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June 27 - August 23, 2021
Practically from the time kids can sit up, their moms begin leading them in weekly or biweekly baking projects.
what’s especially crucial is the mother’s or caregiver’s “sensitivity”—how attuned she is to her child’s experience of the world.
making kids face up to limitations and deal with frustration turns them into happier, more resilient people.
“There are so few years to just be a child.”
When the Frenchwomen I know mention their partners’ inadequacies, it’s to laugh about how adorably inept the men are. “They’re just not capable; we’re superior!” jokes Virginie, as her girlfriends chuckle.
This is actually a very liberating perspective!
French mothers also seem better at giving up some control and lowering their standards in exchange for more free time and less stress.
“One of the great feelings of a couple and of marriage is gratitude to the person who hasn’t left,”
“Today, marriage no longer has a bourgeois connotation. To the contrary, for me, it’s an act of bravado,”
The first foods that French babies typically eat are steamed and pureed green beans, spinach, carrots, peeled zucchini, and the white part of leeks.
They believe that just as they must teach the child how to sleep, how to wait, and how to say bonjour, they must teach her how to eat.
They suggest showing kids a vegetable and asking, “Do you think this is crunchy, and that it’ll make a sound when you bite it? What does this flavor remind you of? What do you feel in your mouth?” They suggest playing flavor games like offering different types of apples and having the child decide which is the sweetest and which is the most acidic. In another game, the parent blindfolds the child and has him eat and identify foods he already knows.
Lesson number one is that there’s no such thing as “kids’ food.”
The commission’s second lesson is the importance of variety.
the main problem with new foods is simply that they’re new.
Another phrase that adults use a lot with children is “I don’t agree,” as in, “I don’t agree with you pitching your peas on the floor.” Parents say this in a serious tone, while looking directly at the child. “I don’t agree” is also more than just “no.” It establishes the adult as another mind, which the child must consider.
the adults I meet who have the most authority all speak to children not as a master to a subject but as one equal to another.
“no” should be used sparingly. But once uttered, it must be definitive.
Rousseau. “Give willingly, refuse unwillingly,” he writes in Émile. “But let your refusal be irrevocable. Let no entreaties move you; let your ‘no,’ once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it. Thus you will make him patient, equable, calm and resigned, even when he does not get all he wants.”
He says the way to “childproof” an oven is to let the kid touch it once and realize that it’s hot.
Letting children “live their lives” isn’t about releasing them into the wild or abandoning them (though French school trips do feel a bit like that to me). It’s about acknowledging that children aren’t repositories for their parents’ ambitions or projects for their parents to perfect. They are separate and capable, with their own tastes, pleasures, and experiences of the world. They even have their own secrets.
