Eight years ago, Caroline Goldman saw the arrival in her consultations of children “agitated” who nevertheless lacked nothing; little ones “pampered to excess” but who lived in “a worrying lack of educational boundaries”. In his podcasts who made him known (more than a million listens), and in his latest book Go to your room! (Interditions, 2020, reissued in April), the doctor of psychology says she shares this observation with many childhood professionals: behavioral disorders are exploding in France, in particular due to the pitfalls of a positive education widely relayed in the media from a decade.
In an interview at Worldshe also explains that children “poorly limited” may be misdiagnosed as ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder with or without Hyperactivity) or HPI (High Intellectual Potential).
You are defined a little quickly as “the positive anti-education shrink”. Can you explain your position and your thoughts on this current from the United States?
I subscribe to everything that this current initiated at the start for the needs of the child. I am attached to the three aspects that it integrates: children’s need for love, the need for an educational explanation of the world around them and the need for educational limits.
I therefore agree with what the Anglo-Saxon world has conveyed about positive education. The trouble is its translation in France by self-proclaimed specialists, Doctor Catherine Gueguen and psychotherapist Isabelle Filliozat. They appropriated the reading of this current in a completely free and partial way, cutting back on the part on educational limits and affirming that setting limits was harmful for children and could create trauma. This has had real consequences on contemporary educational models.
Has benevolent or positive education infused that much into French families?
For about eight years, actors in child psychiatry (working both in public and private institutions and in practices) have had to deal with more and more cases of children with behavioral problems linked to a lack of educational limits.. Some 350 childhood professionals denounced in October 2022, in a collective forum appeared in Le Figarothe drift of “exclusively” positive parenthood.
I share this observation. In recent years, I have seen the arrival in my office of wonderful parents, healthy, well structured with very good educational reflexes, but who have been victims of this misinformation on positive and benevolent parenting. Four years ago, I realized that I was spending most of my days sharing the roadmap I had designed for this type of disorder, with examples of childhood transgressions to prohibit and how to react. I then decided to go on a “crusade” against this media misinformation of which parents in France are victims.
You have 72.45% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.