French Kids Eat Everything (20 page)

The trick with this snack, Mamie explained, is that (like a lot of traditional foods served at the
goûter
) it feels like a treat while actually being quite healthy. Dark chocolate has lots of minerals (like magnesium), and plain bread and butter provide the carbohydrates that active kids need. Importantly, the children weren't allowed seconds. The relatively high energy density of the food meant that they left the table feeling satisfied, but they'd still be hungry for dinner.

She was right, in part because she waited for two hours before calling them for dinner. Just before 7:00
P.M
., the girls were summoned inside. One “
À table!
” was all it took to bring them running in from the garden.

While they had been outside playing, Mamie had been strategizing about the evening meal. The table had been set with napkins, cutlery, and the girls' special bowls (the first time they'd seen them). Little menu cards appeared at each place setting.
Special Spinach Sauce
, I read out loud to the girls, who were looking very curious.

The meal started with the two small bowls appearing on the table, each with a little plate acting as a lid. Sophie leaned closer.

“What's inside?” I asked, leaning over to take a look. Mamie gently blocked my hands as I reached for the lid. “Let them do it!” she cautioned.

Under the lids were small servings of what looked like dark green sauce with tiny dabs of butter slowly melting into little transparent pools. Whiffs of steam curled up. The girls stared, and then laughed as they realized that the bits of butter were artfully arranged in happy faces, complete with teeth.

“Quick! Let's eat them up before they disappear! What would you like to eat first? An eye or a tooth?” said Mamie.

Claire went first. Into her mouth popped a buttery eye with a dab of green goo. No reaction. After a moment, out popped a clean spoon. Sophie went next. In popped two buttery teeth with a spoonful of green goo. She hesitantly tried a second spoonful. This time, the clean spoon came out a little faster. Soon, the happy faces had disappeared, and both girls were rapidly digging their way to the bottom of their bowls. As they scraped the bottoms clean, two smiling rabbit faces appeared. They nodded silently and held out their bowls for more.

Mamie's visit had gotten us off to a good start. “Festive and
fun,” I would remind myself, as dinnertime would approach every day. “The table should be the happiest place in the house,” my husband would remind me whenever I got tense about food. And I did get tense, as preparing the meals was an extra effort at what I always felt was the most stressful time of day—late afternoon (what Philippe and I called the “arsenic hour,” and with good reason). Luckily, we were a lot less busy than we would have been back home. Lessons for French kids don't tend to start until age six or seven. So there were few after-school activities to sign up for, and we were home early enough every day for me to have time to throw something together, with the miraculous B.B. Kook (as we'd now rechristened it) as my mainstay.

I also planned some new Smart Things to Say, but I made sure that they were encouraging rather than frustrating for the kids.

In spite of my stress, and to my amazement, The Plan continued to work. The girls didn't try every soup the first time. But after two or three weeks, they had tried everything on my list. This was another thing I learned from the parenting books: assess the quality of a child's food intake over a period of a week (or weeks) rather than demanding a completely balanced meal every time they sit down.

I made a point of leaving the food in front of them even if they didn't want to taste it while Philippe and I ate our servings. After seeing us eat, the girls would usually be convinced to put a tiny bit in their mouths. Sometimes, though, we'd have to wait until the next appearance on the menu. Unsurprisingly, Claire was an even more avid taster than Sophie (who usually had to be convinced to follow her younger sister's lead).

From my research, I had learned that “peer-to-peer marketing” works too. The funniest experiment I found was one where scientists created a new blue-colored food for kids and tracked whether positive or negative messages from fellow students would increase or decrease consumption. The results were predictable: peer pressure works. But what was fascinating was that kids who had received positive peer messages about the new blue food were more likely to try another new food the next day, even when on their own.

After reading this (and thinking about “positive messaging”), we also tried to change our language. I avoided saying that foods tasted “bad” or “good.” I used only positive words, such as “good” or “tasty.” If I thought something wasn't healthy, I said so, and explained why, using the word “unhealthy” rather than “bad.” And the girls, in turn, were encouraged to use this language.

To convince the girls to move on to eating the vegetables in their more adult version (and to make sure I got even with my brother-in-law, who had been teasing me about my “liquid diet fad”), I made sure that the vegetables turned up in solid form—both raw and cooked—within a week of being eaten in a soup. This was less complicated than it sounded once I had planned the menus out in advance. I just put aside some of the vegetables before making the purees, and pulled them out of the fridge a couple days later. Chopping them into thin strips and serving only a few small, lightly steamed pieces made it easier for the girls to eat them. “The point is that they
taste
these things,” I reminded myself, “not that they
eat
a whole bunch.” Small servings took the pressure off me and off them too. And I made sure to serve the new vegetables with something they liked, so pasta appeared on the menu more often than I wanted in those first few weeks. But when it did, vegetables and pasta were served tossed together, and we all—even Philippe and I—followed the “one piece of pasta, one bite of vegetables” rule. Philippe soon had the girls laughing with his mock attempts to sneak extra bites of pasta, and his good-humored willingness to be “caught” made it easier for the girls to follow the new rule too.

Most important, my husband and I made sure that at least one parent sat down to eat with the kids. Our usual pattern was for one of us to be at work, with the other running around the house (doing laundry, cleaning, sending emails, opening mail) while the kids ate. Now, we took the time to sit down with them. We ate exactly what they ate, because I had also learned through my research that what parents themselves eat in front of their children (rather than what they
tell
their kids to eat) is the best predictor of kids' eating habits.

In line with our theme of “festive and fun,” I had also decided to do away with punishments. But there were, Philippe's mother explained to me, natural consequences that flow from the French approach to eating. Most important, meals are eaten in a logical sequence:
entrée, plat, salade
, and then
dessert
. If you don't follow the order, you've broken the rule, and there is a consequence: if you don't eat your
entrée
or
plat
, then no
dessert
. I explained this sympathetically to the girls, and they accepted it more quickly than I did. I was helped by the fact that lots of French kids' books seemed to carry this message: there was Michel the “naughty” mouse, who tried to eat his dessert first, or Amélie, the little girl who didn't get dessert because she said “
non
” to her carrots. A little propaganda couldn't hurt my cause, so we made sure to read these stories regularly.

Sophie, however, tended to complain at every meal, and the effect on Claire was immediate. When simple encouragement didn't stop Sophie's complaints, I implemented Mamie's approach: if you complain about the food, no dessert. Sophie didn't quite believe me, but I told her in advance, and she only tested the new rule once. It was, I told her firmly, not a punishment, but simply a logical, natural consequence of her behavior: I worked hard to prepare nice meals, and her complaints (along the lines of “ooh, gross”) felt like insults. Instead of complaining, we offered, she could simply say, “
Non, merci
.” I think the parenting lingo went straight over her head, but it worked nonetheless. After being deprived of dessert once (with the resulting storm of tears, stamping of feet, and full-scale meltdown tantrum), she adjusted quickly to the new rule, which worked like a charm. At the same time, we encouraged her to say positive things at the table. “What do you like about this meal?” I'd ask her; to my initial surprise (and even hers), she usually did have nice things to say. Everyone felt happier as a result—even Sophie.

The “variety” phase of The Plan had now stretched into a second month. But I had now learned enough to be patient. Plus, Philippe and I found an unexpected pleasure in sitting down and eating the soups with the girls. We had planned to make a point of tasting everything for
their
benefit. But we actually found that we ended up enjoying the new tastes too. And the requirement that the vegetables reappear in “adult” form in menus later in the week pushed me to be more creative than I'd ever been about cooking.

Dinnertime now took a little longer—in part because it did sometimes take more time to cajole the girls into trying the new things. But we were also having more fun at the table. We invented a few new rituals around the theme of “tell me about your day”: the best thing, the worst thing, a funny thing, something I learned, something I did to help someone else. Claire would make us all laugh by taking a bite of food and saying, “Look, my hair grew!” (As she was self-conscious about still being nearly bald, I told her that the only way to grow the full head of hair sported by her older sister was to eat vegetables with lots of “vida-meens,” as she called them.)

We also told more stories around the table. Sophie's personal favorite was an anecdote about when she was young. From about the age of two onward, she decided that she didn't like anything pale and cold. This included cheese, yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese, whipped cream, and even ice cream. Even at birthday parties, she'd turn up her nose at dessert if she thought it might contain one of these ingredients. By now, she'd learned to like ice cream. But she would still react violently if cheese—even something as mild as Cheddar—appeared on the table. To make the point about how silly this was, we'd use the ice cream anecdote whenever Sophie was being difficult at the table.

“Remember how you didn't like ice cream?” we'd ask her. This would usually result in a drawn-out, reluctant, “Yeeeaaah…”

“Well, this is just like ice cream. Before, you didn't like ice cream, and now you do. You just haven't tasted [insert name of new thing] enough times to like it yet.” That usually got a smile, and hence an open mouth, into which a bit of food would be quickly popped. Eventually, this usually led to a grudging (and sometimes enthusiastic) acceptance of whatever new food was on offer. Sophie still vehemently refused to eat cheese, but we were making progress.

My in-laws, after an initially enthusiastic bout of advice,
had said nothing for several weeks. I took this as a sign of approval.

“Isn't it great that the girls are eating so many new things?” I said to Janine one day in the line at the market. I couldn't contain my pride any longer.

I knew when she started her sentence with “
Oui, mais…
” (Yes, but…) that I wasn't going to get the answer I was hoping for. “Children should eat what adults eat,” she gently chided me. “You're spending a lot of time catering special meals. It would be much simpler if they ate what you ate, when you ate, and as you ate, right from the start.”

Hurt, I didn't have much to say. It was true that compared to the French children we knew, our daughters were still fussy, picky eaters. But I was so proud of the progress we'd made. I felt as if we weren't getting enough recognition for how much the kids had improved.

Once again, my husband smoothed things over. “The kids are just at the first phase,” he said mildly. “Learning different tastes is like learning the alphabet. When they've learned this, they'll be able to go on and learn to like French dishes, just like learning to read.”

This led to endless alphabet games at the table. “A is for apple, B is for beets” was my favorite. In response, our grinning children would chant: “And C is for
chocolate
!” This seemed to sum up the French approach: food was serious fun.

It took me a couple of days (okay, a couple of weeks) to get over my mother-in-law's comments. But I realized my husband was right. It was time to launch the second phase of The Plan. Now that they'd learned to eat a variety of foods, we could begin seriously applying the rest of the French Food Rules. This would be the true test of whether my kids could eat like the French.