France debates discipline as psychologist challenges positive parenting

Caroline Goldman’s call for firmer discipline has become the flash point in France’s fight over positive parenting, with her advice on time-outs for children as young as 12 months drawing fierce backlash from other psychologists and parents. Goldman, a Paris-born child and adolescent psychologist with a doctorate in clinical psychopathology, has built a large audience through public interventions and a podcast with 1.8 million listens.

The dispute is unfolding against a legal shift that has already moved French family policy away from corporal punishment. In 2019, the French Senate unanimously approved a law banning parental violence against children, including physical punishment, and the Council of Europe welcomed it as a step toward a continent-wide ban. UNICEF estimates 1.6 billion children worldwide, or about two in three, still regularly endure violent punishment at home.

Goldman’s supporters see her as a corrective to what they see as a confusion between empathy and permissiveness. Her critics see something else: a return to punitive discipline wrapped in the language of structure. That split sharpened in 2024, when a French early-childhood quality guide from the government drew protest from more than 800 professionals over advice they judged leaned too far toward positive parenting and offered vague guidance that could weaken the boundaries children need.

For years, French parenting has been compared with the more visibly rule-bound style popularized abroad by Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé, yet French families and teachers have never agreed on how much control adults should exercise or how much independence children should be given.

Goldman re-entered the French conversation in 2026 by arguing that the spread of no-kids spaces was less a sign of intolerance toward children than of educational laxity.