Catherine Gueguen, a pediatrician who also regularly faces off with Goldman in the media, says that good behavior comes from explaining rules in detail, not from administering punishments. “Being a parent takes a lot of patience,” she told me. “You have to repeat things over and over again.” Her parents never punished her or her five siblings, she says, nor did she ever punish her children. When she has her grandchildren to stay over on holidays, they set out rules together. And when one does something wrong, she reminds him or her, “Remember what we said?” Gueguen, who joined Filliozat in suing Goldman for defamation, says Goldman’s attacks came out of nowhere. With positive parenting, “obviously there are boundaries and rules”: “We wanted her to stop saying nonsense about us.”
The problem isn’t children, according to Filliozat; it’s how society supports them and their parents. Parents today face challenges that earlier generations didn’t: They are often far from extended family and are confronted with an overwhelming amount of contradictory parental advice. Children are different, too, she notes. There’s a rise in neurodivergence, and she believes that screen time and ultraprocessed foods may increase childhood hyperactivity.
While Goldman often claims that the timeout is a widely recognized child-rearing tool, her timeout is “nothing like the one used in scientific research — not at all,” Héloïse Junier, a psychologist who is a close colleague of Filliozat’s, told me. “It is a form of punishment, a prolonged, punitive isolation that, in our view — at least among scientists, and for many of us — constitutes psychological abuse; not only is it unnecessary, but it is also counterproductive.” She told me that parents who see her in consultation often arrive “lost,” confused about the debate in French media and Goldman’s suggestions. “Once you bring in scientific research, there’s no more debate.”
Even one of the experts Goldman cites doesn’t agree with her. Alan Kazdin, an emeritus professor at Yale whom Goldman references as the source for some of her ideas about timeouts, says that science justifies only a very short period of separation — not “at least 30 minutes,” as Goldman suggests for a child over 4. “Punishment of any kind, including time out, is not an effective way to change behavior,” he says.
Junier notes that there is another issue with Goldman’s approach: She simply hasn’t kept up. Positive education in France — some therapists prefer the terms “benevolent” or “democratic” education — draws from developmental psychology, neuroscience and attachment theory, which focuses on the relationship between children and their early caregivers. Goldman, by contrast, remains firmly rooted in psychoanalysis and the familial patterns it identifies. In France, “psychoanalysis is almost a religion,” Junier told me. Many forms of mental illness, she says, are still treated through the prism of Freudian ideas. She believes that part of the reason Goldman has so many supporters is that psychoanalysts worry that their credibility is declining.