French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Billon (classic english novels txt) 📕

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