Nobody Puts Bébé in the Corner

"Anyone who advocates for criminalising the punishing of four-year-olds cannot be surprised when they grow up to disregard the rule of law."

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

France’s ban on disciplining toddlers equates time-outs to traumatic abuse. No wonder French youth are running riot.

More than 700 educational experts, psychologists, and doctors have signed a letter slamming the French government’s decision to ban punishment in nursery schools and daycares. Last month, new guidelines were released that warn against punitive methods to control the behaviour of naughty children, like isolation and time-outs. It instead advocates for “positive parenting,” recommending that childcare providers allow children to shout, cry, throw objects, and play with their food in order to express their emotions. At that age, the document argues, punishing children is basically a useless exercise, and educators should consider it impossible to shape behaviour through discipline. 

Pedagogues who ignore this guidance could end up falling afoul of the law. The rules build on a law passed in 2019, which forbids adults from carrying out “ordinary educational violence” against children. This includes, as you might expect, corporal punishment like spanking and hitting, as well as “psychological humiliation.” This is supposed to prevent teachers and other childcare workers from being abusive, but the definition of what exactly counts as “psychological humiliation” is becoming ever broader. According to the families ministry, putting kids in time-out is “equivalent to psychological violence. You can’t calm children down by putting them in a corner.” 

The 700 experts who signed this open letter disagree—you very much can calm children down by putting them in a corner. They don’t put much stock in the government’s suggestion that the best way to restore order in a classroom or playroom is to reason with a wailing toddler. Of course, no one is advocating for daycare workers to bring out the cane for misbehaving children. But, realistically, there is only so far you can go in allowing a child to express his emotions before it becomes problematic for the other children. Removing a screaming child from the classroom to calm down is not the same as locking a child alone in a room for hours on end. Nor is giving a kid a stern talking to the same as beating him. 

This approach is also unhelpful to the naughty child. As the open letter argues, it “encourages children to give in to their impulses” and teaches them that being disruptive is acceptable and tolerated. It goes on, “The worrying thing is that this keeps the child in a state of infancy, as if carers should confine themselves to accommodating the child’s needs.” Far from helping them to process and self-regulate their emotions, it teaches them that their feelings, whims, and tantrums should be the No.1 priority of all adults around them. Branding any kind of discipline and punishment as traumatic abuse is a recipe for creating entitled, unruly children. 

This isn’t just a problem that teachers and other children will have to contend with. It also has an effect on wider society. It’s well-established that the children with the most behavioural issues tend to be the same children who come from broken homes and precarious socio-economic backgrounds. For many of these kids with absent or neglectful parents, nursery and school will be the only places they come into contact with discipline. It is especially important to reinforce the idea that breaking the rules will lead to punishment at a young age—otherwise we risk setting children up to go through life believing that their actions don’t have consequences. 

At the most extreme end of this, we see France’s problem with youth gangs. In Greater Paris, police logged 440 rixes entre bandes (gang fights) in 2024, up from 413 in 2023, with six deaths. In Paris proper, there were 17 rixes, leaving 63 injured and two dead. The overwhelming majority of these violent clashes are between teenagers. Multiple towns and cities have implemented curfews over the summer holidays in an attempt to stop wayward teens from wreaking havoc after dark. Obviously, these are not toddlers who are roaming the streets, committing arson, and dealing drugs. And there is no straight line from crèche to crime. But the unruly youths who terrorise towns like Limoges or Nîmes do not come from nowhere. Official stats also show that minors (13–17) are over-represented among suspects for violent theft without a weapon (35%), armed theft (31%), and vehicle theft (28%)—the kinds of offences where impulse control and predictable consequences matter.

The majority of youth gangs proliferate in areas that are socially deprived and immigrant heavy. In Seine-Saint-Denis, a hotspot of gang violence, roughly 31% of residents are immigrants. Plaine Commune—the intercommunal authority that includes Saint-Denis—has 69% of its population living in ‘high-priority,’ poverty-stricken neighbourhoods. 29% are single-parent families, and 41% are immigrants. Schools in this ecosystem are also integrating 88,500 newly arrived pupils who do not speak French. While we don’t have breakdowns of ethnicity or migrant background when it comes to youth gangs, these figures do show where the state is the first educator—and why predictable consequences in early-years settings matter most there. 

Anormal, stable household will be able to pick up the slack where teachers and daycare workers fail, setting proper boundaries and enforcing rules. But what about the child who does not have parents in the picture, or at least, parents who care? One of the very first lessons they will learn from the state is that they can do whatever they please and that the authorities will tolerate it. The majority of them, hopefully, will not turn out to be criminals. But the last thing any of these under-parented kids need is to have their ‘big feelings’ validated. 

None of this is to say that we can fix the issue of youth crime by banishing would-be gangsters to the naughty step. But it’s surely a start. How else are children supposed to learn social responsibility, impulse control, and basic rules and norms if they’re allowed to run wild from day one? Anyone who advocates for criminalising the punishing of four-year-olds cannot be surprised when they grow up to disregard the rule of law. A country that can’t control its toddlers certainly won’t be able to control its criminals.