French Kids Eat Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

France, I was standing in the checkout line at our local grocery store. I had just given my daughter a cookie, complimenting her on how well behaved she had been in the store. “But you’ll spoil her appetite!” the cashier declared loudly.
    Trapped in the line, with the evidence of my food crime visible on my daughter’s crumb-smeared face, I cringed. Whereas I had seen my daughter behaving well, everyone else had seen me behaving badly. “Rewarding your daughter with food is a recipe for obesity,” said an equally stern-faced mother. Nods of agreement came from the other equally stern-faced mothers in the line. I ran to the car, fumed all the way home, and threw all of my daughter’s mini-snack food containers in the garbage. (Well, except for the one in my purse, in case of a real emergency.) But, later that night, I fished them out. What would I do without them the next time?
    The “Supermarket Incident” (as I labeled it), provoked some serious reflection on my part. From the French point of view, I was committing many food faux pas. I summed these up with a second food rule:
    French Food Rule #2:
    Avoid emotional eating .
    Food is not a pacifier, a distraction, a toy, a bribe, a reward, or a substitute for discipline .
    For the French, this rule is so obvious that it is never even spoken aloud. But for me, this rule was incomprehensible, at least at first. To accept it, I had to abandon the belief (widespread in North America) that it is normal to use food for purposes entirely unrelated to hunger or nutrition.
    Food is a pacifier: we give kids something to eat when they’re impatient, when they’re tired, when they’re whining, when we need just a few more minutes on the phone. This is a slippery slope. Kids (my own included) soon learn that whining works. For busy or distracted parents, this can result in an almost Pavlovian reaction: Kid Whines = Food, Fast. This often happens when we’re on the run, or running late. But the danger is that it sets up a cycle in which snack food makes up the bulk of what kids eat, leaving them with little appetite for the more nutritious foods served at mealtimes.
    For many parents, food is also a welcome distraction: we open the cupboards and look for something to eat when the kids are at a loose ends, or when they’re bored, whether or not they’re hungry. “Why don’t we make some cookies?” I’d say to my daughters. “Or a cake?” At one level, this seems harmless. It can even be educational: teaching volume with measuring cups or learning manual dexterity with chopsticks. But the French feel that random snacking—even dressed up as math lessons—encourages a habit of impulsive eating that is hard to break later on. They love to invite children into the kitchen to cook (and even organize special cooking camps for them), but they make sure to organize this around scheduled mealtimes.
    Food, in North America, is also sometimes used as a substitute for discipline. Parents withhold food as a punishment, and use the threat of withholding food to enforce good behavior: “Stop teasing your sister or you’ll go to bed without supper!” Conversely, food is a bribe. “Do this and you’ll get some ice cream!” Worst of all, food is a reward. One of Sophie’s preschool teachers used to reward the children with candy for good behavior. French parents, as a rule, don’t punish (or reward) with food, believing that this imbues food with emotional baggage—and that their children will, later on, attempt to deal with (or bury) their emotions through eating. This, in their view (which is supported by US and French research), has many negative consequences—not the least of which is disrupting children’s ability to regulate their eating habits, increasing the risk of eating disorders.
    Perhaps the deepest difference of all between North American and French parents