Quick: Name a French billionaire.

Now name one who is self-made. A bit harder, non?

According to the Forbes World’s Billionaires List, published today, France has sixteen billionaires. The U.S. boasts far more: 425. And a great number of those American billionaires, from Bill Gates (No. 2 on the list) to Sara Blakely (No. 1153) are self-made.

Yet one of the hottest parenting books on the market, Bringing Up Bébé, purports that American parents should seek to emulate their French counterparts. The book’s author, Pamela Druckerman, introduced her book last month in an essay in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Why French Parents are Superior.”

Druckerman’s book, currently #18 on Amazon’s bestseller list, is part memoir, part amateur anthropology. She writes about what it is like to raise her three children while living in Paris and provides an overview of the French way of parenting.

Here in the U.S. parents follow the advice of a myriad of so-called experts. We devour books and articles that talk about the latest research and construct our own parenting styles according to our individual family values and priorities.

In France, according to to Druckerman, there is only ONE parenting style. This cadre, or framework, is based on the tenets of patience, politeness and allegiance. A petite cheri in Paris, France eats more varied foods than one who lives in Paris, Texas. She is also less likely to be obese, rarely shouts in public and obediently sleeps through the night. These may be desirable characteristics, but before you start following Druckerman’s advice, ask yourself: do you want your children to grow up to become French?

Instead of capitalism and individualism, the book is filled with examples of children absorbing socialism. One parent “chuckles” that her five-year-old plays “labor strike” with his toys. The children in Druckerman’s daughter’s preschool are instructed to paint exactly the same thing. One morning Druckerman finds twenty-five identical yellow stick figures with green eyes hanging up on the classroom wall. Most of the parents Druckerman profiles discourage their children from standing out, speaking up or getting in the way of their parents’ good time. The advice they dole out is focused on keeping one’s child in his place, rather than enabling him to imagine and construct one of his own.

Personally, I have no interest in raising a child who knows her place and stays there. When my husband and I discuss the ways in which we want to raise our children, we never talk about ways we can help them become like everyone else. We talk about ways to encourage intellectual curiosity, creative thought, problem solving skills and leadership. We hope our children will grow up to become become bold, self-reliant dream-builders who are unafraid to take risks: entrepreneurs, architects, designers, engineers, explorers.

Many of the French parenting tactics outlined in Druckerman’s book run counter to those aims. Soon after returning home from the hospital most French women feed their babies formula instead of breast milk, despite all the research that shows breastfeeding contributes to better physical and emotional health and possibly even higher IQ. French babies are also quickly trained to sleep through the night. This sounds good in theory–what new parent wouldn’t like to get a full night’s sleep?–but the methods by which many parents attain this goal often include some form of neglecting the baby and allowing him to “cry it out.” This practice is condemned by many parenting experts in the U.S., including Dr. William Sears. He espouses what he calls “attachment parenting,” which encourages nursing, using gentler methods to get kids to sleep, wearing your baby in a sling and other bonding techniques. Sears argues his approach will teach a child to trust his parents and the world around him so that he can become a confident, independent, emotionally-balanced adult who is comfortable taking risks–all necessary skills to start a company or explore uncharted territories.

Forget Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. According to Druckerman, Parisian parents are not anxious for their children to get head starts and they do not prod them to become prodigies. Rather than play with their children, French parents leave kids to play on their own so the adults can have civilized chats with one other. They do not have toys strewn about the living room, they do not climb on jungle gyms at the playground and they do not get down on the floor to help construct LEGO villages. Certainly smothering children with suffocating amounts of attention, ala helicopter parenting, is a bad idea, but so is depriving babies and children of parental interaction, stimulation and inspiration.

Even the fairy tales are different in France. In one section of her book, Druckerman compares the books French children read to the books they read in the U.S. It turns out French children read stories that are similar to French films. There is sadness and struggle but unlike American fairy tales, none of it resolves in the end. Misery persists, as if to teach children, “This is how life is. Get used to it.”

American children’s books also tell tales of struggle but the characters usually find a solution and live happily ever after. The message: No matter what hard times might befall you, there is a rainbow around the corner. Unrealistic? Perhaps. But throughout my career I’ve interviewed hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and leaders and there is one characteristic every single one of them possesses, typically in large amounts: extreme optimism. It is the prevailing sentiment in today’s booming Silicon Valley and something I dare say the rest of the country could use right now.

Erika Brown Ekiel is a consultant in Silicon Valley. Formerly an Associate Editor with Forbes, she has led marketing at two top-performing venture capital firms, including Greylock Partners, which invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Pandora.
Follow her on Twitter @ebekiel.

*this blog post originally appeared on Forbes.com