more bringing up bebe

I put a comment to this effect down in the BuB post, but I'm putting it here as well--what do you think are the benefits of "American" parenting--specifically the pushing and competitiveness and disrespect of authority?  I know that I tend to encourage my children to not think that adults have all the answers or are the de facto moral leaders.  And the sort of people who grab the world by the tail, if you will, were rarely well-behaved, compliant children.  Am I off-base? 

what I thought about "bringing up bebe"

The premise of this book is that French parents, mainly mothers, are far less stressed and neurotic than their American counterparts, and have much better-behaved children.  There are some ugly things about French culture (at least Parisian culture) which I think Druckerman does a decent job of demonstrating, but there is some very sound advice in there.  If you don't want to read the book and want to know what the takeaway is, let me simplistically sum it up for you:  Don't be a doormat.  Settle down.  Your children are far more mature and capable than you think.

I like this book and am buying a copy for my shelf so I can improve my own parenting as well as recommend the appropriate sections to the other people in my life.  If you guys want to talk about some of the lessons in the book, whether you've read it or not, here's a place we can start:

Let's talk about childbirth.  I often hear the U.S.'s approach to childbirth derided as overmedicated, and we would be so much better off if we just used more natural, traditional methods of childbirth--that's why our infant mortality rate is the highest of any industrialized nation (I have no idea if that statistic is correct, it's just what gets repeated).  But the French culture is far less friendly to doula/midwife/birthing pool/unmedicated childbirth, has a higher rate of epidural use, and yet has a lower rate of delivery complications and infant mortality.  Discuss.  My own suspicions:  it's at least partly due to maternal nutrition.

thoughts on "bringing up bebe" as of page 53

Well, she's still doing the first-person-present thing, but I'm gritting my teeth.  Other than that, I want to take a highlighter and mark great swaths of texts and give it to a number of parents I know.  I just finished a chapter on pregnancy and am now on a chapter about babies sleeping, and although I am no longer in that stage of life I want to shout "TESTIFY!" and run around faith-healing all the sleep-deprived primal birthing worrywarts around me.

what I thought about "the devil in the white city"

For a book about multiple grisly murders and the Chicago World's Fair it was surprisingly sterile.  I liked it but didn't love it.  I don't have any deep thoughts about it.  It seemed like Larson was trying to establish a strong correlation between Burnham and Holmes to add narrative interest, and that didn't work for me, stylistically.  It was okay.

Now I'm reading "Bringing Up Bebe," a book about French parenting written by an American.  I got it because I think that American children are in large ways being failed by their parents who are a curious combination of milquetoast control freaks, and this book claims to have solutions for that.  But already she's losing me, because she opened the first chapter in first person present tense (e.g. "when my daughter is eighteen monts old, my husband and I decide"), which, unless done well, is one of my most hated authorial conceits.  Strike one.