“For a child to be happy, his parents must be”

In your latest book, you identify the ingredients of happiness for a child. So there are recipes?

Yes, a child’s happiness depends on several factors that will serve as a springboard in his own life. The most obvious is love, which translates into protective and empathetic support, from the tenderness of one’s parents. He also needs his educators to give him self-confidence. By encouraging him when he succeeds, but also by recalling the qualities of the other parent, whose good image enhances him. He subconsciously says to himself, “If my mom is adorable, like dad says, then I am.” »

You also talk about joy…

You can’t imagine how much, from one consultation to the next, depending on the families I see, the atmosphere can be demonstrative or, on the contrary, frosty. However, children are imbued with this family universe and will then reproduce it outside, at school, in their activities, with their classmates, their grandparents, etc.

Does a child’s well-being always depend on that of their parents?

Yes, I often tell them: “Take care of yourself and pamper your own happiness. » Child psychiatry today tends to treat children’s symptoms with chemical molecules or vague acronyms. But when you make parents happy, you are sure to help their child.

Why does the need to set educational limits constantly come up in your recommendations?

For ten years, my colleagues and I have been struck by the growing over-representation of this problem in families who have everything going well: children behave like tyrants under the pretext that it would be abusive to impose rules on them. When I ask parents about the origin of these difficulties, they tell me: “We have heard that scolding a child can damage his brain. » What nonsense!

There, you mention what we call “ positive education »?

Yes, certain gurus have imported this trend born in the United States into France. However, they make multiple errors: confusing the need for love and the need for a framework, that is to say, learning to be frustrated; pretend that these limits will be integrated on their own through love, therefore without the need to sanction… However, establishing educational limits is, in my opinion, essential and can be summed up in two words: “Time Out”. It involves temporarily putting away a child who screams and screams.

Is it really possible to do this with teenagers?

Of course! A child always knows deep down that he needs to be confronted with educational limits, to contain him and reassure him. When a teenager disobeys, do not give in to shouting, reproaches or empty threats. Just ask him for his phone and tell him to get out of the common area. If he refuses, you can extend the duration and if he negotiates, cut it short.

Is there nothing to keep from positive education?

Yes, kindness, which animates me too. But overall, I am very angry: if I denounce these practices, it is for the good of the families. My days are filled with children, teenagers, crying parents.

You are also known for your strong positions on high intellectual potential (HPI).

That there can be too much intelligence that would make people unhappy is false. Being intelligent is a quality, just like being friendly or having solid motor development. Categorizing people as “HPI” is, in my opinion, intended to repair parents’ esteem and not give too much work to psychologists. And some people get rich by selling intelligence quotient level tests.

However, these tests make it possible to identify intelligence quotients above average…

At the beginning of my thesis work (which focused on this subject), I believed that indeed, being intelligent could create a by meeting these adolescents, I realized that they were like the others and that treating them in forgetting their intelligence quotient worked very well. Scientific research has confirmed my observations.

On harassment, you defend a controversial idea: harassers and harassed are alike…

This is the reality: these children slide from one side to the other very frequently. We observe in them the same problem of conflict management and they get together with other children imbued with the same culture. Some have no space to experience conflicts at home, their parents being depressed, absent, or persecuted at work… Either they carry this aggressiveness onto the school scene, or they are unable to oppose it.

But for parents whose child is suffering, this concept is very painful…

I obviously understand the pain often expressed by the mothers of children who have been victims, sometimes in a tragic way. But the reflex to point out the full responsibility of teachers or the school in the failure to protect their child seems too partial to me.

Why do you defend screens?

They are just a symptom. A fulfilled child will not get lost in video games. But if relationships are terrible at home — due to a lack of attention or affection, or because there are constant arguments, children may seek refuge in screens. We must solve the problem that is making the child addicted, not take away their phone.

Deep down, do you like controversy?

(She laughs). No not at all, it’s the message that is important. I never speak for anything other than the good of the children. All day long, like my colleagues, I hear their suffering. It would have been very strange to remain silent, not to go and fight certain media lies, continuing to hear the distress of my patients.

Isn’t it unfair to blame parents for all the problems?

But it does the kids justice! And that’s what matters to me above all. My job is not to spare parents, but to tell the truth if it helps children get better. There is no question of a child leaving my office thinking he is guilty of his troubles. I see myself as an architect of their well-being.

You are more tender with grandparents than with parents. Were you close to your people?

My grandparents made up two sets of “additional” parents. Even today, they live in me in an active, daily way. I hear their words, their wisdom, their warnings… Grandparents serve to envelop their little ones with their presence and affection so that they appropriate this good care and then extend it to themselves.

Was your father, the singer Jean-Jacques Goldman, present?

Yes, he was a parent like any other, who took his role as a father and his educational mission very seriously. My parents (my mother is a child psychologist in daycare and PMI) raised my brother, my sister and me, telling us: “You will never walk in our shadows, you are worthy of succeeding in your lives as well as We. »