More about French Parenting

I know.  I just blogged about this darn article.  But like I said, it has made me think and there is more to say.

I consider myself a good mother, but after I read this article, I immediately began to question my own parenting skills.  I found myself yelling more, re-thinking my house rules.  Which in turn utterly confused my children.  It made me stop and ask myself "what the heck am I doing and why?"

Why did it make me feel so insecure?  I realized that when we moved here, as part of my process to adapt to a new culture, I rejected parts of my own American-ness.  I was insecure in a new place, trying to fit in.  This article brought a lot of those initial insecure feelings back to me.  Over the years, I have learned to overcome that insecurity, and instead embrace both cultures and try to see, and apply, the good from both.

I suppose the point of a good parenting book and/or article is to provoke thought and make you examine your own parenting methods. The author raises some interesting points, and it puts reading this book on my ever-growing "to do" list.  But  while she raised some good points, there wasn't much about "how" or "what" us American parents can actually do about it to ultimately become better parents.  (At least in the article there aren't any answers, maybe we have to buy the book to find that out?)  Meanwhile, let me shove past my initial defensiveness and insecurity and maybe I can take what I've learned here to try to help with that.

For example, restaurants.  In the article she talks about restaurants and how the french children behaved while hers didn't.  Here's what I've noticed about restaurants.  Unlike in the United States, there aren't a lot of concessions made for children in restaurants.  Most restaurants don't open until 7pm.  They don't serve children's drinks in plastic cups with lids and silly straws.  You are lucky to find a highchair, and in some cases, a children's menu.  At first glance, this makes it appear that children aren't welcome in restaurants.  This is not true (well, most of the time it's not true).  A lot of it relates to cultural difference, but more than that it's that the expectations for children are higher.  So we adapted and here's how.

At home, I threw out most of my sippy cups and lids.  (I saved two or three, for sick kids that need to take water to bed and for airplanes.)     Every night, I set the table with glass glasses and real silverware, even Miss B gets a table knife.  If a glass breaks, it breaks.  If it spills, it spills.  It's practice for those nights at other people's houses or a restaurant.  On special occasions, my kids even get a wine glass for their sparkling apple juice.  If having a wine glass or a knife is going to be a novelty at a restaurant, of course the kid is going to bang the knife against the glass.  If it's something they see every night at dinner, they know what to do with it.  (We're still working on not banging them around, but I grow more and more confident every day.)  This "practice" isn't just good for the kids, it makes me more confident as well.  When we go out I'm not just waiting for the glass to break or the drink to spill.  I have faith and confidence in them, which not only means that I can let them talk to their friends but I get to do the same.

When we go out, I always make sure I have my own markers and paper for the kids to use to color while they wait.  And when I look around the restaurant, I see that other parents do the same.  And some kids even have their little faces glued to a Nintendo DS system (we try not to resort to that, but there have been times I have stuck my iPod loaded with Blues Clues episodes in my purse...just in case).  No booster seat?  No problem.  That backless toddler booster car seat that Monkey uses works perfect at the table for Miss B.

If we're going out late, I make sure my kids have a substantial snack about two hours before.  By that I don't mean cakes or cookies.  I give them a snack that would maybe even qualify as dinner if it had to.  Like a small sandwich or cheese roll-up.  The point is that it's not enough to really "be" dinner, but enough to tide them over and keep their blood sugar in check so they are not crazy and screaming when we sit down to the table.  It's also enough for me to not care too much about how much they actually eat at dinner.

Which raises another interesting topic that she also brings up in her article, "snacking."  But this really is about another entirely new cultural difference, that really deserves its own blog entry altogether.

But do I really dare devote another blog entry to this?  Oh, I suppose if I must, I must.  To be continued....