Journal de bord

dimanche 5 février 2012

Citation du jour

« L’explosion de l’euro, ça va être la délégitimation de tous les connards qui ont fabriqué l’euro ! »

Emmanuel Todd.

1. Le 5 février 2012,
Marie-Aude

Tiens du même, dans la suite de la discussion sur les communautarismes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUvyPzJb5I&feature=colike

2. Le 6 février 2012,
Gagarine

« Je serais très étonné que l’euro, dans sa forme actuelle, survive à l’année 2011 » (le même, le 4 janvier 2011).

Le plus fascinant, c’est l’applomb du monsieur lorsqu’il sort ses énormités. Au fait, il y a des gens qui le prennent au sérieux?

3. Le 6 février 2012,
Gagarine

(au fait, citation via @Quatremer).

4. Le 6 février 2012,
Romain

Quand bien même l’euro tomberait, les mêmes connards reviendraient nous dire qu’ils l’avaient toujours dit.

Blah ? Touitter !

Parenting, the French way

[…] Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

[…] Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don’t explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids.

[…] One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

[…] Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on how children learn to delay gratification. As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80 years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend’s apartment. He agreed to meet me for coffee.

Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the “marshmallow test” in the late 1960s when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a 4- or 5-year-old into a room where there is a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while, and that if the child doesn’t eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll get only that one.

Most kids could only wait about 30 seconds. Only one in three resisted for the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was away. The trick, the researchers found, was that the good delayers were able to distract themselves.

Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and didn’t “tend to go to pieces under stress,” as their report said.

Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so often fall apart under stress?

Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on French children. But as a longtime observer of France, he said that he was struck by the difference between French and American kids. In the U.S., he said, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.”

The Wall Street Journal, Pamela Druckerman: “Why French Parents Are Superior”.

The Marshmallow Test.

Wikipedia: “Stanford marshmallow experiment”.

1. Le 5 février 2012,
padawan

Rappelons que Nicolas Sarkozy n’a pas été élevé par deux parents français, et nous prouve donc qu’effectivement toutes les civilisations ne se valent pas.

2. Le 6 février 2012,
zerchove

On pourrait aussi comparer les enfants français avec les petits coréens du nord pour voir a quel point les petits frouzes sont des minables petites fiottes fainéantes.

Mais bon vu la teneur de l’article, il me semble que l’adage selon lequel certains feraient mieux d’avoir des chiens plutôt que des enfants est toujours d’actualité.

3. Le 6 février 2012,
Raveline

Ce qui m’étonne le plus, c’est que les scientifiques tirent un lien de causalité entre ne pas aimer les marshmallows et avoir une plus grande capacité de concentration.

4. Le 6 février 2012,
Karl, La Grange

À Mouille Point, il y a des embruns.

5. Le 6 février 2012,
Nicolas

@zerchove Moi c’est le manque de protocole “scientifique” dans cette expérience (en plus des conclusions hâtives) qui me fait frissonner… @padawan hu hu hu joli :)

6. Le 7 février 2012,
Karl, La Grange

Blah ? Touitter !