What is going on with British kids?

[FrenchAreDoingSomethingRight]

On holiday in France. An upmarket holiday camp and we are the only British family here. It was recommended by a French friend and I didn't realise it only has French families on holiday

Dinner is set 3 course dinner. My kids are 5 and 3. My older boy has ADHD we think (referred by school), our younger one doesn't as far as we know. Both kids are trying their hardest at dinner. There is v loud music playing and the pool party bit is still open. They run off after every course for a dance. Older one tries to stand up sometimes. We have colouring in books etc. Really they're fine. At restaurants and pubs they are totally average in terms of being able to sit at the table. No screens.

Not a single French kid has done anything wrong. No screens or even colouring. They might not all be talking to their parents but every single one is sitting through the whole 90 min dinner and waiting to dance at the end. So patient.

Do no French kids have ADHD or ND? Or even just kid like and cheeky? I have always tried my best with dinner times but these kids aren't even considering running off.

What is going on???

yes, I agree that the French teenagers can be pretty awful. However so can their parents come to think of it.

I work in St Helier and every day we get a boat load of French tourists wandering around the town.

They are the most self unaware of any people I have ever come across, just no concept that there may be other people around when they stop en masse in the middle of the high street

You can all speak for yourselves but my British kids can sit through a meal no problem.

@FrenchAreDoingSomethingRight also you do realise that the French are generally nuts dont you? I wouldn't be looking to them for guidance tbh

I don’t think it’s anything to do with the kids, British or not, it’s the parents.

Your foreign students are probably shocked that they have to eat dinner on their lap with the tv blaring !

My kids could sit in a restaurant and chat as a family from an early age, my grandchildren can do the same. It’s what has always been expected of them.

I was an au pair in France, years back and can confirm that the kids I had to look after behaved APPALLINGLY at mealtimes for the most part, would not stay at the table, would not eat a lot of the food and had no table manners.

That said, I don't think most French children behaved like this.

any wonder the adults riot at every given opportunity given the stifled childhoods they no doubt had.

Please please don't look to the French as some paragon of all the Brits are doing wrong

Some of the posts are hilarious.

My poor children, terrified by good manners and... good food. This last point hasn't been mentioned yet. French kids like to go to restaurants, they are not dragged there by their parents and threatened of punishment if they move or talk. They love going to restaurants because they will get to pick a dish they like and look forward to savour it.

You will never see in a French cafe a group of mums and toddlers leaving a disgusting mess behind like they go in Australia where I currently live. I used to go to cafe with my 18 months old. We would select a nice patisserie from the display and each of us, would sit properly and enjoy eating it with knife and fork. Does this make me a dragon ?

We do not eat on the move. Or whilst we walk, in the car, in front of tv. You eat with a plate and a chair under your bottom.

Sadly, not just children.

It's mostly down to parenting styles combined with the child's natural temperament. My DC (8 and 11) are perfectly capable of sitting nicely through a long dinner without having to keep getting up and we never have screens at the table. However I do interact with them on their level - we might play cards or pen and paper games together and we have conversations about things that interest them.

@BeardyButton I probably didn’t articulate this very well at all. I meant by this that they are treated with the same respect as the adults, i.e. according to the book, French parents wouldn’t say ‘no! Don’t do that!’ instead they would calmly say, ‘we don’t do that’, the we is to ensure that the children are treated on the same level as the parent and that the discipline feels more fair. This difference in language has helped me stay on my children’s level during many a meltdown and shown them that I’m on their side. I also meant this, in that French children eat three course meals from nursery upwards, as culturally meal times will always be an important part of their lives so they start very young. My children attend Montessori and Steiner educational settings, and personally I believe that child led play and learning is the best approach to growing up. I would say that Montessori is focussed on adults in the making as they encourage independence and curiosity too, so maybe it’s my turn of phrase not being quite right! Am sleep deprived with newborn! I found that the books lends itself well to this and that’s why it’s been helpful for me personally, but not everyone’s cup of tea as with anything parenting related.

There is a book about this - it's called 'French children don't throw food'

Yes, this is my experience of living in various countries.

If anyone mentions that bloody book again without RTFT I'm going to throw some food

Expectations on kids are different, family meal times are different and kids are not allowed to leave the table. French kids have what is called 'cadre' or structure. Kids in the UK largely do not. There they actually talk to their kids and take an interest in their life and day at mealtimes not just give them an ipad as a babysitter. They eat as a family, in the UK even sitting at a table it is often not as a family, they are just individuals eating and ignoring each other.

Also ADHD is treated differently there than here. They first look at diet and that has a huge impact. They look at the cause of the ADHD and not just give them pills. They look at dealing with the issues causing the behaviour - diet, exercise, gaming, allergens, social and emotional issues.

I very much agree

My 3yr old can manage reasonably, but we eat out regularly, we’ve communicated expectations from the start. I think she behaves because she likes eating out, orders her own food etc. She’s not terrified of us, we don’t smack her, she’s actually half feral tbh. It does mean we basically have to focus conversation on her to keep her attention, never used colouring or screens (tbh I think colouring is fine, they can still talk to you and listen to you but it keeps their little hands busy).

We also have a ritual for dinner which is going around the table to ask about everyones day and if we’ve been together all day we ask about the best bit of the day. Just to get Dd used to the idea of talking around the dinner table.

It's because they are children that parents need to parent. That is to say, demonstrate consistent, civilised behaviours that show respect to the child and others.
Screaming at a child to be quiet, or telling a child to be civil to others while hurling abuse at a passing motorist or fellow shopper doesn't do this. Calmly explaining why we observe certain rituals does.
It's nearly thirty years since I had DC, but if I'm stood at the kerb next to a parent with a small child, I will patiently wait for the 'green man' to avoid a harassed parent being told "well they didn't wait, why should I".
It's called being part of a society and it's impact can be seen around the globe by how countries with more homogenous populations and shared standards dealt with Covid. I also suspect that it's a leading cause of the reduction in social mobility as children (from all kinds of economic backgrounds) fail to respectfully communicate with others.

What part of Spain do you live in? I'm a teacher in Spain and the behaviour is much worse than when I taught in England. When my daughter started school in Spain her teachers even commented on how well behaved English children must be as she was so polite compared to the majority of her class.

30 years of living in France and I have never witnessed this negative attitude. Maybe it’s a regional thing, but where I live there is huge support for people with disabilities on every level. Never seen staring, never heard of a child being “hidden away” Nor ever had a child be rude to me. A fair few waiters, peelers, drivers and shop assistants though… 😂

Everyone mentioning the book “French kids don’t throw food”- there’s been a lot of discussion on it previously in this thread & turns out it was written by an American journalist and isn’t based on anything much atall!

As I posted i thread though, this book completely ignores the dark side of French parenting.

the hitting, the shouting, the shaming (allfrom the parents).

it’s standard there, it’s parenting through fear.

i have French family and spend a lot of time there. Their parenting attitudes are at least a generation, maybe two, behind here.

parenting concepts now pretty mainstream here - to model calmness and control as a parent, to support your children to appropriately express and then understand their emotions, as the route to supporting healthy development, are barely known there.

The cause is ADHD is primarily genetic and probably due to neurological dysfunction of the processes around the use of dopamine and noradrenaline.

It is not really anything to do with diet, exercise, gaming or allergens.

There is no evidence that diet has any causal input into ADHD - some people may find avoiding/taking certain foods may help them but despite vast amounts of research, results are mainly inconclusive.

They don't hand out meds like smarties here either - but I know first hand how dramatic the results can be.

Almost everyone I know has an autistic kid these days… makes you wonder if screens over stimulate the brain and cause these issues