• Don’t force children to finish everything on their plates. Serve smaller portions and allow them to ask for more if they want. Children who retain a sense of control over eating are healthier eaters as adults.
French Food Rule #4:
Food is social.
Eat family meals together at the table, with no distractions.
The French believe that eating is innately social. The family meal is a daily ritual that cements the bonds of French families. Now, the fact that food is social doesn’t only mean that you need to eat together. It also means interacting, learning, and sharing ideas. Family meals are moments during which French children learn about the world (through hearing the stories their parents tell) and where they learn important social skills (how to argue without offending someone, how to ask good questions, how to wait your turn to speak). This is why conversation is so important at French meals.
Eating together also means that food choices are not solely a matter of individual preference. Specifically, parents expect that children will learn to be comfortable with eating a variety of foods. This is crucial, French parents believe, for instilling a healthy relationship with food in young children (starting with babies). Expressing individual food preferences is bad manners in France. So, from an early age, French children sit down with their parents to eat, and everyone eats the same thing, which has an important effect on kids’ tastes. This is partly true because most French adults tend to eat healthy meals, with “real” (rather than processed) food. It is also true because children are more likely to try a new food if an adult tries it first.
Now, eating together doesn’t mean eating anything together. If we want children to learn to like and eat healthy foods, they need repeated, positive, and early experiences with those foods, as well as lots of chances to watch others consuming those foods. Kids do as we do, rather than as we say. So model healthy eating and positive food attitudes yourself.
Rule #4 Tips on Eating Together
• Eating is more than an essential physical act. It should also be a shared social event, in which children experience a sense of pleasure, discovery, and well-being.
• No TV, radio, phones, or other electronic devices: mealtime is family time.
• Meals are moments during which children get your undivided attention. How much misbehavior at the table is simply attention-seeking?
• Conversation can capture your children’s attention, keep them at the table, and put them in a positive frame of mind for eating. As soon as my children sit down, I sit with them and start talking.
• Create rituals. One of our favorites is asking each person in turn to tell a story about his or her day.
• Ask grandparents (or other elders) to get involved. They often have the time and skills and are only too willing to share.
• Older children who like to eat well have a magical influence on my children. Invite them to dinner, and see if positive peer pressure works!
• Prime the pump: include a little something that your children like with the meal.
French Food Rule #5:
Eat vegetables of all colors of the rainbow.
Don’t eat the same main dish more than once per week.
Kids all over the world—and the French are no exception—naturally prefer sweet or salty, calorie-rich foods. The problem today is that our culture supplies a glut of these foods, and our eating habits and parenting routines aren’t designed to cope. So adults need to guide children in developing healthy eating routines in and outside the home.
This is where variety comes in. We all know that eating a variety of whole foods is important. But how do you get your kids to do so? The French answer is: nutritional literacy. Children, in their view, should learn the basics that set them up for life: how to read, how to do basic math, and how to eat. So teaching children to like eating a variety of foods, and to be open to trying new foods, is one of the most important parenting tasks. And early childhood is the critical phase for learning to eat well, especially before the age of two, when children are more likely to be open to trying new things. (Don’t worry if you’re starting later: I started when my children were five and two, and the French approach has still worked for us. But if you’re starting earlier, so much the better.)
French parents believe that children’s tastes are very adaptable; taste is acquired rather than innate, and can be learned (and taught). Adults’ job is to help children grow out of juvenile tastes and to help them develop their tastes to mature. From the French point of view, neophobia is a stage of development through which children should move fairly quickly. If you cater to children’s limited food preferences, the French believe, children get “stuck” developmentally. This is where Rule #5 comes in.
Rule #5 Tips on Eating a Variety of Healthy Foods
• Make variety fun! Try “taste training” with your children. Encourage them to move beyond judging food by its color or appearance—and use their other senses to assess foods. The “stuff sack” is one game played in French schools: place a “mystery food” in a bag, and allow children to feel it, then guess what it is. The results will often surprise adults as well as kids. Or try taste-testing blindfolded. Adults participate too!
• Create your own Family Food Rule for variety: We won’t eat the same thing more than ___________ every __________. For example, we try not to eat the same dish more than once per week.
• Build variety on top of what kids already like. If they enjoy one type of cheese, try others. If they like pasta, serve it tossed with broccoli one day, spinach leaves the next.
• North America’s multiethnic melting pot makes a wonderful variety of cuisine easily available to us (which isn’t always the case in France). Why not try a new type
