French Children Don't Throw Food

I read this book and identified with a lot of it, it was (mostly) how I bought my children up and my daughter was a Nou Nou in Paris and it was how she looked after 5 children under 7.

My colleague and I (childminders) take 8 children 3 and under, out to lunch every week, not fast food chain, proper sit down restaurants, Japanese, Italian, Vietnamese, they sit beautifully, eat with cutlery, enjoy everything that is out in front them and make no mess. They do not run around, shrieking, get up and down from the table, no need for crayons, gadgets etc to amuse them whilst waiting for their food.

We have conversation,make observations and discuss things they have seen or done, they are a pleasure to take aout and we really enjoy it, many people comment on their "good" behaviour, I don't think they are being"good" they are being normal, how children should behave.

We have however, see the same children out with their parents and the contrast is a sight to believe, food half eaten, discarded, mess, running around making a noise, a shocking sight!

It is all about expectation, I have set the boundaries and expectations from when they join me at 8-12 months. The children serve each other, lay the table, have napkins to use, and see eating as a social occasion not a necessary routine just to eat for fuels sake!

A problem I see is that today a lot of parents themselves do not know how to hold a knife and fork, and never eat at the table. My family have never eaten in front of the television, ever, nor will we, even when my DH is away, I use the dining room.

I see appalling table manners from adults who have no idea that they portray quite a disgusting sight when they eat!

Sounds like you are doing a great job with your DSs. You sound very confident that you are doing the right things, which is probably more than half way there to getting the DCs to do what you think they ought to be doing (like sleeping and eating at the right time).

You do have my sympahies with trying to get over the grazing (which is not so bad in itself if what is grazed is healthy!)

On the sleeping, I do recall a neighbour - he was French and she was English. The nanny - with whom I was quite close as I was a SAHM at the time when DS1 was very small - explaining how she had been instructed to let the baby cry itself to sleep. Apparently, it took close to two hours on one occasion. I don't think I could have done that.

The rushing back to work is a legal thing. French employees have great worker rights, and it is much harder to fire someone than it is in the US. Maternity leave has been negotiated to be 16 weeks. If they take longer, I think they loose certain rights, including the right to come back to work.

One of mine was a grazer, who at one stage ate exactly two things (could have been the original model for the Teletubbies diet, or so I thought).

If your eldest is four, it is not too late to develop new food habits, if you would like to. I found this book useful in developing a family approach to food that now has my teenagers eating vegetables:

The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food by Joanna Blythman.

Hope that helps on the food! I don't know much about the sleeping.

I can offer a few insights on the eating thing. Firstly, French people have a different attitude to food compared with the Anglo-attitude. They don?t expect food to be either cheap or fast or plentiful. They do expect it to be delicious; and quantities may be tiny, particularly of high-fat stuff. People would be willing to drive quite a way to go to a really good restaurant, which wouldn?t be cheap.

Next, they project these expectations onto their children. Their approach is something along the lines that if you give hungry children good food they will eat it. So the DCs are exposed to high-quality, adult food from an early age. I guess the DCs develop a taste for whatever happens to be available, in the same way that Indian children develop a taste for spicy food.

The French attitude and expectation is that the children fit in. When it comes to meals, they are expected to sit at the table with the adults and to eat the food that is available. My children were exposed to this at the crèche, where there were fixed snack and meal times, and everyone ate the same thing. There were no choices to be made, and I didn?t have to make packed lunches. There was an expectation that every child would at least taste a bit of everything.

In primary school and even into secondary school, lunches typically consist of a set menu. There would generally be four items, which together comprise starter, main course and desert, as well as correctly balanced between the food groups. So the menu could be salad, fish, potatoes, chocolate mousse. Or fruit juice, chicken risotto, green beans, yoghurt. There are no difficult choices to make, such as ?Shall I have chips or pasta?. During primary school, ?frites? formed part of the menu roughly once in three weeks. They experiment with different meats ? I recall seeing venison on the menu at least once during the Autumn term.

That continued for one of my children all through primary school up to age 12. I am very happy that he now eats everything including vegetables, loves salad. He expects food to be tasty, and sometimes orders mussels when we go to a restaurant.

We have had cultural clashes along the way. One day, DS age 6 was home and the others were away. I announced that he and I would be having a sandwich for lunch. ?No, mummy?, he expressed with surprise. ?Lunch isn?t sandwich. Lunch is meat and carrots and something else?.

I haven't yet read the book, but have just looked at the preview and a couple of articles. I live in France, so I have seen quite a lot of what she talks about first-hand. I'd be happy to discuss it. What do you think of?