“Don’t run, don’t throw… Why isn’t he listening? The explanation may be at the level of his brain”, advances Jean-François Belmonte, alias “Papa Positive”, on his Facebook account, in one of his many successful videos. Also present on Tik Tok, Instagram and You Tube, the influencer feeds his community daily – made up of one million subscribers! – tips and tricks. The goal ? Make parents aware of the benefits of “positive education”, the particularity of which is to emphasize benevolence, listening and respect for children’s initiatives.
“I raised my son, now 16, myself, without punishment or violence,” says this former manager in the supermarket. “After doing a lot of documentation, having read many books on the subject, talking with specialists, I decided to share tools for free on my site”, continues Papa Positive, who derives income from advertising on his pages. “Please note, I am neither a coach nor a psychologist. This is why I rely on professionals who have an academic and scientific background”, he specifies, anxious to counter the criticisms of which he is regularly the object. , especially from part of the medical world.
In recent years, the highly lucrative positive education market has exploded. There are countless books on personal development, coaching offers, podcasts, derivative products on the subject. A business like any other? Last October, a group of 350 childhood specialists denounced in Le Figaro the drift of this “exclusively” positive parenthood. Education “must go through fair and substantiated decisions, based on research, studies, statistics, and not on the feelings and personal experience of self-proclaimed experts who treat their popularity with a discourse that is certainly attractive, but dangerously simplifyer”, stipulated the text. The child psychiatrist Patrick Ben Soussan, author of “How to survive your children? What positive parenting has not told you” (ed. Erès, 2019), observes with some perplexity the emergence of this new “school of thought”. . “Let’s be clear, these are often people who have no solid training or experience!”, he storms, worried about the emergence of “guilt-inducing” speeches for parents.
Most influencers who advocate positive education like to refer to the best-selling books by pediatrician Catherine Gueguen or psychotherapist Isabelle Filliozat, including the bestseller I have tried everything !, published in 2011, has sold over 400,000 copies and has been translated into 14 languages. The latter’s method is now dispensed via training courses stamped in its name, such as this two-and-a-half-year “parenting coach or consultant” course, made up of several modules on the “laws of the relationship”, the “reception and expression of emotions” or “emotional education”. Total cost: 13,475 euros. On her site “Creative parenthood”, Catherine Dumonteil-Kremer also offers professional training for “only” 3,000 to 3,500 euros. “Our consultants are then led to work in social centers or in places of parent-child reception. They can also build up a private clientele”, explains this former social worker who, on her site, also offers professionals a course on the world of cards, to learn “the difference between tarot, oracle and photo language”. “There is no mystical dimension there! The cards just serve as a support for us to work on psychology with the families”, she justifies.
“It’s a very perverse system!”
After working in the agri-food sector, Maude Allais recently embarked on the adventure of parental coaching. “Creating a cooperative relationship with your child”, “knowing how to accompany your emotions”, “finding family harmony”… This is what the young woman promises through several formulas. “Mom myself, I used to have a lot of principles. Then when my second child arrived, I exploded in midair and I had to correct certain things,” she explains. From now on, she wants to help “other mothers to get out of this dominant-dominated power relationship” with their child.
Many of these “specialists” set themselves up as slayers of ordinary educational violence, which they only name under an essential acronym of the small world of positive education: the VEO. Behind these three letters lies the idea that any parent could mistreat their child without realizing it. Proponents of this concept rely on the law of July 10, 2019, which provides that parental authority must be exercised “without physical or psychological violence”. Where many will see it as a ban on beating your child, humiliating or belittling him on a daily basis, these influencers go much further. Some say that rolling your eyes, raising your voice, confiscating a packet of candy from your son, forcing your daughter to take a bath if she doesn’t feel like it… can fall under the scope of VEOs. What paralyze some parents, paralyzed at the idea of committing an irreparable act that will automatically classify them in the camp of violent adults.
“Destabilized by these daily injunctions, some adults crack and even come, paradoxically, to raise their hands on their children!” Reproves psychologist Caroline Goldman. The author of Go to your room! (Interéditions) has been denouncing for several years the toxic effects of this philosophy pushed to the extreme. “You should know that the parent-child conflict is inseparable from parenting. Aggression springs both from the side of the child when he calls for limits and from the side of the parent whose very tiring mission often requires a lot of sacrifices and hard work. ‘abnegation”, she explains: “Now these ideologues of parenthood will use the parent’s guilt, make it swell, fuel failure to keep their clients in lucrative addiction. It’s a very perverse system!” . Like many of her colleagues, the psychologist sees followers of these training courses parading through her office, totally confused. “I explain to them that setting limits for your children does not make them bad parents. On the contrary, children need a structuring framework to grow up peacefully,” she insists.
To convince parents of the benefits of their “courses”, these “positivity” consultants often hide behind the contribution of neuroscience. “Research has made enormous progress in recent years, sometimes contradicting certain theories defended by psychoanalysis for more than a hundred years”, advances Jean-François Belmonte. The deleterious effects of certain acts or words on the brains of our children are now scientifically proven. These studies have also improved our ability to collaborate with our children.” And the influencer put forward the example of the use of the negative turn: “We know today that the brain of the little ones is not not mature enough to fully understand a sentence with a negative. It is therefore preferable to say what is expected of the child”.
Marie Chetrit, author of “Positive education: a question of balance?” (ed Solar), disputes: “If the sentence is adapted to the context and the situation he is going through, obviously the child understands the negation!” This doctor of science, accustomed to reading and deciphering research studies, deplores the shortcuts and misinterpretations that run on the Net. “Some erroneous speeches are based on surveys carried out on subjects exposed to a very high level of abuse. Or on experiments carried out on mice or rats subjected to situations of intense stress”, she explains. It is therefore possible to reassure parents. The – real – experts are formal: throwing your child “go to your room” is not like a “VEO” likely to cause irreversible brain damage.