Today's Madame Figaro - Elisabeth Badinter...

[Bonsoir]

is interviewed criticising the pressure on women to breastfeed/cosleep/dedicate themselves to the welfare of their children and explains why the French model of motherhood (outsourcing care) is best.

Fascinating. She completely bypasses the point that women might actually enjoy their babies and the full back-to-nature experience...

Dati is also now a lawyer. Very busy getting ready to make pots of cash, like her lord & master. And replying shallowly and uselessly to journalists' questions (if the bit I saw of her last night is anything to go by).

DH thinks that Badinter in fact has a very bad conscience about the way she (like other mothers at the time) brought up her kids, and is trying to justify it by slating any more attachment-style approaches.

Auld - I love your DH's theory! I have read quite a bit of the book now, and given just how aggressive she is towards those with opposing ideas to her own (with particularly vicious personal attacks reserved for French childcare gurus of her own generation), I suspect he may be right.

The book is very badly written indeed - peppered with exclamation marks, italics and dubious logic. Why oh why don't the French ever seem to use editors?

Have read a bit and thought a bit more about this.

For someone who likes to think of herself as a philosophe, a profession which carries a certain gravitas, her book is very undignified in its attack on others.

I wonder whether it becomes completely impossible for (some) French mothers to feel any kind of maternal instinct, coming as they do from generations of babies who have been brutalised by the "care" they received in their early years.