Feeding French: Takeaways from French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon

French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon has apparently achieved the coveted unicorn seal of excellence. You can buy the book here.

SKIP TO: Key Takeaways

SKIP TO: Action Items for Parents

Parents willing to devote substantial time to meal prep and family meals in the service of encouraging long-term healthy eating habits.

The book describes Le Billon’s experience moving from Canada to France, and then back to Canada. She draws out the cultural differences she experienced in France, the benefits for her kids, and the difficulties with implementing some of this French wisdom once she returned home.

Le Billon drives home how the French treat meals as a social experience at the heart of family life. Food isn’t eaten alone – it is something everyone experiences and enjoys together. Therefore, to implement most of the advice in French Kids Eat Everything, you’re going to need to slow down and sit down with your child to eat.

In French Kids Eat Everything, Karen Le Billon sets out a compelling argument for trying to teach kids to enjoy food. French parents do not focus on which foods are the healthiest. Rather, they focus on providing a variety of flavors and textures and teaching their children to expect variability (for instance, carrots may be presented raw one week, pureed the next, and roasted another). The expectation is that parents must educate children about food and help them develop good taste. They consider it bad manners to express a food preference or dislike. For French families, including those with small kids, meals are a time for families to unwind, connect, and experience the same food together.

She sets out ten “French food rules.” We tried implementing some of her advice in our home. I’ve highlighted the particular tidbits I found most useful in the Key Takeaways section below. The section below covers just the actionable highlights.

The goal is not to discover what food your child naturally likes (spoiler: it’s probably not broccoli). Nor is the goal to force your child to eat all of the food on her plate. The goal is to teach your child to be curious and open to trying new foods in the first place. It’s okay and expected that a child won’t finish many foods she tries. You should anticipate that your child may reject a food ten to fifteen times before learning to like it. Trying the food repeatedly is how a child learns to like the food (see my discussion of some studies showing this works). This is part of the process of teaching your child to appreciate food.

The parent’s job is to teach children through repeated exposure: (1) to like foods they initially dislike but that are good for them; and (2) to expect a wide variety of flavors and textures to be presented at mealtimes.

Practically, parents should focus their energies on enforcing the rule that their children must try everything on their plates. Sometimes this is not practical (for instance, my son frequently simply refuses to let something delicious near his face). Figuring out how to enforce this rule was a major issue for us – you can read about our struggles when our family tried to implement this rule below. I’ve realized that the enforcement is subtle and depends on the child’s age. And also, it’s more of a mantra than a rule.

The indirect way I discovered to enforce the “rule” is twofold. There is a tiny pull and a tiny push.

The Tiny Pull: Basically, you eat the food with your child, showing obvious pleasure, and you leave the food near the child to try. You set the example, you pique his interest, and you create a happy, social atmosphere at the table. You gently pull the child toward wanting to try the food. You may suggest that the child try the food, but you do not pressure them too hard to try it. You don’t want to get upset at them if they refuse to try it. And you don’t want a direct confrontation with your child.

The Tiny Push: The stick is the “no alternatives” rule. If they don’t eat their food, they don’t get an alternative food option. They can eat the other foods on the table, of course. And they don’t get dessert if they didn’t try everything or finish something they’ve eaten without objections in the past. Le Billon describes dessert as part of the natural order of the meal, not a punishment or incentive – to move to the final part of the meal, you need to have participated in the preceding part.

Le Billon mentions that the French “dress the table” before meals and do not start eating until everyone is seated.¹ The meal is treated almost like a ritual, where the family convenes, eats the same foods together, appreciates and talks about what they are eating, and connects. It is an unrushed social time that French culture widely respects.

Notably, the French take very long lunches and work later into the evenings to make sure lunch time (their primary meal of the day) is respected.² Stores close for up to two hours in the middle of the day so that families or coworkers can go and have lunch together. The meal itself is typically three or four courses.

Our North American culture, by contrast, is one where people typically eat meals for the purpose of filling their stomachs. They often do this alone, hurried, and without taking time to appreciate their food or connect with others.

To try to adopt some of the gravitas of the French primary meal time, visual cues like making the table look special, and social cues like not starting the meal until everyone is present, can be helpful for kids. Dressing up the table for dinner immediately communicates to children visually that this is a special time in the day that everyone respects and looks forward to.

The French consider it bad manners to express a personal preference for food in public.³ This cultural wisdom may have a special importance for children. Le Billon describes studies about how children influence each other when they comment on food. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone who has ever witnessed two children eating at the same time or who remembers lunchtime at school growing up.

The suggestion is to limit the negative commentary children are permitted to make about foods they dislike at the table. Negative comments will impact the experience of the other people at the table, especially the other children. The American version of this I’ve heard is, “Don’t yuck someone else’s yum.” I’ve asked my kids to say just that they don’t care for more if they don’t like something.

Also, consider how to use this influence to your advantage. Maybe don’t serve a new vegetable to your child if she has a friend who is a picky and vocal eater over for dinner that night (avoid the potential for negative commentary). Maybe do serve a vegetable that you know your child’s friend happens to like (create the possibility for positive comments about the vegetable for the benefit of your child).

French children typically eat four meals a day. Breakfast, lunch (the largest meal), a goûter in the late afternoon (technically a snack, a bit like tea time in the UK), and dinner around 8pm. They don’t eat outside of those times. Not only can snacking ruin an appetite, but it also encourages children to eat on the go, without appreciating what they are eating.

Le Billon describes the French view as one where it is okay for a child to feel hungry from time to time – this ensures that the child will eat a good meal at mealtime, full of nutritious food which will taste better for the hunger. You also don’t want children filling up on snack food, which tends to be less healthy than the food served at meals.

Let’s get a bit further into the details. I tried some of these methods at home, so I’ll pass along places where I experienced rough patches or confusion as to what exactly Le Billon was suggesting.  

To start, Le Billon also sets out ten French food rules in French Kids Eat Everything – I’ve listed them below here for ease of reference:

Le Billon’s 10 French Food Rules

I’ll touch on each of these French food rules as I discuss my primary takeaways from French Children Eat Everything below. But I’m not going in chronological order. Instead, I tried to try to break the rules down into the following four basic takeaways, which are easier for me to remember. They also hit the points I found most useful in Le Billon’s book.

My Dumbed-Down Version

(because 4 rules is easier for my brain than 10)

Now let’s discuss the details.

The French Expect Kids to Dislike Some Foods, at First

The French difference, according to French Kids Eat Everything, is that they do not expect their children to like many of these foods at first. Parents expect they will need to teach their children to like these foods by giving tastes of them to their children ten to fifteen times.⁴ The child is not forced to finish the food if she doesn’t like it – the food is just removed without much comment after a while. Sometimes an encouraging word is offered (you just haven’t tried it enough times yet, you’ll like it when you’re older, etc.)

Because of this mindset, parents aren’t discouraged when a child rejects a food – they expect that to happen as part of the child’s food education. This repeated exposure approach has been supported in studies I’ve discussed previously.

Practically, this means that French parents make a habit of exposing their kids to foods they know their children may not like, repeatedly. Le Billon describes that the French see food training as somewhat similar to how American parents view potty training. In other words, the parent must actively teach the child the particular skill, not simply wait until the child is sufficiently motivated to do it by herself.

The Importance of Variety

Because the French see their role as educating children to develop good taste and a love of food, they do not routinely offer the same foods – they make a point of serving a wide variety of foods, cooked in different ways. They try not to repeat the same dish twice in one week.⁵ This way, children learn to expect variety. This exposure to variety may actually be a virtuous cycle, leading children to be more willing to try new dishes.

Le Billon notes another contrast here with North American culture. North American parents tend to obsess over nutrition by focusing on particular nutrients (for instance, making sure kids are getting their Omega-3s or enough protein). On the other hand, the French are primarily focused on providing variety from an early age (ideally, before the picky-eater stage kicks in around age 2). They are more likely to focus on providing children with vegetables in all the colors of the rainbow. They will intentionally vary the colors of purees provided to infants from day to day.  This way, the children learn to expect and accept foods of all different colors. If the children eat a wide variety of homemade foods, in all different colors, much of the nutrition will naturally follow.

So the parent’s job is to teach children to appreciate good food by introducing them to a wide variety of foods, many of which the parents know the children will not like at first. That sounds great, but how do you actually get the kids to eat the food?

One way that parents encourage children to eat the food they prepare is by making mealtime a pleasant experience. During mealtime, adults model the behavior they want to see in their children. (This modeling approach is supported by research I’ve discussed previously.) In other words, they sit down with the children and eat the same food with clear enjoyment.

No Snacks

Le Billon describes how French families are very strict about snacks. French children have one snack per day, at 4pm, called the goûter. This is because dinner is typically served quite late (around 8pm). Outside of this snack and mealtimes, the children do not eat.

The philosophy is that children should get a little hungry before their meals – this ensures that they eat a big meal and that they are willing to eat more of things they otherwise might not have been as willing to eat. Don’t vegetables taste better when you’re really hungry? It also serves the purpose of enforcing the principle that food should to be enjoyed with others, at the table.  It is not simply there to fill one’s stomach.

Dressing the Table

Parents can immediately communicate the centrality of mealtime by setting the table (in French, the literal translation is “dressing the table”) before meals. Le Billon states that during her time in France, she witnessed families “dressing” the table with at least a table cloth. She goes on to describe setting the table as a “ritual that expresses the ceremonial and aesthetic aspects of French eating, at the core of which is the belief that eating is intensely social and that it rightfully happens around the table.” Food is only served once everyone is at the table.

Food is a Social Activity

French families enjoy their meals, and the same foods at those meals, together.⁶ It is a shared physical experience and one that is relationship-building. During the meal, the family should sit together with no distractions. Everyone should eat the same meal. Parents can ask their children about their food, about how their bodies feel eating the food (Are they still hungry? How full do they feel? Are they satisfied or stuffed? Do they taste the way chocolate mousse melts on the tongue?) Parents should teach that the food is meant to be enjoyed slowly and savored.⁷ Make this an occasion where your full focus is on the people at the table.

Overall, the example set by the parents should be that food is interesting to taste and enjoyable – and mealtime is a relaxing time to bond with family over the new and familiar flavors.

Our Family’s Experience

Okay, so this all sounds great. Getting the family together around the table and experiencing food together. No snacking outside of this. Let’s do it!

First, we tried making dinner look more special at home, and I think my kids really enjoyed that aspect. I tried a couple of tactics: (1) Setting the table with a nice tablecloth and napkins – I bought some relatively inexpensive tablecloths that have elaborate designs so they don’t immediately look terrible if (when) someone drops food on it; (2) Starting dinner a bit earlier so we could eat without rushing; (3) Waiting for everyone to sit down at the table and trying to keep the kids in their chairs (such a struggle!) through the meal; (4) giving the kids plates and silverware and telling them I believed they could behave like big kids – and watched them (for the most part) rise to the occasion.

To encourage our focus to be on the table, my husband and I also started leaving our phones in another room during dinner time to avoid temptation.

The kids thought this was all really fun, and it drove home that our kids love being treated like adults. They enjoyed helping to set the table, and I would let them help me do little designs (for instance, collecting fall leaves for a small vase in the center of the table) I do think they were more willing to give new foods a try in this (more exciting!) setting.  I was pleasantly surprised at how our kids clearly worked to rise to the occasion. My 2-year old even consented to placing his partially chewed chicken on a napkin instead of on the table next to his plate. Sometimes, you have to appreciate the small blessings.

On Snacking

On the elimination of snacking, we faced some big hurdles. Le Billon describes similar hurdles when she describes her return to Canada.

First, my two older kids are in school, where they have snack time 1-2 times per day. My daughter frequently doesn’t eat much at school despite the snacks and comes home ravenous. This is around 2.30pm, so I’ve just started treating this as a regular snack time. But it does mean that, after you include the two snacks she gets at school, she’s getting about three snacks a day. This really isn’t ideal, but since dinner isn’t ’til 6pm, she still has a hearty appetite at dinner. And I try to make sure that this 2:30pm snack is a healthy one.

Second, my 2-year old is a challenge when he wakes up from his nap, and hunger only makes this worse. We don’t have dinner until about 6pm – and we can’t move it earlier if we want to eat together as a family. So he sometimes gets a tiny snack around 5pm, when he wakes up from his nap, to take the edge off of his hunger, if he’s really cranky. Otherwise, I’ve seen him quickly escalate into tantrum territory – and then he is not open to trying anything new, and dinner is not enjoyable for anyone. That said, if I think he can make it without the snack, I will try. It all depends on his crankiness level when he gets up, because the snack definitely affects his appetite at dinner.

A Caution Regarding Frustration

I also have to say that my effort in making the table look nice and the meal feel like more of an event resulted in my temper being a bit shorter than usual. I’ve put in a lot of work by the time dinner comes around. The short temper is something Le Billon warns against in French Kids Eat Everything. You need to be in a good, relaxed place when you’re offering kids something new.  Otherwise, you’re likely to get into a conflict with your child, and that will probably not end with them admitting that, actually, they really like your pea and leek soup. It hasn’t yet, anyway.

It is really important to be relaxed and remember this is a slow game. There will be baby steps. More on this below.

This builds on the social aspect of mealtime. Meals are communal – everyone experiences the same meal, together. This means parents should prepare one meal for everyone, and the kids should eat the adult meal. That said, Le Billon suggests having at least one thing on the table that you know the kids like.

This is obviously the hard one. It is where our family struggled the most. What do you do when you’re all around the table and your kids just don’t eat (or even try!) what you’ve prepared? French Kids Eat Everything addresses this issue in sort of an indirect way scattered throughout the book. I’m going to focus on the topic here because I really struggled with it. I think I misunderstood Le Billon’s suggestions initially – and I suspect any other American parent who tries to implement Le Billon’s suggestions will also struggle here.

You Have to Try It

You can’t force your kid to try anything. If a kid doesn’t want to try it, they won’t try it. Le Billon states that the trick is not to force the issue. You don’t fuss or hover – you offer casually, you encourage, and you give them space to try it. If the child doesn’t try it, take the food away without much comment. If they tried it but don’t like it, you may encourage them by saying that it’s okay that they don’t like it, they probably just haven’t tried it enough times, or they may like it when they are older.

I think this must be where having something on the table that the kids like comes in – but I worry this could quickly devolve into kids eating only the bread (the thing they like) and nothing else. So the success of the plan truly relies on encouraging kids to try the other foods. You have to trust that they will give it a try without your forcing the issue.

The Role of Courses

French Kids Eat Everything mentions that French families often course out their meals. Le Billon tried starting dinner with a vegetable puree, leaving it on the table in front of the kids until she and her husband finished theirs. If the kids were not willing to try the puree, she would just take it away without too much fuss. But often the kids would give them a try. After all, it was the start of the meal, they were hungry, and the parents were clearly enjoying theirs. This may be another strategy to try, as it forces the kids to focus on the vegetable when they are at their hungriest and when they know more food is imminent.

Side note about the puree strategy: Le Billon also notes that making a vegetable into a puree limits the possibility that a child won’t like a food due to its texture. So it may work better to introduce a new food with a tricky texture (mushrooms, for instance?) first to get a child to learn to like the taste of it.

You Don’t Have to Like It

Where a child is familiar with a food and has eaten it in the past but currently refusing to eat it, French families simply tell the child, gently but firmly, to eat it.⁸

No Alternatives

The enforcement mechanism for French parents is the “no alternatives” rule. If a child doesn’t eat her food, she doesn’t get an alternative food option. There is obviously some ambiguity here.

One issue I had was that I wasn’t 100% clear on what Le Billon means when she says “no alternatives” – does it mean the kids don’t get second servings of any food item at dinner until everything is gone from their plates? Or do they just need to have tried everything on their plates? Or does it mean they can have second servings of anything on the table regardless of the status of their plates, but nothing not on the table?

Based on our family’s experience, I think you have to play it based on the kids age and temperament – for my 5-year-old, no second servings until she’s at least tried everything. She understands and accepts this rule. For my two-year-old, we’ll encourage him to try everything by putting it on his plate and suggesting he try it, but we won’t draw any hard lines. We give him nudges. And you only progress to dessert if you ate well and tried everything. (Note that how you frame this is important. You should avoid framing dessert as a reward. French Kids Eat Everything describes dessert as a natural consequence in the order of the meal, not a punishment. To move forward to the next course, you must first finish the current course.⁹ It’s just part of the natural order, not emotionally-charged, and not an incentive.)

Tips for Introducing Variety

Because children become more difficult to feed new foods between ages two and four, the French focus on introducing lots of new foods before the child reaches age two. Rather than introducing foods slowly in case of an allergic response, as tends to be the approach in North America, the Société Française de Pédiatrie emphasizes food diversification early on.¹⁰

Le Billon suggests introducing variations on favorite dishes (adding pieces of spinach to the plain pasta dish, for instance). She suggests that you not hide new things. Rather, try to make them fun, perhaps by making them into faces and serving them at the start of the meal. Serve in small portions (less intimidating). And make sure you’re in a good mood at the start, so that you can handle rejection and keep this is a pleasant experience.

She also suggests serving new foods as part of a meal, where there is at least one thing on the table that your child likes. I’ve found this familiar food rule to be very important. Too many new things and nothing for the kid to be excited about does not end well. If the child doesn’t like the food, take it away after a while without making a fuss. Don’t offer a alternative.

Our Family’s Variety Triumphs

For our family, I sometimes offer a taste of a veggie while I’m cooking or while everyone is still gathering at the table. The informality of the offer seems to be a little disarming for the kids (plus, they’re hungry!). Sometimes we will start with a first course vegetable soup for everyone for about five minutes when we get to the table. This has actually had some success in getting the kids to try some new flavors (and even like them!). Maybe a 50% hit rate.

Once the adults finish the soup, we clear it away (whether or not the kids have tried it), and we serve out everyone’s plates with a little bit of everything. We make sure to put one thing on the plate for the kids to be excited about (e.g., roasted chicken thighs with some type of sauce), and then once they’ve taken the edge off the hunger, I’ll start encouraging them to try a veggies on the plate and not refill it with more of the really desirable stuff right away. I’ll make sure to eat my vegetables quickly with gusto! A few times I’ve been really enjoying a particular vegetable and eating it quickly and looked up to find my son watching me and demanding some for himself.

Peer-to-Peer Marketing: The Studies

Le Billon describes several studies in French Kids Eat Everything about the impact of peer pressure and positive messaging.

First, she describes the “Kohlrabi Experiment.”¹¹ Children were given kohlrabi at snack time. None of the children could identify what it was at first. Then the children were split into two groups. Each group was read a story about kohlrabi. In the first group, a repeated refrain was, “At least I didn’t have to eat kohlrabi.” In the second group, the refrain was, “Almost as good as kohlrabi!” The children were given kohlrabi again. The majority of the children could now identify the kohlrabi. They were offered a taste. The only children who refused to eat the kohlrabi were in the first (negative message) group. The majority of children who tried the kohlrabi said that they liked it.

Second, she describes a study where scientists created a new blue food and tracked how positive and negative messages from other kids affected consumption. The results indicated that not only did positive messages increase consumption of the blue food, they also increased the likelihood of the child being willing to try a completely different food the next day.¹²

Peer-to-Peer Marketing: Practical Advice

Peer messages surrounding food are powerful. The story I think of personally is how I stopped eating tuna (a food I previously loved) after several kids loudly groaned “ughh tuna?!” when one of the children in my 4^th grade class opened a tuna sandwich in her lunchbox. It wasn’t even my sandwich, and I still don’t want to eat tuna today, even though my husband makes it several times a month. If I were starving, yes, I would eat it. And yes, I probably even like tuna. But I really, really don’t want to eat it.

Because this is such a powerful tool, Le Billon writes that she adopted a rule that if you complain about a food, you don’t get dessert. (It took one tear-filled evening for her children to learn she was serious.)¹³ (Doesn’t this conflict with the not using food as a punishment rule?)

She would also ask the children what they liked about a meal, in order to solicit positive messaging. She said she was often surprised that they did have some nice things to say. And as I noted above, it may be worthwhile to consider how your child’s friends can play into this picture with foods you are trying to get them to like.

Moving to One Meal: The importance of perspective

I really struggled with the one meal approach at first. I mean, we had already been doing one meal for the most part. But I hadn’t really been trying to give our kids a little bit of everything the adults were eating, and I was willing to get up and make an alternative meal if they hated what was on the table. Better than dealing with tears. Eliminating the backup meal was our challenging bit — because what do you do if your kid just won’t eat?

Plus, I had been putting in so much effort to cook nice meals, to make the table look pretty, and initially our kids (okay, mostly my 2-year-old) were just not eating much at all. This put me in a bad mood. It didn’t help that my husband and I were not entirely on the same page regarding the approach. Maybe I should have mentioned that I was reading this book and wanted to give some of the methods a try? (Seriously, my bad.)

I had to adjust my perspective over the course of the week and realize that: (1) this was a long game; (2) the kids might not cooperate at first, and that was okay; (3) it was critical to avoid going head-to-head with the kids about trying the food and instead exert gentle, constant pressure. The goal was to get them to look forward to meals and to be excited about trying something new. It had to be more pull than push. But it’s stressful, isn’t it, when your kids reject what you make? 

Combatting Stressful Dinner Situations

I think a lot of my stress initially was in determining exactly how to respond in this slightly different setting when the kids wouldn’t try something or wouldn’t eat very much. What exactly was the strategy I was taking? Where was I going to draw the line? What was I going to do if my son straight up refused to eat?

French Kids Eat Everything cites a French parenting book that states, “Opposition to food can’t persist if there is no opponent. In the face of a child’s refusal to eat, the best parental response is serene indifference. Parent’s should remind themselves: ‘I know this will pass. My child will not continue refusing to eat if I simply refuse to react.” Le Billon also mentions that if French kids don’t eat, the food is just removed and they are told that they’ll eat well at the next meal.¹⁴

This makes sense to me for breakfast or lunch. But in a dinner context, this sounds to me like putting the kids to bed hungry. When faced with this as an option for a kid refusing to eat, I realized I was not in this no-dinner camp. Maybe I was not sufficiently committed to this experiment. After all, one or two painful nights for the kids to learn I mean business when I say to eat your food at the dinner table? Perhaps it would be in their best interest in the long-term.

I concluded that I didn’t think that this extreme was necessary at this point, and so I relaxed a bit. I’ve personally found more success when I remember to lure our kids, not push them. So I wanted to try that first. So answering that question helped. I was not willing to put the kids to bed hungry.

Developing a Slow Pull Mindset

I ultimately determined that for our family, this was going to be a slow process. Sometimes, I would need to give a little. We adopted the rule that if you didn’t at least try everything on your plate (and if you had learned to like the food, finish the thing on your plate), you don’t get to progress to dessert. A solid dinner comes first. You could have repeat servings of some of the items on the table. Before second servings, we will ask you to try some of the uneaten foods on your plate, and we might be slow in serving you if you don’t.

And sometimes I’d still give my kids a healthy smoothie if they ate really badly at dinner (particularly if they were sick). I know this breaks the no alternatives rule. (I think this falls somewhere in the Emily Oster camp of offering an acceptable, although not highly desirable, alternative.¹⁵)

Trusting the Incentives

I had to remind myself that there is a strong but gentle pull here: the pleasure of a sit-down, social experience with the whole family. This is a low-pressure incentive that is going to take time to work. We will eat with our children, showing obvious pleasure, and leave the foods near them to try. We will invite them to try. We set the example, we try to pique interest, and we will try to create a happy, social atmosphere at the table. And we will let our children decide that they don’t like a food, encouraging them that they may like it on the next try, or when they are older. And we will praise them when they try a new food.

When I embraced this slow pull, developing a routine mindset, the dinners started to go a bit better. The kids were excited about the fancy table setup, and I stopped pushing them to try the food. I just made the food available, and encouraged them to try it. I’d make sure they were hungry. I’d make sure there were one or two things I knew they liked.

Still, sometimes they just wouldn’t eat that well. But we were making a routine of having the good food available and encouraging the kids to eat it. I developed confidence in the incentives for them to eat the food on the table, and I had smoothies in my back pocket if I was really worried. And sometimes, they just had a shockingly solid breakfast the next morning.

Perhaps because of this mindset, the French are much less anxious about food than Americans, who consider health, nutrition, and dieting key topics associated with eating. The French, by contrast, associate eating with pleasure, socializing, culture, identity, and fun.¹⁷ Tellingly, Le Billon describes how French adults tended to associate cake with “celebration,” whereas American adults tended to associate it with “guilt.”

Le Billon suggests encouraging children to seek out healthy foods, rather than to avoid bad ones. She also encourages teaching children to focus on the sensory pleasures food provides, by encouraging them to describe their food in detail (sweetness, texture, how it dissolves, how it feels in your stomach, etc.) This teaches children to learn that food can be a source of pleasure.

Food should not be used to soothe an upset or frustrated child, as this will not encourage the child to learn how to self-soothe without the use of food. Introducing food to an upset child introduces an emotional component to the food.

What about dessert after a meal?

Le Billon suggests treating dessert as an event that occurs in a natural, logical mealtime sequence. First you eat your vegetables, then you get dessert. Dessert should not be framed as a reward, and not providing a dessert should not be framed as a punishment.

There is one other aspect that comes into play for parents who frame dessert as a reward for eating vegetables. Treating dessert as a reward in this context implies to the child that vegetables are not enjoyable in themselves. It also implies to the child that dessert is highly desirable. French Kids Eat Everything notes that studies have found that using a particular food as a reward increases a child’s preference for that food.¹⁸ In other words, a dessert-as-a-reward framework inherently encourages children desire dessert more, and healthy food less.

That said, her book did provide more information about the French way of doing things that gave me a number of good ideas about the importance of serving a variety of foods, so in the end I didn’t really find the denigration of American culture too annoying. I suppose it was worth it.

But who works harder?

That said, maybe I just can’t help the competitive urge here, but I was irked at Le Billon’s claim that French mothers work longer hours than American mothers on average.¹⁹ Apparently this information was provided by her Parisian economic journalist sister-in-law (clearly a nonpartisan resource). She says that 66% of mothers work full time in France, and 70% of mothers do in the US. However, the average workday length in France is 8 hours, but only 7 hours in the United States?!

Intuitively, this seems incorrect and highly suspicious.

On the basis of these statistics, Le Billon claims that the French are at least as busy as Americans, but choose to spend their time preparing meals and eating. While Americans spend it doing what? She doesn’t mention that the commute times for Americans in general tend to be significantly longer than for the French – so certainly that would eat into leisure time. As would the fact that housework and childcare tends to be more disproportionately borne by women in the United States than it is in France.

Statistics are difficult to find

Unfortunately I was not able to locate specific statistics comparing the working hours of full time French versus American mothers during an initial search. I was able to pull general statistics from the OECD website comparing France²⁰ and the United States²¹ generally. It states that 5% of French women work 50 hours or more per week on average, whereas 7% of US women did. SO HAH. And I was able to pull that the average full time French worker devotes 16.2 hours per day to personal care and leisure, whereas the average American full time worker only gets 14.6 hours. AGAIN, HAH. (Wait, is the joke on us?)

I did find a U.S. Department of Labor note²² that employed women in the United States work an average of 35.5 hours per week, which would seem to support Le Billon’s statistic. But they are also doing chores for 13.2 hours per week, and 12.5 hours per week on active child care. Of course, I couldn’t find a similar breakdown for French women. I did find a different study suggesting that French women spend about 24 hours per week (206 minutes a day) on chores,²³ but this information on France versus the United States was collected by two different groups, so who knows if it would be comparing apples to apples.

I’m going to just have to say that I can’t prove Le Billon was incorrect on this point at this moment, but I choose to feel annoyed. If anyone does have better information, please do let me know.

As I was writing this, I started listening to Emily Oster’s new podcast, Raising Parents. It’s very entertaining by the way — the episodes aren’t too long and it covers a lot of interesting topics. She interviews a variety of people on each topic and covers a lot of different viewpoints. I do wish it could delve a little more into the details and available statistics on these viewpoints, but one can only wish so much upon a podcast.

Anyway, the third episode is called “Are we feeding kids the wrong foods?” Naturally this caught my eye because of this post, and I had to listen. One of the individuals interviewed is Pamela Druckerman, the author of Bringing Up Bébé. Druckerman says a lot in that interview that is very similar to French Kids Eat Everything: French parents see it as a responsibility to teach children how to enjoy food, the influence of the school system on encouraging children to eat different foods, etc. So I may need to pick up her book while French Kids Eat Everything is fresh on my mind and see if there is anything more to pick up here / any topics where Druckerman disagrees.

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1. Le Billon, K. (2012). French kids eat everything (p. 27). HarperCollins. ↩︎
2. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 93. ↩︎
3. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 114. ↩︎
4. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 214. Rule 1 – Parents, you are in charge of your child’s food education. Children should not be in charge of what they eat. Fear of new foods is heightened when children are confronted with choice. ↩︎
5. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 221. Rule 5 – Eat vegetables all the colors of the rainbow. Don’t eat the same main dish more than once per week. (Tips: Stuff sack, tasting blindfolded can be fun games) ↩︎
6. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 218. Rule 4 – Food is social. The family eats together at the table with no distractions. (Tips: Kids should get your undivided attention at the table. Create rituals like asking each person to tell a story about his or her day. Invite older kids who eat well to dinner for positive peer pressure.) ↩︎
7. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 227. Rule 8 – Take your time for cooking and eating. Slow food is happy food. ↩︎
8. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 114. ↩︎
9. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 214. ↩︎
10. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 118. ↩︎
11. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 108. ↩︎
12. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 128. ↩︎
13. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 130. ↩︎
14. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 146. ↩︎
15. Oster, E. (2019). Cribsheet: A data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting, from birth to preschool (p. 104). Penguin Press. ↩︎
16. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 26. ↩︎
17. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 93. ↩︎
18. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 214. ↩︎
19. Le Billon, French Kids Eat Everything, p. 158. ↩︎
20. https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/France/ ↩︎
21. https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/ ↩︎
22. https://blog.dol.gov/2024/05/09/eco-mom-ics-5-fast-facts-about-mothers-in-the-us-economy#:~:text=On%20top%20of%20performing%20paid,did%20almost%2050%20years%20ago. ↩︎
23. https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol50/19/50-19.pdf ↩︎