Title:
French Kids Don’t Throw Food
Author:
Pamela Druckerman
How do
the French manage to raise well-behaved children, and have a life?
This
is the secret Pamela Druckerman will reveal in her book French Kids Don’t Throw Food.
A New
Yorker married to an English husband, and raising kids in Paris, Druckerman
discovered that French mothers do things differently and often better.
When
Druckerman was in Paris, both she and her husband went through hell when dining
in the restaurant with their little baby. All they wished was to quickly finish
their meal and leave. What caught their attention was that French parents with
little kids do not go through the same situation.
Here were
what they seen in France.
At the
restaurant:
“The
French children all around us don’t look cowed. They’re cheerful, chatty and
curious. Their parents are affectionate and attentive. There just seems to be
an invisible, civilizing force at their tables – and, I’m starting to suspect,
in their lives – that’s absent from ours.”
At the
playground:
“I’ve
never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum.”
At
home:
“Why
don’t my French friends need to end a phone call hurriedly because their kids
are demanding something? Why haven’t their living rooms been taken over by
teepes and toy kitchens, the way ours has?”
“Why
so many French babies start sleeping through the night at two or three months
old?”
“Why
French kids don’t require constant attention from adults, and that they seem
capable of hearing the word ‘no’ without collapsing?”
Druckerman
found that French parents are very concerned about their children but not to
the point of panicking over their children’s well-being. This makes them better
at establishing boundaries and at the same time giving their kids some
autonomy.
In her
book, Druckerman reveals more stories on what she has discovered in parenting à la francaise.