginary, more engaged style of American parenting which, according to The Huffington Post, has more finger-painting and sandpit time.
   While HuffPost argues the American style is about promoting independent thinking and big ambitions, the National Review gives credence to French theory on the basis that lax American parenting “was the inevitable result of a decades-long self-esteem movement that implies children are so fragile we should treat them with kid gloves”.
   In reality, no American, French or even Australian child is in charge of their household.
   Excuse-making parents may claim they are slaves to their children’s demands, but the law, society, culture, religion and basic physics ensure children are second-class citizens, whether they have ponies or not.
   First, the average Australian parent spends about one hour per day with their children in active playtime.
   The Australian Institute of Family Studies reports that only 45 per cent of children are read to most days.
   Second, most kids are oppressed by an absurd array of rules covering appropriate school play, food bans, limiting choices for toys because of spurious safety concerns, and restricting age-old behaviours now considered to be gender-biased, aggressive or inappropriately sexual.
   The idiotic premise that one mother’s insecurities or odd parenting crutches can damn or sanctify an entire nation’s mothers has been given credence in the strangest places.
   The usually sensible Economist concluded there must be something to it because “France, it turns out, bests America on nearly every measure of maternal and infant health.
   “The infant mortality rate is 57 per cent lower in France than in America, and fewer babies are born with a low birth weight; in addition, fewer women die during pregnancy or delivery.”
   But in Australia, where the parenting style is closer to the American than the French, the infant mortality rate is the same as France’s.
   Low birth weight babies account for 6.2 per cent of births in Australia and 6.4 per cent in France, so we’re “better” here.
   The UNICEF League Table of Maternal Death puts France at 15 deaths per 100,000 live births and Australia at nine, so Aussie, Aussie, Aussie again.
   Whether or not these fads make for better children, there’s certainly no proof they make for better adults.
   Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, confirmed recently that her daughter, Sophia, had been accepted to two Ivy League schools.
   Can I please be the first to say, so what?
“No American, French or even Australian child is in charge of their household”
   It seems to me the lesson of Tiger parenting is that you risk destroying a child’s few remaining social freedoms for a pay-off of - what? That they learn an instrument and go to college?
   Thousands of American and Australian children manage to get to university every year without being banned from extracurricular activities, friends, computer games, TV or hobbies as required by the Tiger mum.
   In addition to banning fun, this is the “parenting method” that involves throwing back hand-made birthday cards and “motivating tactics” that include yelling, “If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!”
   Let’s look at the facts: has the French Way or the Tiger Way or any other fad parenting style delivered a significantly better population of adults than the Australian Way?
   Fewer Australians than Chinese are members of the Communist Party, so we have that for starters.
   Fewer Australians than French are on welfare.
   We also have more Olympians per head of population - Australia at No 5, France at 32 and China at 68.
   And Australia has produced 14 Nobel Laureates, the highest number per head of population of any country in the world.
   On that basis, some enterprising mum with high levels of patriotism and scant regard for facts could write a book about the Aussie mum way of sunburn, Tim Tams and - Oooh, lightbulb!

* Cassandra Wilkinson has been a senior political advisor to a number of NSW Ministers and is the author of Don’t Panic - Nearly Everything is Better Than You Think.
This article first appeared on www.theaustralian.com.au
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