Rachel’s Reviews > Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting > Status Update
Rachel
is 50% done
There is an underlying (is it even underlying? or is it just...there, lying right on the surface?) distain for fat people and poor people in this book that I am finding *tremendously difficult* to digest. 😒
— Mar 14, 2022 07:24AM
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Caroline
(last edited Mar 15, 2022 04:57AM)
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Mar 14, 2022 11:45AM
I read this a while ago and I have a feeling it would not have aged well.
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Caroline wrote: "I read this a while ago and I have a feel it would _not_ have aged well."It deeeeefinitely has that breezy Sex in the City meets 2008 Jezebel vibe to it, just CASUALLY bitching about how the nanny takes her daughter to McDonalds. It was published 10 years ago, and boy oh boy does it show every day of that 10 years.
Yes, you nailed it. There's also the layer of "I'm a parenting expert" while the author has ... one young child. She's not a parenting expert. She might be an expert at her own kid, and that's great. But she doesn't have expertise in a broad sense. the more time you spend parenting, the more you realize you have to fly blind. At least that's how I feel!
Caroline wrote: "Yes, you nailed it. There's also the layer of "I'm a parenting expert" while the author has ... one young child. She's not a parenting expert. She might be an expert at her own kid, and that's grea..."Yes, absolutely. It's deeply annoying because it fails as a cultural criticism (I keep wishing that there was some kind of acknowledgement that sooooo much of American parenting comes down to socioeconomic precarity and a lack of access to reliable daycare or the fracturing of the kinds of larger child-rearing community that previous generations had) but it also fails as a parenting guide (for the reasons you said here). And it comes down to the fact that this feels like a 2010s-era blog that got turned into a book without any expectation that the author back of her claims. It might as well be "NYC moms are from Mars, and French moms are from Venus." 🙄
