Erika Brown Ekiel
This is the first book I’ve read by Pamela Druckerman and it will not be the last! Though I didn’t relate to every scenario that she has experienced in her 40s, I totally appreciated her honesty & wittiness when maneuvering through life’s events as a 40 year old expat mother of three. Kia spectra haynes repair manual download torrent.
By Erika Brown Ekiel
Quick: Name a French billionaire.
Now name one who is self-made. A bit harder, non?
According to the Forbes World’s Billionaires List, published today, France has sixteen billionaires. The U.S. boasts far more: 425. And a great number of those American billionaires, from Bill Gates (No. 2 on the list) to Sara Blakely (No. 1153) are self-made.
Yet one of the hottest parenting books on the market, Bringing Up Bébé, purports that American parents should seek to emulate their French counterparts. Mumbo jumbo games free download. The book’s author, Pamela Druckerman, introduced her book last month in an essay in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Why French Parents are Superior.”
Druckerman’s book, currently #18 on Amazon’s bestseller list, is part memoir, part amateur anthropology. She writes about what it is like to raise her three children while living in Paris and provides an overview of the French way of parenting.
Here in the U.S. parents follow the advice of a myriad of so-called experts. We devour books and articles that talk about the latest research and construct our own parenting styles according to our individual family values and priorities.
In France, according to to Druckerman, there is only ONE parenting style. This cadre, or framework, is based on the tenets of patience, politeness and allegiance. A petite cheri in Paris, France eats more varied foods than one who lives in Paris, Texas. She is also less likely to be obese, rarely shouts in public and obediently sleeps through the night. These may be desirable characteristics, but before you start following Druckerman’s advice, ask yourself: do you want your children to grow up to become French?
Instead of capitalism and individualism, the book is filled with examples of children absorbing socialism. One parent “chuckles” that her five-year-old plays “labor strike” with his toys. The children in Druckerman’s daughter’s preschool are instructed to paint exactly the same thing. One morning Druckerman finds twenty-five identical yellow stick figures with green eyes hanging up on the classroom wall. Most of the parents Druckerman profiles discourage their children from standing out, speaking up or getting in the way of their parents’ good time. The advice they dole out is focused on keeping one’s child in his place, rather than enabling him to imagine and construct one of his own.
Personally, I have no interest in raising a child who knows her place and stays there. When my husband and I discuss the ways in which we want to raise our children, we never talk about ways we can help them become like everyone else. We talk about ways to encourage intellectual curiosity, creative thought, problem solving skills and leadership. We hope our children will grow up to become become bold, self-reliant dream-builders who are unafraid to take risks: entrepreneurs, architects, designers, engineers, explorers.
Many of the French parenting tactics outlined in Druckerman’s book run counter to those aims. Soon after returning home from the hospital most French women feed their babies formula instead of breast milk, despite all the research that shows breastfeeding contributes to better physical and emotional health and possibly even higher IQ. French babies are also quickly trained to sleep through the night. This sounds good in theory--what new parent wouldn’t like to get a full night’s sleep?--but the methods by which many parents attain this goal often include some form of neglecting the baby and allowing him to “cry it out.” This practice is condemned by many parenting experts in the U.S., including Dr. William Sears. He espouses what he calls "attachment parenting," which encourages nursing, using gentler methods to get kids to sleep, wearing your baby in a sling and other bonding techniques. Sears argues his approach will teach a child to trust his parents and the world around him so that he can become a confident, independent, emotionally-balanced adult who is comfortable taking risks--all necessary skills to start a company or explore uncharted territories.
Forget Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. According to Druckerman, Parisian parents are not anxious for their children to get head starts and they do not prod them to become prodigies. Rather than play with their children, French parents leave kids to play on their own so the adults can have civilized chats with one other. They do not have toys strewn about the living room, they do not climb on jungle gyms at the playground and they do not get down on the floor to help construct LEGO villages. Certainly smothering children with suffocating amounts of attention, ala helicopter parenting, is a bad idea, but so is depriving babies and children of parental interaction, stimulation and inspiration.
Even the fairy tales are different in France. In one section of her book, Druckerman compares the books French children read to the books they read in the U.S. It turns out French children read stories that are similar to French films. There is sadness and struggle but unlike American fairy tales, none of it resolves in the end. Misery persists, as if to teach children, “This is how life is. Get used to it.”
American children’s books also tell tales of struggle but the characters usually find a solution and live happily ever after. The message: No matter what hard times might befall you, there is a rainbow around the corner. Unrealistic? Perhaps. But throughout my career I’ve interviewed hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and leaders and there is one characteristic every single one of them possesses, typically in large amounts: extreme optimism. It is the prevailing sentiment in today's booming Silicon Valley and something I dare say the rest of the country could use right now.
Erika Brown Ekiel is a consultant in Silicon Valley. Formerly an Associate Editor with Forbes, she has led marketing at two top-performing venture capital firms, including Greylock Partners, which invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Pandora.
Follow her on Twitter @ebekiel.
'>By Erika Brown Ekiel
![Druckerman Druckerman](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126227237/889326441.jpg)
Quick: Name a French billionaire.
Now name one who is self-made. A bit harder, non?
According to the Forbes World’s Billionaires List, published today, France has sixteen billionaires. The U.S. boasts far more: 425. And a great number of those American billionaires, from Bill Gates (No. 2 on the list) to Sara Blakely (No. 1153) are self-made.
Yet one of the hottest parenting books on the market, Bringing Up Bébé, purports that American parents should seek to emulate their French counterparts. The book’s author, Pamela Druckerman, introduced her book last month in an essay in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Why French Parents are Superior.”
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Druckerman’s book, currently #18 on Amazon’s bestseller list, is part memoir, part amateur anthropology. She writes about what it is like to raise her three children while living in Paris and provides an overview of the French way of parenting.
Here in the U.S. parents follow the advice of a myriad of so-called experts. We devour books and articles that talk about the latest research and construct our own parenting styles according to our individual family values and priorities.
In France, according to to Druckerman, there is only ONE parenting style. This cadre, or framework, is based on the tenets of patience, politeness and allegiance. A petite cheri in Paris, France eats more varied foods than one who lives in Paris, Texas. She is also less likely to be obese, rarely shouts in public and obediently sleeps through the night. These may be desirable characteristics, but before you start following Druckerman’s advice, ask yourself: do you want your children to grow up to become French?
Instead of capitalism and individualism, the book is filled with examples of children absorbing socialism. One parent “chuckles” that her five-year-old plays “labor strike” with his toys. The children in Druckerman’s daughter’s preschool are instructed to paint exactly the same thing. One morning Druckerman finds twenty-five identical yellow stick figures with green eyes hanging up on the classroom wall. Most of the parents Druckerman profiles discourage their children from standing out, speaking up or getting in the way of their parents’ good time. The advice they dole out is focused on keeping one’s child in his place, rather than enabling him to imagine and construct one of his own.
Personally, I have no interest in raising a child who knows her place and stays there. When my husband and I discuss the ways in which we want to raise our children, we never talk about ways we can help them become like everyone else. We talk about ways to encourage intellectual curiosity, creative thought, problem solving skills and leadership. We hope our children will grow up to become become bold, self-reliant dream-builders who are unafraid to take risks: entrepreneurs, architects, designers, engineers, explorers.
Many of the French parenting tactics outlined in Druckerman’s book run counter to those aims. Soon after returning home from the hospital most French women feed their babies formula instead of breast milk, despite all the research that shows breastfeeding contributes to better physical and emotional health and possibly even higher IQ. French babies are also quickly trained to sleep through the night. This sounds good in theory--what new parent wouldn’t like to get a full night’s sleep?--but the methods by which many parents attain this goal often include some form of neglecting the baby and allowing him to “cry it out.” This practice is condemned by many parenting experts in the U.S., including Dr. William Sears. He espouses what he calls 'attachment parenting,' which encourages nursing, using gentler methods to get kids to sleep, wearing your baby in a sling and other bonding techniques. Sears argues his approach will teach a child to trust his parents and the world around him so that he can become a confident, independent, emotionally-balanced adult who is comfortable taking risks--all necessary skills to start a company or explore uncharted territories.
Forget Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. According to Druckerman, Parisian parents are not anxious for their children to get head starts and they do not prod them to become prodigies. Rather than play with their children, French parents leave kids to play on their own so the adults can have civilized chats with one other. They do not have toys strewn about the living room, they do not climb on jungle gyms at the playground and they do not get down on the floor to help construct LEGO villages. Certainly smothering children with suffocating amounts of attention, ala helicopter parenting, is a bad idea, but so is depriving babies and children of parental interaction, stimulation and inspiration.
Even the fairy tales are different in France. In one section of her book, Druckerman compares the books French children read to the books they read in the U.S. It turns out French children read stories that are similar to French films. There is sadness and struggle but unlike American fairy tales, none of it resolves in the end. Misery persists, as if to teach children, “This is how life is. Get used to it.”
![Pamela druckerman books download torrent download Pamela druckerman books download torrent download](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126227237/889182555.jpg)
American children’s books also tell tales of struggle but the characters usually find a solution and live happily ever after. The message: No matter what hard times might befall you, there is a rainbow around the corner. Unrealistic? Perhaps. But throughout my career I’ve interviewed hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and leaders and there is one characteristic every single one of them possesses, typically in large amounts: extreme optimism. It is the prevailing sentiment in today's booming Silicon Valley and something I dare say the rest of the country could use right now.
Erika Brown Ekiel is a consultant in Silicon Valley. Formerly an Associate Editor with Forbes, she has led marketing at two top-performing venture capital firms, including Greylock Partners, which invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Pandora.
Follow her on Twitter @ebekiel.
PARIS — One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what’s really happening here. They think Paris is a Socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.
In fact, the French have all kinds of worthwhile ideas on larger matters. This occurred to me recently when I was strolling through my museum-like neighborhood in central Paris, and realized there were — I kid you not — seven bookstores within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. Granted, I live in a bookish area. But still: Do the French know something about the book business that we Americans don’t?
I was in a bookstore-counting mood because of the news that Amazon has delayed or stopped delivering some books, over its dispute with the publisher Hachette. This has prompted soul-searching over Amazon’s 41 percent share of new book sales in America and its 65 percent share of new books sold online. For a few bucks off and the pleasure of shopping from bed, have we handed over a precious natural resource — our nation’s books — to an ambitious billionaire with an engineering degree?
France, meanwhile, has just unanimously passed a so-called anti-Amazon law, which says online sellers can’t offer free shipping on discounted books. (“It will be either cheese or dessert, not both at once,” a French commentator explained.) The new measure is part of France’s effort to promote “biblio-diversity” and help independent bookstores compete. Here, there’s no big bookseller with the power to suddenly turn off the spigot. People in the industry estimate that Amazon has a 10 or 12 percent share of new book sales in France. Amazon reportedly handles 70 percent of the country’s online book sales, but just 18 percent of books are sold online.
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The French secret is deeply un-American: fixed book prices. Its 1981 “Lang law,” named after former Culture Minister Jack Lang, says that no seller can offer more than 5 percent off the cover price of new books. That means a book costs more or less the same wherever you buy it in France, even online. The Lang law was designed to make sure France continues to have lots of different books, publishers and booksellers.
Fixing book prices may sound shocking to Americans, but it’s common around the world, for the same reason. In Germany, retailers aren’t allowed to discount most books at all. Six of the world’s 10 biggest book-selling countries — Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Spain and South Korea — have versions of fixed book prices.
Even with the state’s help, French bookstores are struggling. Xavier Moni, co-owner of Comme Un Roman in Paris, says he can afford to give 5 percent off only every 10th purchase. More important than free shipping, he and others say, is that despite having extensive operations in France and elsewhere in Europe, Amazon pays taxes in Luxembourg, where corporate taxes are effectively low and in some cases largely avoidable. The European Union has begun an inquiry into Amazon’s taxes.
Still, there does seem to be a link between fixed book prices and flourishing — or at least still-breathing — independent bookstores. In Britain, which abandoned its own fixed-price system in the 1990s, there are fewer than 1,000 independent bookstores left. A third closed in the past nine years, as supermarkets and Amazon discounted some books by more than 50 percent. “You’d have to be almost masochistic to go into a bookseller in the U.K. to buy a best seller,” Dougal Thomson of the International Publishers Association says.
What underlies France’s book laws isn’t just an economic position — it’s also a worldview. Quite simply, the French treat books as special. Some 70 percent of French people said they read at least one book last year; the average among French readers was 15 books. Readers say they trust books far more than any other medium, including newspapers and TV. The French government classifies books as an “essential good,” along with electricity, bread and water. (A French friend of mine runs a charity, Libraries Without Borders, which brings books to survivors of natural disasters.) “We don’t force French people to go to bookstores,” explains Vincent Montagne, head of the French Publishers Association. “They go to bookstores because they read.”
None of this is taken for granted. People here have thought for centuries about what makes a book industry vibrant, and are watching developments in Britain and America as cautionary tales. “We don’t sell potatoes,” says Mr. Moni. “There are also ideas in books. That’s what’s dangerous. Because the day that you have a large seller that sells 80 percent of books, he’s the one who will decide what’s published, or what won’t be published. That’s what scares me.”
The French aren’t being pretentious or fetishizing bookstores. They’re giving voice to something we know in America, too. “When your computer dies, you throw it away,” says Mr. Montagne of the publishers’ association. “But you’ll remember a book 20 years later. You’ve deeply entered into a story that’s not your own. It’s forged who you are. You’ll only see later how much it has affected you. You don’t keep all books, but it’s not a market like others. The contents of a bookcase can define who you are.”
The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I’m not French. While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children’s birthdays. Online retailers are a godsend for stranded expatriates. Like people everywhere who are fretting about Amazon’s global domination, I want to have my gâteau and eat it, too: the option to buy online, but the pleasure of browsing in a shop. And I don’t want every book purchase to feel like a political statement. French people like having books delivered to their doorsteps, too, and they’re starting to read more e-books (which are currently just 3 percent of the book market). Indeed, despite all their old-fashioned bookstores, they are aiming for something that sounds quite American: choice (here they call it équilibre — balance). Unlike us, they might actually get it.
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Pamela Druckermanis an American journalist and the author of “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.”