Bringing Up Bébé summary

Children can be picky eaters, especially in the United States. American children often end up eating only a very limited amount of food. But not so in France!

Children can be trained to eat virtually anything. But when the author visited a range of seafood, Italian and Cuban restaurants in the United States, she found that most offered them the same items: hamburgers, chicken fingers and pizza.  

How many times have you eaten a sandwich at your desk during work, or grabbed a snack on the way home? We tend to enforce mealtimes on kids, without always following them ourselves. But the French know that mealtimes are about more than just staying slim.

Fixed mealtimes help reduce calorie intake, so they reduce the risk of obesity too. Nearly all French children eat four times a day: at 8 a.m., midday, 4 p.m. and finally at 8 p.m.

When American couples have children, they tend to view their child’s birth as the end of their previous life and the start of a new one. American parents are under a lot of societal pressure to put their family’s needs before their own – whether in terms of passions, money or sex.

In France, it’s considered unhealthy to sacrifice your sex life for your children. In fact, the French believe that the loss of sex drive is a psychological disorder. It’s viewed as a form of depression and is treated as such.

These days, people are doing a lot of work to break down the gender divide. French women do too, but they have a different take on the issue. They believe that we need to embrace certain gender disparities, and celebrate our differences.

So French women don’t expect men to match them in their child caring skills. According to Debra Ollivier, the author of What French Women Know, French women are content to view men as different kinds of people who simply aren’t as good at buying diapers or scheduling appointments with the pediatrician. French men aren’t under pressure to be perfect like American men are.

The term helicopter parenting has gained a lot of currency in the United States in recent years. It refers to modern parents’ tendency to hover around all aspects of their child’s life, inhibiting their ability to think for themselves and develop their autonomy.

This isn’t how it works in France.