French Children Don’t Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman, Random House, $29.95.
The idea of Paris is enough to make those of us who don’t live there go weak at the knees — the Renaissance lofty garrets filled with starving artists, the oh-so-chic slender women who seem to get sexier as they age, the sophisticated bars and lifestyles…
And it is with these stereotypes swimming around her headthat New Yorker Pamela Druckerman and her British husband moved to the city and started to drink in the culture.
Pamela was far from an instant convert. She found Parisian women distant and aloof, the city a tad shallow and much of daily life to be very different from the picture postcard ideal.
Yet when she fell pregnant and started raising her kids there, Pamela’s sense of wonderment really kicked in.
While she and husband Simon struggled to control their toddler, Bean, in a local restaurant, French families sat calmly, the kids using cutlery, eating vegetables and staying in their seats while their parents sipped wine and indulged in adult conversations. What sort of witchcraft was at play here?
This is the premise for Druckerman’s investigation into French parenting secrets and while her methods are far from scientific — a hefty dose of anecdotes from friends, some patchy research into the history of France’s parenting experts and a few interviews with paediatricians and psychologists — her findings are both intriguing and highly amusing.
As much an autobiography about love and kids in a foreign clime as a parenting guide, French Children Don’t Throw Food has a deliciously self-deprecating tone which coupled with feisty New Yorker wit makes Druckerman’s observations come alive.
French parenting, she says, seems to “vacillate between extremely strict and shockingly permissive”, but its bonuses are babies who sleep through the night, children who eat at appointed hours and don’t need to endlessly snack, their food a civilised combination of fruit, vegetables, cheese and dessert, and youngsters so secure they can spend a week away from their parents as young as six.
Add to this mothers who return to work after just three months — thanks to state-subsidised créches — and hang on to their independence, their sex life and even their figures, while still raising seemingly well-behaved, well-adjusted kids and, like Druckerman, we are compelled to find out how on earth they pull it off.
Her answers are maddeningly simple, but do seem to be fuelled by common sense and plenty of French “easy calm authority”. Are we convinced? Not entirely, but it’s a fascinating journey.
About the author
American author Pamela Druckerman worked for five years as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal based in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and New York.
She went on to work as a freelance journalist writing for titles including The New York Times, The Guardian and Marie Claire magazine before writing her first book Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee in 2007.
She lives in Paris with her husband, English football writer Simon Kuper, their daughter, Bean, and twin sons Leo and Joey.
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