French Kids Don’t Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman

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.