16 In the hubbub over parenting styles, it's not just the mother's story

IN a desperate attempt to divert myself from the back-stabbing minutiae of Australian politics which, as Kevin Rudd's reception by the hoi polloi shows, has nothing to do with reality in the shopping mall, I recently came across a book by an American, Pamela Druckerman, about French mothers, called Bringing Up Bebe.

I am not sure how much Druckerman's book has to do with reality either, but it is a clever and entertaining twist on the old baby manual, a comparison between the middle-class American mother and her French counterpart.

One is characterised as indecisive, a hopeless disciplinarian, over-managing, self-flagellating borderline neurotic - and fat to boot; the other is chic, calm, unperturbed by her polite children who eat whatever their parents eat and are kept in line with the firm "no". No prizes to guess which is which. The poor, zealous (fat) American mum, just can't win.

There has been a puzzling plethora of international mummy books such as this, some more serious than others. Another even more scathing critique of modern motherhood from France has been written by a serious feminist (is there any other sort?) Elisabeth Badinter, a mother of three. She is highly critical of the modern mother's attempts to immerse herself in domesticity and child-rearing, and even regards breast-feeding past six months, along with the prohibition of booze and ciggies, as all just a sinister throwback to the kitchen sink.

She has a point. Modern Anglophone mothers, including Australian mums, can be over-zealous, fearful, and too hung-up about infancy, forgetting that one day baby will be 15 years - not 15 months.

Reading this stuff, I was not a bit surprised about French mothers' insouciant attitude to motherhood. That is normal. What does surprise me is that Druckerman and even Badinter think that all French mothers are the same.

Perhaps one should expect it of Badinter. Being a feminist, her view of the world is from the top down. But I don't think the mothers of children who were looting, burning and turning over cars on the outskirts of Paris a few years ago, were the same ones that Druckerman describes, whose kids were sitting up calmly eating their foie gras and offering the infant hand to be shaken by visiting admiring adults.

The most controversial book of this genre is doubtless Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother. This book caused a sensation. It outlines the Chinese philosophy which incorporates the sort of strict upbringing that leads to an education of breathtaking achievement.

As this newspaper's Rowan Callick, who has spent several years in China, wrote last week, the Chinese model of education and child-rearing, while not entirely the way to go in the land of the tall-poppy syndrome, is a very interesting example of the importance of the interaction of culture and family on education outcomes.

In China, family includes the extended family. The nub, though, of Chua's tiger mother approach is the dreaded D word, Discipline, which in China is the secret of success in education.

Nevertheless, Chua's discipline seemed overbearing, even cruel. No television, no sleepovers, no extracurricular activities, not picked up by mum - no fun and, what is more, the children always had to be at the top of the class, no excuses. And yet the book is not just a parenting manual, Genghis Khan-style. It also documents Chua's journey, from ultra-strict disciplinarian in her parents' style, to a more mellow, Americanised approach as the children grew.

Chua explains that "my actual book is not a how-to guide; it's a memoir, the story of our family's journey in two cultures, and my own eventual transformation as a mother. Much of the book is about my decision to retreat from the strict 'Chinese' approach, after my younger daughter rebelled at 13." That bit was lost in the aftershock of someone bold enough to actually mention the D word.

Like two-thirds of the Wall Street Journal respondents to the article Chua wrote about her approach, I too am a Chua sympathiser. From my early days with two little ones in Manhattan, when every problem became a seminar and every theory was explored, one had only to whisper the word "discipline" and the mummies suddenly stopped talking, drew breath and, screwing up their eyes, looked at you as if Cruella de Vil had just entered the playground.

My own counting-down method was considered crude, to say the least, and I didn't dare mention my husband's favourite Shanahan child-control mechanism known as the art of "brandishing the thong" lest the police were called.

In truth we never had much call to use the dreaded thong, because conviction is a better tool than any punishment.

But modern parents who come late to parenting and have few children do not have much confidence - hence no conviction. People might have more confidence if they had more children.

Lately there has been a lot of publicity about what makes for educational success. The Grattan Institute came up with the not very astonishing recommendation that too much money was being wasted on "stuff", and the answer is rightly not more computers or fancy school halls, but good teachers, combined with traditional, knowledge-based learning.

However, there is something even more important than good teaching and good curriculum, and all educational research, including that of the Grattan Institute, acknowledges it as truly fundamental. The most important underlying factor for success in education is family background.

Family background is not just socioeconomic background, particularly in Australia. The most important element of a child's family background is good parenting, which means stability. The children of families with a stable mother and father do better overall than children with only one parent. And even where parents have separated, those children whose fathers are involved also do slightly better.

So whether you are a tiger mother, an insouciant mother, or even an over-the-top meddling paranoid mother, or, shock horror, a casual thong wielder, the real story here is the one you rarely hear about, and it is not just the mother's story really. It is the mother's - and the father's.