The French

Yes, yes, I'm still obsessed with the French approach to child rearing and eating in particular. Since reading "Bringing up Bebe," I've dabbled happily into "French Women Don't Get Fat," and "French Kids Eat Everything" as well as "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," which is a novel set in a French apartment building.

The French approach appeals to me by combining two remarkable things. First they eat for the pure enjoyment of food and socializing with an eye for quality. Second they have a lot of unspoken cultural rules about eating. I love rules! Give me a good rule and I'm determined to follow it.





The "non-diet book" claiming that French women eat for pleasure without gaining weight was not very scientific, but very interesting. These women seem to have an internal points system like Weight Watchers. They know when they have indulged and so for the rest of the day they eat lightly. They don't feel guilty for eating their favorites, they just eat them in small amounts and not all of the time. Makes sense to me to be making small "compensations" throughout the week.

In contrast, Dan and I have been doing the P90X video series and about halfway through it now, I'm totally bored of working out at a strenuous level for over an hour 6 days a week. You do get relatively fast results, but it doesn't feel sustainable or a realistic way to live. When I think, "do I want to spend almost 1/2 of my free evening time doing a workout?" the long term answer is "no." For me this is a temporary fad. Dan seems to be enjoying it more than me, so maybe he'll keep it up.


I have also been implementing many strategies from "French Kids Eat Everything." If I'm not very intentional, Jack slips into the milk and crackers diet and it is very hard to convince to eat anything at all. It scared me that even Cosette, who is a good eater, was falling into these bad habits of rejecting what she is served and waiting for cereal to come out at dinner time to chow down. That was a real wake up call that I wasn't taking the time and effort to plan their diet and teach them how to enjoy a variety of foods. When I got intentional about teaching Jack to eat, the results were surprisingly good. In the last week since I have again recommitted myself to training him to eat well, he's tried and even eaten many new foods. It helps that we've all been sitting down at the table together longer and I've been teaching him about what we're eating, letting him help prepare it sometimes, and helping him try it. Also, I can't give him the options to snack, fill up on milk, or have an alternative food if he doesn't like what we're having. Americans value choices and price while the French value equality (read uniformity) and quality.


I think the 10 French Food Rules are a great summary of the approach. I'm up to #4 in the book and am excited to learn more about #5-10.

1. Parents are in charge of children's food education <---i br="" didn="" even="" kids="" know="" my="" needed="" t="" this="">
2. Avoid emotional eating (bribes, rewards, etc.)
3. Parents schedule meals and menus (kids eat what adults eat, no short order cooking)
4. Eat family meals together (free from distractions)
5. Eat your veggies (think variety)
6. Say at every meal "You don't have to like it, but you do have to taste it" (it takes an average of 15 tastes of a food for someone to start to like it)
7. No snacking (it's ok to be hungry between meals)
8.  Slow food is happy food (eat slowly)
9.  Eat mostly real food (treats are ok for special occations)
10. Relax - eating is joyful!

The idea is not to force healthy things down their throats, but to teach them to enjoy healthy foods. I love that! There is a lot of work to get there, but potty training was a lot of work and well worth the effort now. Living in the US, it's not obvious that children need food education. The French treat education of food and good taste like we treat teaching kids to read - nonnegotiable. I'm learning so much about how to feed our family. I feel very luck to have the time and resources to be able to ponder these questions and make changes.