Children

French Children Don't Throw Food

Sitting in Nero’s Caffe and noticed a french couple with their two young children. All well dressed and from the outside, a happy, loving family. While pondering their virtues, the quiet was shattered by a mother shouting at her child, who screamed back with something about wanting chocolate and then proceeded to throw her sandwich and cool drink onto the floor. 

I looked back at the first couple and the children who were all eating their food quietly and they looked happy doing it. I asked myself the question, why do these french children seem so well behaved and the normal English child a nightmare. A nightmare, not only for their parents, but the rest of those, unfortunate enough to be in the same coffee shop.

After all the screaming and tantrums, I decided that Nero’s had lost its appeal and went home. I did some research and found this book which describes almost the exact situation I have just described. This is a short extract from the book called ‘French Children do not throw Food’. 

This extract starts with this couple on holiday in Paris, they had been through a few nightmare meals with their eighteen month old daughter, Bean, who would not eat her food, would not sit in her high chair, shouted and cried and pushed her food off the table.

After a few more restaurant meals, I notice that the French families all around us don't look like they're in hell. Weirdly, they look like they're on holiday. French children the same age as Bean are sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food or eating fish and even vegetables. There's no shrieking or whining. Everyone is having one course at a time. And there's no debris around their tables. 

Though I've lived in France for a few years, I can't explain this. In Paris, kids don't eat in restaurants much. Anyway, I haven't been watching them. Before I had a child, I never paid attention to anyone else's. In our current misery, however, I can't help but notice that there seems to be another way. But what exactly is it? Are French kids just genetically calmer than ours? Have they been bribed (or threatened) into submission? Are they on the receiving end of an old-fashioned seen-but-not-heard parenting philosophy? 

It doesn't seem like it. 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, civilising force at their tables - and, I'm starting to suspect, in their lives - that's absent from ours. 

Once I start thinking about French parenting, I realise it's not just mealtimes that are different. I suddenly have lots of questions. Why is it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I've clocked at French playgrounds, I've never seen a child ( except my own) throw a temper tantrum? 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 teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours has? 

No one is making a fuss about all this. But quietly and en masse, French parents are achieving outcomes that create a whole different atmosphere for family life. When British or American families visit our home, the parents usually spend much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. There are always a few rounds of crying and consoling. When French friends visit, however, we grown-ups have coffee, and the children play happily by themselves. 

Maybe I am getting too old to have a reasonable opinion on how to bring up children but someone once wrote.

The pleasures of the table belong to all ages, all conditions and all countries, and to each and every day. 

So Parents, you are in charge of your children’s education, that includes food and behaviour.