French Children Don't Throw Food (29 page)

Bean sometimes exploits the letter of the rule by eating a single piece of courgette, and then insisting that she has fulfilled her obligation. She recently declared that she will taste everything ‘except salad’, by which she means the actual green lettuce leaves. But for the most part, she quite likes the starters we serve. These include sliced avocado, tomato in vinaigrette, or steamed broccoli with a little soy sauce. We all have a good chuckle when I serve
carottes rapées
– shredded carrots in vinagrette – and try to pronounce it.

My kids come to the table hungry because, except for the
goûter
, they don’t snack. It helps that other kids around them aren’t snacking either. But even so, getting to this point required a steely will. I simply don’t cave in to demands for a filling piece of bread or a whole banana between meals. And as the kids have got older, they’ve mostly stopped asking. If they do, I just say, ‘No, you’re having dinner in thirty minutes.’ Unless they’re very tired, they’re usually fine with that. I feel a swell of accomplishment when I’m in the supermarket with Leo and he points to a box of cookies and says ‘
goûter
’.

I try not to be too fanatical about this (or as Simon describes it, ‘more French than the French’). When I’m cooking I occasionally give the kids a little preview of dinner – a piece of tomato or a few chickpeas. When I’m introducing a new ingredient, like pine nuts, I’ll offer them a few bites while I’m cooking, to get them in the mood. Obviously they drink water whenever they want.

Sometimes keeping my kids in the food
cadre
feels like a lot of work. Especially when Simon is away, I’m often tempted to skip the starter, plop a bowl of pasta in front of them and call it dinner. When I occasionally do this, they’re quite happy to gobble it down. There’s certainly no clamouring for salad and vegetables.

But usually the kids don’t have a choice. Like a French mum, I’ve accepted that it’s my duty to teach them to like a variety of tastes, and to eat meals that are
équilibrés
. (Though my fanaticism about this is entirely American.) Also like a French mum, I try to keep the balance of the whole day’s
menu
in my head. We mostly stick to the French formula of large protein-heavy lunches and lighter carbohydrate-driven dinners, though always with vegetables. The kids do eat a lot of pasta, though I try to vary the shape and the sauce. Whenever I have time, I make a big pot of soup for dinner (though I can’t bring myself to purée it), and serve it with rice or bread.

It’s no surprise that the kids find the food more appetizing when the ingredients are fresh, and it looks good. I consider the balance of colours on their plate, and occasionally slip in some slices of tomato or avocado if dinner looks monotone. We have a collection of colourful melamine plates. But for dinner I use white plates, which makes the colours of the food ‘pop’, and signals to the kids that we’re having a grown-up meal.

I try to let them help themselves as much as possible. Beginning when the boys were quite young, I passed around a bowl of grated Parmesan on pasta nights and let them sprinkle it on all by themselves. They get to put a spoonful of sugar in their hot chocolates and occasionally in their yogurts.

Bean frequently asks for a slice of Camembert, or a hunk of whatever cheese we’ve got, at the end of the meal. Except for special occasions, we don’t do cake or ice cream at night. I still can’t bring myself to serve them chocolate sandwiches.

It’s taken a while to make all this second nature. It helps that the boys in particular really like to eat. One of their teachers at the crèche calls them
gourmands
, which is a polite way of saying that they eat a lot. She says their favourite word
is
‘
encore
’ – more. They’ve developed the annoying habit, possibly learned at the crèche, of holding up their plates at the end of the meal, to show that they’ve finished. Whatever sauce or liquid is left spills on to the table (I think at the crèche they’ve already mopped up the liquid with slices of baguette).

Sweets are no longer non grata in our house. Now that we offer them in moderation, Bean doesn’t treat each sweet as if it’s her last. When it’s really cold out, I make the kids hot chocolate in the morning. I serve it with yesterday’s baguette, softened slightly in the microwave, and slices of apple in a little serving bowl, which the kids dip in their drinks. It feels like a very French breakfast.

(makes about 6 cups)

In a saucepan, mix one heaped teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder with a small splash of cold or room-temperature milk. Mash the milk and powder together until they form a thick paste. Add the rest of the milk and mix. (The chocolate should spread evenly into the milk.) Cook on medium heat until the milk begins to boil. Allow the hot chocolate to cool, skim off any skin that has formed, then
pour
it into mugs with spoons inside. Let kids add their own sugar at the table.

In a large mug, make a paste with 1 teaspoon cocoa powder and a small splash of milk. Fill the mug with milk and mix. Heat the mug in the microwave for two minutes, or until very hot. Mix in a teaspoon of sugar. Pour a bit of this hot cocoa concentrate into several mugs. Add cold or room-temperature milk to each mug. Serve with a crusty baguette, or any toasted bread.

13

It’s Me Who Decides

LEO, THE SWARTHY
twin, does everything quickly. I don’t mean that he’s gifted. I mean that he moves at twice the speed of ordinary humans. By age two, he’s developed a runner’s physique from dashing from room to room. He even speaks quickly. As Bean’s birthday approaches, he begins singing ‘Happybirthdaytoya!’ in a high-pitched squeak; the whole song is over in a few seconds.

It’s very hard to wrestle with this little tornado. Already, he can practically outrun me. When I go to the park with him, I’m in constant motion too. He seems to regard the gates around play areas as an invitation to leave.

One of the most impressive parts of French parenting – and perhaps the toughest one to master – is authority. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm manner with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back or engaging in prolonged negotiations. But how exactly do French parents pull this off? And how can I acquire this magical authority too?

One Sunday morning, my neighbour Frédérique witnesses me trying to cope with Leo when we take our kids to the park. Frédérique is a travel agent from Burgundy. She’s in her mid-forties, with a raspy smoker’s voice and a no-nonsense manner. After years of paperwork she adopted Tina, a beautiful red-headed three-year-old, from a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she’s been a mother for all of three months.

But already Frédérique is teaching me about
éducation
. Just by virtue of being French, she has a whole different vision of what’s
possible
and
pas possible
. This becomes clear in the sandbox at the park. Frédérique and I are sitting on the perimeter of the sandbox, trying to talk. But Leo keeps dashing outside the fence surrounding the sandbox. Each time he does this, I get up to chase him, scold him and drag him back while he screams. It’s irritating and exhausting.

At first, Frédérique watches this little ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she says that if I’m running after Leo all the time, we won’t be able to indulge in the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.

‘That’s true,’ I say. ‘But what can I do?’

Frédérique says I should be more stern with Leo, so he knows that it’s not OK to leave the sandbox. ‘Otherwise it doesn’t work,’ she says. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo is inevitable. In her mind, it’s
pas possible
.

Frédérique’s strategy doesn’t seem to hold out much promise for me. I point out that I’ve been telling Leo to stop leaving the sandbox for the last twenty minutes. Frédérique smiles.
She
says I need to make my ‘no’ stronger, and to really believe in it.

The next time Leo tries to run outside the gate, I say ‘no’ more sharply than usual. He leaves anyway. I follow and drag him back.

‘You see?’ I say to Frédérique. ‘It’s not possible.’

Frédérique smiles again, and says I need to make my ‘no’ more convincing. What I lack, she says, is the belief that he’s really going to listen. She tells me not to shout, but rather to speak with more conviction.

I’m scared that I’ll terrify him.

‘Don’t worry,’ Frédérique says, calmly urging me on.

Leo doesn’t listen the next time either. But I can feel that my ‘no’s’ are coming from a more convincing place. They’re not louder, but they’re more self-assured. I feel like I’m impersonating a different sort of parent.

By the fourth try, when I’m finally brimming with conviction, Leo approaches the gate but – miraculously – doesn’t open it. He looks back and eyes me warily. I widen my eyes and try to emit disapproval.

After about ten minutes, Leo stops trying to leave altogether. He seems to forget about the gate, and just plays in the sandbox with Tina, Joey and Bean. Soon Frédérique and I are chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us.

I’m shocked that Leo suddenly views me as an authority figure.

‘See that,’ Frédérique says, not gloating. ‘It was your tone of voice.’

She points out that Leo doesn’t appear to be traumatized. For the moment – and possibly for the first time ever – he actually seems like a French child. With all three kids suddenly
sage
at once, I can feel my shoulders falling a bit. It’s an experience I’ve never really had in the park before. Maybe this is what it’s like to be a French mother?

I feel relaxed, but also foolish. If it’s that easy, why haven’t I been doing this for the last four and a half years? Saying no isn’t exactly a cutting-edge parenting technique. What’s new is Frédérique’s coaching me to drop my ambivalence and to be certain about my own authority. What she tells me springs from her own upbringing and deepest beliefs. It comes out sounding like common sense.

Frédérique has the same certainty that what’s most pleasant for us parents – being able to have a relaxing chat at the park, while the kids play – is also best for the children. This seems to be true. As we’re chatting, it becomes clear that Leo is a lot less stressed than he was half an hour earlier. Instead of a constant cycle of escape and reimprisonment, he’s playing happily with the other kids.

I’m ready to bottle my new technique – the fully felt ‘no’ – and sell it off the back of a wagon. But Frédérique warns me that there’s no magic elixir for making kids respect your authority. It’s always a work in progress. ‘There are no fixed rules,’ she says. ‘You have to keep changing what you do.’

That’s unfortunate. So what else explains why French parents like Frédérique have so much authority with their kids? How exactly do they summon this authority, day
after
day, dinner after dinner? And how can I get some more of it?

A French colleague of mine says that if I’m interested in authority, I must speak to her cousin Dominique. She says that Dominique, a French singer who’s raising three kids in New York, is an unofficial expert in the differences between French and American parents.

Dominique, forty-three, looks like the heroine of a
nouvelle vague
film. She has dark hair, delicate features and an intense, gazelle-like gaze. If I were thinner, better looking and could sing, I’d say that she and I were living mirror-image lives: she’s a Parisian who’s raising her children in New York. I’m an ex-New Yorker who’s raising kids in Paris. Living in France has made me calmer and less neurotic, whereas despite Dominique’s sultry good looks she has adopted the bubbly self-analysis that comes from living in Manhattan. She speaks enthusiastic French-accented English, peppered with ‘like’ and ‘oh my God’.

Dominique arrived in New York as a 22-year-old student. She planned to study English for six months, then go home. But New York quickly became home. ‘I felt really good and stimulated and had great energy, something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time in Paris,’ she says. She married an American musician.

Beginning when she first got pregnant, Dominique was also enchanted with American parenting. ‘There’s a great sense of community that, in a way, you don’t have as much in France …
If
you like yoga and you’re pregnant, boom! You get into this group of pregnant women doing yoga.’

She also started to notice the way kids are treated. At a big dinner with her husband’s family, she was astonished to see that when a three-year-old girl arrived, all twenty adults at the table stopped talking and focused on the little girl.

‘I thought, oh, this is incredible, this culture. It’s like the kid is a god, it’s really amazing. I’m like, no wonder Americans are so confident and so happy, and the French are so depressed. Here we are – just look at the attention.’

But over time Dominique started to view this type of attention differently. She noticed that the same three-year-old girl who’d stopped conversation at that family dinner was developing an oversized sense of entitlement.

‘I was like, “That’s it, this kid really annoys me.” She’s thinking that because she’s here, everyone has to stop their life and pay attention.”’

Dominique, whose own kids are eleven, eight and two, says her doubts grew when she overheard kids at her children’s nursery responding to teachers’ instructions with: ‘You are not the boss of me.’ (‘You would never see that in France, never,’ Dominique says.) When she and her husband were invited for dinner at the homes of American friends with young kids, she often ended up doing most of the cooking, because the hosts were busy trying to make their kids stay in bed.

‘Instead of just being firm, and saying, “No more of that, I’m not giving you more attention, this is bedtime, and this is parents’ time. Now it’s my time as an adult with my friends. Go
to
bed, that’s it” – well, they don’t do that. I don’t know why they don’t do that, but they don’t do that. They can’t do it. They keep just serving the kids. And I see that and I’m just blown away.’