Bringing Up Bebe (24 page)

Of course, one of the benefits of having some
cadre
in your home is that you can go outside of the
cadre
without worrying that it will collapse. Denise tells me that once a week she lets her two girls—who are seven and nine—have dinner in front of the television.

On weekends and during those ubiquitous school holidays, French parents are more relaxed about what time their kids eat and go to bed. They trust the
cadre
to be there when they need it again. Magazines run articles about easing your kids back onto an earlier schedule, once you get back from vacation. When we’re on holiday with Hélène and William, I panic a bit when it’s one thirty and William still hasn’t gotten home with some of the ingredients for our lunch.

But Hélène figures that the kids can adapt. They are people, after all, who like us are capable of coping with a bit of frustration. She breaks open a bag of potato chips, and the six kids all gather at the kitchen table to eat them. Then they pile outside to play again until lunch is ready. It’s no big deal. We all cope. A little while later we all have a long, lovely meal at the table that we’ve set up under a tree.

If overparenting
was an airline, Park Slope, Brooklyn, would be its hub. Every parenting trend and new product seems to originate or refuel there. Park Slope is home to “New York’s first baby wearing and breast-feeding boutique,” and to a fifteen-thousand-dollar-per-year preschool where teachers “actively discourage and stop superhero play.” If you live in Park Slope, Baby Bodyguards will kid-proof your duplex for six hundred dollars. (The company’s founder explains that “once I gave birth and my son became part of the external world, my fear and anxiety kicked in.”)

Despite Park Slope’s reputation fo reickr zealous parenting, I’m unprepared for what I witness in a playground there on a sunny Sunday morning. At first, the father and son I spot just seem to be doing a particularly energetic version of narrated play. The boy looks about six. The father—in expensive jeans and a stylish weekend stubble—has followed him to the top of the jungle gym. In a bilingual twist, he’s giving the boy a running commentary in both English and what sounds like American-accented German.

The son seems used to his father heading down the slide behind him. When they move to the swings, the father continues his bilingual soliloquy, while pushing. This is all still within the bounds of what I’ve seen elsewhere. But then the mother arrives. She’s a rail-thin brunette in her own pair of expensive jeans, carrying a bag of produce from the farmer’s market next door.

“Here’s your parsley snack! Do you want your parsley snack?” she says to the boy, handing him a green sprig.

Parsley? A snack? I think I understand the intention: These parents don’t want their son to be fat. They want him to have a varied palate. They see themselves as original thinkers who can provide him with unusual experiences, German and parsley surely being just a small sampling. And I grant them that parsley doesn’t run the risk of ruining their son’s—or frankly anyone’s—appetite.

But there’s a reason why parsley has never caught on as a snack. It’s a seasoning. It doesn’t taste good all by itself. I get the feeling that these parents are trying to remove their son from the collective wisdom of our species and the basic chemistry of what tastes good. I can only imagine the effort this requires. What happens when he discovers cookies?

When I mention the “parsley snack” incident to American parents, they’re not surprised. They concede that parsley isn’t a snack. But they admire the effort. At that impressionable age, why not try? In the hothouse environment of Park Slope, some parents have gone beyond the American Question: How do we speed up the stages of development? They’re now asking how they can override basic sensory experiences.

I realize I’m guilty of this, too, when I take Bean to her first Halloween party, when she’s about two. The French don’t widely celebrate the holiday. (I go to one adult Halloween party where all the women are dressed as sexy witches and most of the men are Draculas.) So each year a group of Anglophone mothers in Paris takes over the top floor of a Starbucks near the Bastille and sets up little trick-or-treat stations around the room.

As soon as Bean grasps the concept—all these people are
giving her candy
—she begins to eat it. She doesn’t just eat a few pieces; she tries to eat all the candy in her bag. She sits in a corner of the room stuffing pink, yellow, and green gooey masses into her mouth. I have to intervene to slow her down.

It occurs to me then that I’ve taken the wrong approach to sweets. Before this Halloween, Bean had barely ever eaten refined sugar. To my knowledge, she hadn’t had a single gummy bear. Like the parsley parents, I’d tried to pretend that such things didn’t exist.

< wi

But sugar does exist. And French parents know it. They don’t try to eliminate all sweets from their children’s diets. Rather, they fit sweets inside the
cadre
. For a French kid, candy has its place. It’s a regular-enough part of their lives that they don’t gorge on it like freed prisoners the moment they get their hands on it. Mostly, children seem to eat it at birthday parties, school events, and as the occasional treat. At these occasions, they’re usually free to eat all they want. When I try to limit the boys’ intake of candy and chocolate cake at the crèche’s Christmas party, one of their caregivers intervenes. She tells me I should just let them enjoy the party and be free. I think of my skinny friend Virginie, who pays strict attention to what she eats on weekdays, then eats whatever she wants on weekends. Kids, too, need moments when the regular rules don’t apply.

But parents decide when these moments are. When I drop Bean off at a birthday party for Abigail, a little girl in our building, she’s the first guest to arrive. (We haven’t yet figured out that you’re not supposed to be punctual for kids’ birthdays.) Abigail’s mom has just set out plates of cookies and candy on a table. Abigail asks her mom if she can have some of the candy. Her mom says “
non
,” and explains that it isn’t yet time to eat it. In what seems to me like a minor miracle, Abigail looks longingly at the candy, then runs off with Bean to play in another room.

Chocolate has a more regular place in the lives of French kids. Middle-class French parents talk about chocolate as if it’s just another food group, albeit one to eat in moderation. When Fanny describes what Lucie eats in a typical day, the menu includes a bit of cookies or cake. “And obviously she’ll want chocolate in there somewhere,” Fanny says.

Hélène gives her kids hot chocolate when it’s cold outside. She serves it for breakfast, along with a hunk of baguette, or makes it their afternoon
goûter
, along with some cookies. My kids love reading books about T’choupi
,
a French children’s-book character modeled on a penguin. When he’s sick, his mom lets him stay home and drink hot chocolate. I take my kids to see a performance of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
at a theater near our house. The bears don’t eat oatmeal; they eat
bouillie au chocolat
(hot chocolate thickened with flour).

“It’s a compensation for going to school, and I guess it gives them some energy,” explains Denise, the medical ethicist. She shuns McDonald’s and makes her daughters’ dinner from scratch each night. But she gives each girl a bar of chocolate for breakfast, along with some bread and a bit of fruit.

French kids don’ch sot get a huge amount of chocolate; it’s a small bar, or a drink’s worth, or a strip on a
pain au chocolat
. They eat it happily and don’t expect a second helping. But chocolate is a nutritional fixture for them, rather than a forbidden treat. Bean once comes home from the summer camp at her school with a chocolate sandwich: a baguette with a bar of chocolate inside. I’m so surprised I take a picture of it. (I later learn that the chocolate sandwich—usually made with dark chocolate—is a classic French
goûter.
)

With sweets, too, the
cadre
is key. French parents aren’t afraid of sugary foods. In general, they will serve cake or cookies at lunch or at the
goûter
. But they don’t give kids chocolate or rich desserts with dinner. “What you eat in the evening just stays with you for years,” Fanny explains.

After dinner, Fanny typically serves fresh fruit or a fruit compote—those ubiquitous little tubs of applesauce with other pureed fruits mixed in. (These come with or without added sugar.) There’s a
compotes
section in French supermarkets. Fanny says she also buys all different types of plain yogurt and then gets jams for Lucie to mix in.

As in most realms, French parents aim at mealtimes to give kids both firm boundaries and freedom within those boundaries. “It’s things like sitting at the table and tasting everything,” Fanny explains. “I’m not forcing her to finish, just to taste everything and sit with us.”

I’m not sure
exactly when I started serving my kids meals in courses. But I now do it at every meal. It’s a stroke of French genius. This starts with breakfast. When the kids sit down, I put plates of cut-up fruit on the table. They nibble on this while I’m getting their toast or cereal ready. They can have juice at breakfast, but they know that for lunch and dinner we drink water. Even the union organizer doesn’t complain about that. We talk about how clean water makes us feel.

At lunch and dinner I serve vegetables first, when the kids are hungriest. We don’t move on to the main course until they at least make a dent in the starter. Usually they finish it. Except when I introduce an entirely new dish, I rarely have to resort to the tasting rule. If Leo won’t eat a food the first time I serve it, he’ll usually agree to at least smell it, and he’ll take a nibble soon after that.

Bean sometimes exploits the letter of the rule by eating a single piece of zucchini and then insisting that she has fulfilled her obligation. She recently declared that she will taste everything “except salad,” by which she means the actual green lettuce leaves. But for the most part, she quite likes the starters we serve. These include sliced avocado, tomato in a vinaigrette, or steamed broccoli with a bit of soy sauce. We all have a good chuckle when I serve
carottes rapées
—shredded carrots in a vinaigrette—and try to pronounce it.

My kids come to the table hungry because, except for the
goûter
, they don’t snack. It helps that other kids around them aren’t snacking either. But even so, getting to this point required a steely will. I simply don’t cave in to demands for a filling piece of bread or a whole banana between meals. And as the kids have gotten older, they’ve mostly stopped askly 2em">
Goûter.
”

I try not to be too fanatical about this (or as Simon describes it, “more French than the French”). When I’m cooking I occasionally give the kids a little preview of dinner—a piece of tomato or a few chickpeas. When I’m introducing a new ingredient, like pine nuts, I’ll offer them a few bites of it while I’m cooking, to get them in the mood. I might even give them a sprig of parsley (though I wouldn’t call it a snack). Obviously they drink water whenever they want.

Sometimes keeping my kids in the food
cadre
feels like a lot of work. Especially when Simon travels, I’m often tempted to skip the starter, plop a bowl of pasta in front of them, and call it dinner. When I occasionally do this, they’re quite happy to gobble it down. There’s certainly no clamoring for salad and vegetables.

But the kids don’t have a choice. Like a French mom, I’ve accepted that it’s my duty to teach them to like a variety of tastes and to eat meals that are
équilibrés.
Also like a French mom, I try to keep the whole day’s menu balanced in my head. We mostly stick to the French formula of having large, protein-heavy lunches and lighter, carbohydrate-driven dinners with vegetables. The kids do eat a lot of pasta, though I try to vary the shape and the sauce. Whenever I have time, I make a big pot of soup for dinner (though I can’t bring myself to puree it) and serve it with rice or bread.

It’s no surprise that the kids find the food more appetizing when it’s made with fresh ingredients and it looks good. I consider the balance of colors on their plates and occasionally slip in some slices of tomato or avocado if dinner looks monotone. We have a collection of colorful melamine plates. But for dinner I use white, which makes the colors of the food pop and signals to the kids that we’re having a grown-up meal.

I try to let them help themselves as much as possible. Beginning when the boys were quite young, I passed around a bowl of grated Parmesan on pasta nights and let them sprinkle it on all by themselves. They get to put a spoonful of sugar in their hot chocolates and occasionally in their yogurts. Bean frequently asks for a slice of Camembert, or a hunk of whatever cheese we’ve got, at the end of the meal. Except for special occasions, we don’t do cake or ice cream at night. I still won’t serve them chocolate sandwiches.

It’s taken a while to make all this second nature. It helps that the boys in particular really like to eat. One of their teachers at the crèche calls them gourmands, which is a polite way of saying that they eat a lot. She says their favorite word is
encore
(more). They’ve developed the annoying habit, possibly learned at the crèche, of holding up their plates at the end of the meal to show that they’ve finished. Whatever sauce or liquid is left spills onto the table. (I think at the crèche
they’ve already mopped up the liquid with slices of baguette.)