To really like the book "French Children Don't throw food"

[catgirl1976]

I am sure some of them do and the title is a bit (like French Women Don't Get Fat - I am sure lots do) - and I find the author annoying and think I would dislike her IRL, and I think the "French" attitude to BF is not righ......but these issues aside..........

I've just read this and I loved it. DS is 15 weeks now and I wish I had read it before he was born as I think I would have handled his sleep / waking differently.

He does sit nicely in restaurants though (smug).

It has got rid of my guilt about the fact I will be going back to work in 3 weeks and putting him in nursery and the fact that I combination feed. I love this book :)

It seems like relaxed, common sense, sensible parenting to me

Should add - that I'm more of an admirer of the a certain African model of parenting: expect total obedience. If your children don't comply then beat them.

I remember witnessing an exchange between a parent and a teacher at school over a year 1 child who had upset a girl by flicking her skirt up in the playground. The child stood there staring at his shoes. When the parent had finished apologising to the teacher she turned around and casually (but hard) whacked her son round the back of the head, nodded at the teacher and walked away.

I definitely think there's a gap in the market for book aimed at the old testament style of parenting. Because in my experience it tends to produce pretty well-behaved, hardworking and compliant children.

Just read it and I loved it! I don't think there's anything mean and smug about the author thinking: "I'm not enjoying parenting and I think I'm getting some stuff wrong", then looking at parents with happy, well behaved kids and enquiring into how they do it.

We did "The Pause" without even knowing it: when the spud was tiny and sleeping in our room, every time she whimpered in the night I would go to pick her up, but my DH would stop me and make me wait to see if she really was going to cry properly, or if she might go back to sleep. She was sleeping 10 hours a night by ten weeks. She's over a year old now and still sleeps well.

All the book is saying is don't hover over your kids, don't let them behave like brats and remember who's in charge and that it does kids no harm to know that mum and dad have a life of their own and they are not the centre of the universe.

Given the amount of resistance to this and charges of 'smuggery' I can only conclude that a sizeable minority of people on here love wearing their martyr pants pulled up tight, whinging on about how they've not slept in two years and their children love to bounce up and down on their heads every morning before going off to bite grandma.

Shit. I'm French. No one ever said .

Diamondback - I think that any book which makes sweeping generalisations about parenting styles and how they impact on things like sleep and feeding patterns, and general behaviour, without ANY reference to good quality evidence, is just pissing in the wind.

shagmund give it a rest about the evils of formula will you? I think it's great that a book tries to help with the guilt that new mums feel when breastfeeding's not working out for them. Makes a change from being judged and found wanting.

catgirl don't feel guilty about going back to work. My mum worked when I was little and I'm relatively well adjusted :)

Also Irish, agree with Cailin and Whatme about differences between UK and Irish parenting. My first baby is due in a week and a half and I can already see that any of my UK-learned ideas about baby care will be regarded with great hilarity by parents and in-laws visiting from Ireland.

Unfortunately, though I more or less brought up all my younger siblings, I suspect I'm thoroughly infected by UK middle-class parenting anxiety, so I'm getting the worst of both worlds...

not putting yourself first but putting your self SOMEWHERE in the scheme of things - putting anyone first (no matter how small) all the time just makes selfish people...

Surely this is just common sense, nothing to do with Frenchness (or not).

Not everyone in Britain is an anxious helicopter parent hanging over their PFB's every move in case it's non-educational or slightly dangerous.

I did go to DS as soon as he stirred when he was tiny, though. When he was older then I did the pause thing (because why wouldn't you??) but when they're tiny it's so much easier to just feed them back to sleep before they properly wake up.

I think the writer makes a lot of very good points but I dislike any book that generalises about an entire culture!

I appreciate many people have well mannered and beautifully-sleeping children because they are superior parents.

I however have twins, and 1 sleeps through the night, and 1 doesn't. 1 will eat anything, with a knife and fork and beautiful table manners, the other would rather skip food in order to go play, and anything i feed her is met with 'but I don't like that' even if she has eaten it every week for a year.

So it's not all parenting - some kids are just more compliant/better sleeper/better eaters/less fussy than others.

I agree with Cailin.

I'm Irish as well and find the approach to child rearing here much more pragmatic and casual than in the UK where I have to say, a lot of mothers appear very analytical and angsty and, dare I say it, precious. I've also never heard anyone in Ireland talk about controlled crying or baby fed weaning.

Mind you, I'm generalising. Obviously there are parents in Ireland who go a bit over the top.

and the good sleeper is NOT the good eater!

My chldren don't throw food either.

However they have lots of other dubious practices. I am not sure not throwing food is evidence of anything much. I may write a book.

Ach, sympathies greygirl!

Catgirl, I also found the most useful aspect of this to be the de-emphasis on feeling guilt over how you parent.

Someone asked earlier, do all French people parent the same way? No, of course not, but I do think there is a general lack of guilt about parenting choices, whatever those are.

I find it a much healthier attitude than what you find in some quarters of the UK and US, where formula is poison, leaving your baby in her first year is Bad Mothering, if you spoon-feed your baby you're condemning her to a lifetime of... gosh, I don't even know.

I mean, look at some of the threads on here, you have mothers in tears because their baby is still on a cup at 12 months. Why do we torture ourselves???

French parenting tendencies may horrify some people, but can you point to the French as a nation and say they have had such disastrous consequences? Are the French more stupid? Fatter? Sickly? Or any of the other things that are thought to come from formula, purees and working mums?

Hope your return to work is going okay catgirl

'The Pause'?

Jeez

I've not read the book, Catgirl. But I agree with others that once your dc are older many of these smug-sounding best practices go hurtling out the window.

I was never going to let my dc watch telly unless it was educational - HA HA HA

Or eat 'kids menu' crap - HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Or let them interrupt mine and dh's precious evenings - HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!

Me too proud.

Ooh if you could see the list of things My Children Are Never Going to Do you'd realise what an amazingly principled and strict parent I was going to be. Until I had some children that is....

Ooh if you could see the list of things My Children Are Never Going to Do

One could write a book :)

I haven't read the book, but from what I have read that it says, I agree with you catgirl.

Although I do agree with how some parents parent their dcs in UK, I do personally think a lot of parents aren't strict enough. My kids are usually fine in restaurants and I think thats because we ate round a table at home and had strict table manners. And my brothers and sisters dcs are the same.

Some parents do seem to be afraid to tell their kids off or for their kids to experience any discomfort.

I don't think I shall be reading it as for me it would only serve to add to my worries about how I could do it better/differently.

I think guilt is an important emotion, it makes you question things and prohibits arrogance as a result but then I was brought up as a Methodist and guilt featured quite heavily!

What about if you like flash cards and playing educational games with them? There's nothing I like more than a game of Alphabet bingo and Bus Stop. My DS loves these games to. However, he is 4 so he is encouraged by school to learn outside of the classroom. I have an 11 month old and equally like doing puzzles with her, shape sorters etc. I think it's fine if you both enjoy it, I don't see it as child centric because I love it to. In fact in real life I'd not let on to friends as they would assume that you were some sado, child centric idiot that was not cool having lost your identity!

I read the abridged version that was published in The Times it appears I am a 'French Parent' not always through choice sometimes through circumstance. But this was the way I was brought up and I have merely taken what I felt were the best bits of my up bringing and changed the bits I didn't like.

I am lucky at 8 my DD now sits well when eating out and loves steak tartare. I think am lucky I parented by the seat of my pants and in some ways it is working. At night when DD is tired and doesn't want to wash, go to bed or in fact do anything and screams at me that I am the worst parent in the world I think it is probably not working.

.....and they'd be right - 'love it'??

Referencing my own post.

The Pause , anyone with more than 1 DC will have already mastered it, without realising.

The way I look at it, children aren't a different species who require specialised living - they respond in exactly the same way to the world as adults do, it's just that they way they express that response is different. If you're generally a nice, kind, caring person then there should be no guilt in bringing up children. Everything you do will be done out of consideration for them and their future. You might get it wrong from time to time but that's nothing to feel guilty about, you were just doing your best, and as long you recognise you were wrong and change things then there's no harm done.

The sad thing about over-analytical parenting is that it often prevents the parent from really enjoying their children. They're so busy thinking about what to do for the best, and planning for the next thing that the child grows up without them realising and they've missed out on just rolling around on the carpet with them, splashing in puddles and just generally breathing them in and enjoying how little and gorgeous they are.

I did The Pause out of sheer laziness. I always hoped she would go back to sleep, but she rarely did. DD didn't SLTN until she was 18 months old.