What’s with our admiration these days of all things French? If the Oscars are any indication of current trends, Francophilia is having its day. More than a few awards went to films that were either written, directed, or starred in by Frenchmen (“The Artist”) or featured nostalgic scenes of Gay Paree (“Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris”).

A recently published book about the virtues of the French style of childrearing also romanticizes the Gallic way of life. In Bringing Up Bébé:  One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, American ex-pat Pamela Druckerman extols the strict rules, authoritarian methods, and no-nonsense attitude towards emotional expression characteristic of French parents.  True, they may produce children who are “good little sleepers [and] gourmet eaters . . .” But a New York Times reviewer pointed out a less enviable byproduct of the French approach.  During an emergency room visit the reviewer experienced with her 14-year-old daughter, who had broken her wrist during a soccer match, the examining doctor manipulated the injured extremity so brusquely that the girl started to cry. The physician responded in typical French parental fashion by shaming her:  “He’s a little boy [pointing to a quiet four-year-old nearby] and you’re a big girl, and he’s not crying. Why can’t you be more like him?”

While I don’t think American-style indulgence is the best way to encourage self-sufficiency and independence, the French approach may be taking it a little too far.

I was on the receiving end of such methods when, at fourteen, I attended a French private school during a year my family spent in Paris. This was a very long time ago, of course, and I’d thought (hoped?) times had changed.  But after reading about contemporary French parenting and researching the French educational system, I’m not so sure.

I felt lost and self-conscious my first day of school because I knew almost no French and, having already reached my full height, towered over my more petite and slower-to-mature classmates. There was no student ambassador appointed to show me the way.  The teachers and headmaster ignored me. Fortunately, I attached myself to an American girl who told me where to go. But the next day, when I sat down next to her, she got up and moved across the room. Her parents, she said, had forbidden her to associate with other Americans.  They were afraid her French would suffer.

For months I remained mute, too scared to risk making a grammatical error until one day, pushed by an impatient, chain-smoking (in class!) teacher who’d had enough of hearing me say I didn’t understand, I stood at attention as per the rules and answered her question in fluent French.

French teachers don’t coddle their students.  They don’t care about encouraging creativity or independent thinking. And they certainly don’t worry, as American teachers and parents do, about damaging a young person’s self-esteem. In middle school, the French system tracks students by test scores into classes with others of similar ability.

My performance on the school’s entrance exams, which I took in French before I had even a rudimentary grasp of the language, had landed me in the slow class.  And even among my low-achieving peers, I was at the bottom. We all knew everyone’s place in the hierarchy because after every test the teachers read out the grades from highest to lowest, mocking the students who had performed poorly.  Ridicule and humiliation were—and still are, from what I can tell—as much a part of the standard, French pedagogical repertoire as memorization and recitation of passages from Molière and Racine.

In the end, though, I had my revenge.  Handing back the final exam, the science teacher did a double take and rechecked the top paper to make sure he hadn’t miscalculated the grade.  He grimaced.  “Gots? C’est incroyable!” (“It’s unbelievable!”). Never a “Good job!” or an “I knew you could do it.” But, to me, the victory was still sweet.

I’m not saying we should adopt the French, tough-love approach to raising our kids.  We anxious American parents could never pull it off, just like we can’t manage to look as effortlessly chic as the French. But maybe there’s a middle ground, somewhere between enrolling our kids in infant swimming lessons and swaddling them in life jackets before letting them near the water and throwing them in to sink or swim.