French Kids Eat Everything (14 page)

My mother-in-law's views are fairly typical. From Janine's perspective, children's primary job is to behave, and parents' primary job is to help them behave. Some of this is generational: for example, the idea that children should be “seen and not heard.” But even mothers my age expected their children to be
sage
(which literally means “wise,” but when used with children means “discreet” and “well-behaved”). This is, above all else, a rule to be followed at the table, as suggested by the highest compliment my mother-in-law could pay to my children at the end of a family meal: “We didn't hear a single word out of you!” Older children would be welcome to speak, but only if they had something interesting to say. Their interventions weren't tolerated just because they were kids.

Before we moved to France, I had dismissed this behavior as old-fashioned. But after several months of living in France I realized that the passionate belief that the French have in the need for
éducation
stems from a completely different view of childhood. This really hit home after I started searching for children's books in French for our daughters. I imagined snuggling up on the couch with Claire with the equivalent of
Peter Rabbit
and
Winnie-the-Pooh
. And I couldn't wait to start reading classics with Sophie. What, I wondered, would be the French equivalent of
Anne of Green Gables
, or the Famous Five—books that were my favorites when I was young?

But the books that family and friends suggested to us were much less innocent in tone.
Le Petit Prince
was above the girls' heads.
Babar
scared them (with the mother elephant being shot in the first few pages), and its colonial story was, in my opinion, racist. Many of the other books that we were offered had incidents that I considered too cruel or macabre for our children.
Barbapapa
became a favorite, but that wasn't the sort of reading repertoire I'd hoped for.

Determined to find the French classics that I was sure existed, I went to the village bookstore. The puzzled bookseller wasn't much help. Having cleverly consulted Philippe beforehand, I knew enough to ask for
les grands classiques
and
les contes de fées
(fairy tales). But I was offered Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and
Pippi Long-stocking
translated into French. There wasn't even an equivalent of Mother Goose; French children sing nursery songs instead. Listening to Claire sing “Frère Jacques” in an off-key chorus with her cousins was, I had to admit, very cute. But this didn't satisfy me as a replacement for reading the sort of books that I identified with childhood.

I tried explaining this to Philippe's father one evening. “Back home,” I said cautiously, “childhood is viewed as a really innocent time. There are lots of books about magic and make-believe. The French don't seem to have the same sorts of books.”

“Kids aren't innocent,” snorted Jo, in an uncharacteristically direct tone. “They're like little animals. If they aren't disciplined, they'll never learn to behave!”

This meant that there were some real differences in how I parented, as compared to the other parents in the village. At the homes we visited in the village, there were far fewer toys than back home (and certainly fewer than in our basement playroom, stuffed from floor to ceiling with kiddie paraphernalia). And French parents didn't really involve themselves in kids' playtime as much. I saw this at the local village playground, but also in Paris when visiting my sister-in-law, Véronique. Whereas parents back home would follow their children around, at a discreet distance, helping them clamber and climb if needed, grinning all the while, French parents would more often than not settle onto one of the benches with an uninterested look on their faces. Some even brought magazines or newspapers. Clearly, kids' play was not for them.

In fact, getting
too
close to your kids was frowned upon. A common criticism I heard from the other mothers in the village (and one that I was sure was directed at me behind my back) was that someone was “a slave to her children.” Philippe's relatives were surprised (and, to be honest, a little concerned) about how attached I was to Sophie when she was born—holding her too much, breast-feeding her on demand, and even (the ultimate no-no) sleeping with her.

However, I saw lots of French parents express their love in other ways. They spent a lot of time with their children—in the evenings and on weekends. Families seemed to socialize together a lot more—a dinner invitation would be for everyone, from the youngest to the oldest member of the family. And most of the moms we knew prepared homemade food for their children every day, even if they worked full-time. I marveled at how some of them produced amazing meals in a matter of minutes, dashing around their (by my standards) tiny kitchens. They never seemed to be caught off-guard (as I often was) at dinnertime. Because food was a priority, they were organized, and because they were organized, making good food from scratch was relatively quick and painless. They thought creatively about offering new types of food to their children, exposing them to lots of flavors. Training their children to “taste everything” was one of the most important priorities for the French mothers I met—just as important as reading, talking, or giving the baby toys. This was supported by a loving but authoritative parenting style.

The French approach, I began to realize, is a very good way to behave if you want to prevent food from becoming a power struggle between parents and kids. At first glance, their methods seem coercive because there are so many rules and limited choices. But in fact the opposite is true. Because there are fixed rules and routines that everyone (including the parents) respects, there is no negotiation and no power struggles. French kids, in general, thrive within this structured approach to parenting. And French parents also make sure that food is fun and tasty, which helps kids look forward to eating. As a result, their kids are usually happy to come to the table.

In our house, on the other hand, we had few routines and fewer rules. I wasn't sure why I behaved this way, never having articulated my parenting style to myself. The fragments of ideas I remembered from the books on “attachment parenting” were the closest I got to a parenting philosophy.
Children need to form an emotional bond with their parents. Anything that threatens the parent-child relationship is a threat to their long-term psychological health
. Now, I began scrutinizing these ideas. In practice, I began to realize,
my
attachment to these ideas had translated into my not wanting to argue about food (or lots of other things) with my kids, because I didn't want to screw them up, or weaken our attachment. Admittedly, once written down, this does not seem entirely logical. But in the sleep-deprived state that lasted for years once the kids arrived, logic wasn't always my strong point.

Maybe, I decided, I'd have to rethink my “attachment parenting” approach. Part of this would involve rethinking the way that we handled “why” questions with the kids. At the heart of my vague definition of attachment parenting was a commitment to getting kids to think critically. Sophie's first “why” was met with praise. We encouraged her curiosity, and she began asking endless questions. At times, this stretched my mother-in-law's patience very thin.

“
Why
does she ask ‘why' all the time?” Janine once exclaimed.

“I'm teaching her to negotiate, and to think critically,” I responded, wondering where this was going.

“But children shouldn't be negotiating with their parents!” she snapped, clearly exasperated. “Some things should be so routine that they don't even ask questions! Especially about eating!”

I shrugged it off at the time, but I later began to wonder. Maybe Janine was right. I had encouraged my children to express their individual views, and to use their questions to dispute parental orders, allowing them to exert control where they could. One of the places where they did this, early on, was at the table. Meals at our house were usually rushed, as we were either herding the children out the door in the morning or rushed getting home after work. Hurried and harried, I'd usually accept the kids' rejections of my cooking and meet their demands for substitutes. Bread and butter, or pasta, became our routine. My kids learned that they—not I—decided what to eat.

From the French perspective, this was not attachment parenting. This was indulgent parenting. Traditionally, the French believe that children who have not yet reached the age of reason (
l'âge de la raison
, which the French believe occurs at the age of seven) shouldn't be allowed to decide about many things, most certainly not what and how they eat.

This made me wonder why I caved in so easily to my children's demands. Was I really being “child-centered”? Or was I just being a distracted wimp?

The potential flaws in my “child-centered” method were driven home by the experience of acquaintances of ours, British expats who'd bought a crumbling country château nearby and were spending their summers fixing it up. They'd allowed their four-year-old son to eat what he liked, on the assumption that some internal wisdom would guide him to eat a balanced diet over time. After some time spent subsisting solely on dairy products and white bread, he developed anemia and had to be briefly hospitalized. Although he quickly recovered, the story soon made the rounds of the village gossips and seemed to reconfirm French people's views about the mysterious, even sadistic refusal of English-speaking people to eat real food.

Thinking about all of this made me exhausted. I'd started off simply wanting to get my kids to eat better, but I had gotten caught up in a conflict between American and French ways of
being:
of parenting, of nourishing, of caring. And I kept coming back to the same question:

Did I need to behave like a French mother in order to get my children to eat like French kids?

I wasn't sure that it would work. But I decided that it was worth a try. Proudly, I pasted my rules to the fridge door. Later that night, my husband read them with raised eyebrows.

“What's this?” he asked.

“Don't you remember that dinner party?” I reminded him. “I'm trying to figure out how to get the girls to eat like French children.”

“This sounds a little bit too strict,” he protested, clearly dubious.

“But France is like that!” I protested. “There are strict rules for everything!”

“I want to enjoy my meals, and I think the girls do too. Are you sure you want to apply all of these rules at once? Food is about pleasure, not about being strict,” he persisted. His comments made me wonder whether I was on the right track. But Christmas was only a month away. I had decided that the girls' eating habits needed to change, and fast. So, undeterred, I turned to developing the next part of The Plan. I needed to find out how French kids eat, and how they think and feel about food.

Luckily, I was spared the necessity of having to do my own research. Philippe's cousin Christelle was a
puéricultrice
, which is something like a cross between a pediatric nurse and a kindergarten teacher. I called her up one evening and explained what I was interested in. She was intrigued and had lots of great suggestions. There was abundant research, she explained, because France had been a pioneer in developing
puériculture
(the science of childrearing) in the nineteenth century and was still a world leader.

She told me, for example, about the French researcher Claude Fischler, who had spent thirty years studying eating habits and food preferences. Together with an American researcher (Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania), he had surveyed 7,000 people in France and the United States about their eating habits. And he had done detailed studies of French children and parents. Perfect!

Reading this research confirmed the ideas I'd developed: by the time they were school-age, French kids liked eating a variety of foods, and their love of variety made them more interested in vegetables. I also gleaned some important principles from reading the survey questions that Fischler had asked when trying to probe how well French children understood habits of healthy eating. Interestingly, these included some sayings that my in-laws were fond of repeating, like “One must eat a bit of everything,” and “Eating unhealthy foods once in a while is not a problem.” The French children in the surveys, I also learned, had a very good understanding of which foods were healthy (and unhealthy) and why. So although—just like kids everywhere—they loved things like pizza, soda, sweets, and ketchup, they ate these in moderation, as did their parents.

Fischler's work on adults also confirmed my impressions. Americans tend to be anxious about food and to identify health, nutrition, and dieting as the key issues they associate with eating. The French, on the other hand, almost never mention any of these topics when asked for their thoughts about food. Rather, they talk about pleasure, tasty food, socializing, culture, identity, and fun. In one of the most revealing studies, Fischler showed a picture of a chocolate cake to both American and French people and asked them for the first word that popped into their head. For Americans, the most common word was “guilt.” For the French, the most common word was “celebration.”

How do French kids learn these ideas? Part of the explanation is the amount of time they spend at the table with their parents, where (naturally) the conversation focuses on food. The tradition of the family meal is alive and well in France, where the entire workday is structured around mealtimes. Stores shut for one and a half or even two hours between noon and 2:00
P.M.
, so that everyone can go home for lunch. In repeated surveys of French families, nearly all the kids eat a traditional, sit-down, three-course lunch
every
day. More than half of them eat at school: French schools have a two-hour break at noon in order to allow kids the time required to eat (at least thirty minutes) and to properly digest their food (during the sixty- to ninety-minute recess that follows lunch). As a result, school finishes later: usually at 4:00 or 4:30
P.M
., which is when the traditional
goûter
is eaten. Shops close at 7:00
P.M
. in order to allow everyone to get home in time for dinner at the traditional French hour of 7:30 or 8:00
P.M
. By 9:00 or 9:30, most kids are in bed.