FRENCH KIDS EAT EVERYTHING / FOLLOW UP

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First off, I want to say THANK YOU all so much for your fantastic feedback on my French Kids Eat Everything post. Clearly we weren’t the only family trying to figure out how to make eating with our kid(s) a pleasurable experience. Everything in this post has been added and incorporated to the original post, so if you prefer you can just read that!

Since posting, I’ve been accumulating some of your questions for a big Q&A post, including some of my own questions that I emailed to my cousin in France!

If you have questions, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them all next week!

A few updates…

Setting the table…
I mentioned briefly that we set the dinner table every night for dinner. I wanted to be more specific about that. We have Gigi help us set the table. She picks out her place mat, plate, fork/knife/spoon, and cup and puts them on the table. Some evenings she’s more excited about helping than others but she usually eagerly participates. We always ask her to use the appropriate utensils while eating. She struggles with successfully using the utensils with every dish and usually uses them and her hands, but she’s learning.

Patience…
In the book French Kids Eat Everything the author, Karen, talks a lot about how important it is for kids to learn to wait patiently. That’s part of the reason we all wait until we are seated and have said what we are grateful for. Last night we were all starving (dinner was a bit late) and I said to her, “Wait, what are you grateful for.”, and she looked right at me and said, “No Mama. I can’t.”, and started eating! Actually I was right there with her! But most of the time it’s a great opportunity to ask a small bit of patience from her… occasionally she even stops us from taking the first bite by saying, “WAIT! I grateful…..” These little “grateful” moments have become some of my favorite Gigi quotes. The other night she said, “I grateful…. maybe…. PENIS!!!” Ha. She’s learning about anatomy.

The point is, I find that she’s been getting more and more patient as a result of these little moments. I find that I can say, “You can have this when we get home.”, or “We can do/have/read/see that in a little bit.” I think it’s a lot about building trust. She knows that I will follow through with it.

Vegetables before dinner…
In my original post, I mentioned that we don’t always do the veggie course first. Usually it’s a part of the meal. I thought I should give some specific examples. If our dinner is veggie heavy (like veggie lasagna) than we don’t normally have another veggie before dinner. But If I’m introducing a new vegetable, or if the vegetable is likely to get ignored in favor of pasta, than I will serve it first. I also am sure not to give her too much pasta. We are trying to follow the rule that she has to at least try/taste everything on her plate before she can have more pasta. We ask that she eats three bites of everything before she can have more of something she’s finished (usually pasta or bread which almost always gets eaten first)! And then it’s only a few bites worth of the pasta. For example, I love making Penne with Butternut Squash, Goat Cheese and Prosciutto for dinner but when I serve it up for her I make sure to only give her a little pasta along with everything else. That way she’s “forced” to eat other things before she can have more pasta. In other words, we try to keep everything in balance. If she has a few bites of everything she can have a few more bites of pasts. Sometimes we don’t giver her any more pasta until her plate is (mostly) clean. I do this when I know it’s a dinner she loves. With the Butternut Squash pasta dish, I know that she has learned to love the squash, the goat cheese, the prosciutto, and she’s working on the basil and red onion. So, I know that there is plenty of food on her plate that she enjoys.

This is what our current eating schedule looks like…
7:30 breakfast
12:00 lunch
3:30 small snack and 1/2 cup milk
6:00 dinner
7:30 bedtime

Snack time…
I was finding at times the Gigi didn’t seem totally hungry at dinner time so we cut back the quantity at snack time, we try to keep to about six bites. She’ll have half a piece of buttered toast, a few bites of yogurt and a couple slices of apple, one cookie. I try to avoid protein as much as possible.

Eating together…
When I did the original post, we were mostly focusing on dinners, I was planning and making breakfast and lunches but we weren’t really eating them together regularly. But, over time we saw that Gigi was acting out a bit at those meals. Dropping food on the floor. Spilling her water on purpose. So we determined that having someone sit with her and eat with her would be a good thing, for all of us! Kyle and I both usually skip breakfast, or I would find that I wanted carbohydrates around 10am because I didn’t eat something healthier in the morning (I’m blaming pregnancy for part of this). Now we usually sit down together and have a bit bowl of fruit and yogurt or eggs and whole grain toast. The social eating aspect of the French approach really does make a big difference. Now she eats at all meals and is getting better at telling us when she’s all done (as opposed to “showing” us by smearing food on the table).

For those of you who mentioned getting your babies with few teeth to start eating solid foods, I would recommend reading Baby Led Weaning. I haven’t read it myself but it’s been recommended by a few friends and my sister has had great success with it. Her nine month old eats everything (seriously, everything). The concept is essentially no purées. I’m ordering a copy to read before our daughter is born!

A few thoughts on dessert…
We don’t have dessert every night. But if Gigi has had a particularly great meal and tried everything on her plate, I’ll often cut up an apple for us all to share, or we will each get five or six chocolate chips, or a little ice cream. I don’t think of it as a reward and I don’t tell her that it’s because she ate everything. It’s simply because I think she earned it. She doesn’t get to the end of each meal and ask for a treat but when she does it’s a good opportunity to say: “Yes. We all tried everything and I think it would be fun to have _____.” or “No. We aren’t going to have dessert tonight because we didn’t try everything on our plate.” She seems to understand both answers. One thing to keep in mind too is that she has no idea or expectation about what dessert entails. The other night Gigi asked me, “We have a treat?” and I told her, “I got nothin’!”, and she got so excited and squealed, “OH BOY!” It was so sweet, I got up and found a little something. But it taught me that, she doesn’t know of care what’s for dessert… it’s just the idea of having earned something.

Being patient…
This has been and continues to be a process with ups and downs. We try to enjoy every little success and not get caught up with “failures”. I feel really proud that G has learned to eat and love squashes, cucumber, potatoes, zucchini, kale, carrots, radishes (and those are just a few the vegetables) and willingly tries everything from broccoli to eggplant. Sometimes they go in, get chewed a bit and come back out but we don’t say anything or make a big deal out of it… I think it’s a success that she’s trying it and I’m confident that things will make it to her stomach eventually. She seems to be outgrowing her “sensitivity” to texture. I find it really helpful to talk about new foods, at the store, while being prepared, while being served. For example: At the store: “These radishes are pretty! What color are they?” While preparing: “This radish is white on the inside! Can you help me put it on our salad?” While eating: “What does it taste like? Is it crunchy like an apple? Maybe it’s a little spicy?” The more she’s in an exploratory state of mind the more she seems to eat! I still cannot get her to enjoy green peas on their own (it’s fine if they’re mixed into a dish)… tasting these usually means licking one… but I am confident we’ll get there eventually. But I don’t worry too much about it. I also feel comfortable that if she decides she really does not like green peas, then that’s her choice. She’s eating enough variety of vegetables that I don’t worry about it. She does have her own individual tastes, as we all do. We will all measure our little successes differently since our kids are all different. For me every time she tries, eats, enjoys, says “that’s tasty!” to a new food, I feel proud and I count that as a success.

I hope this is helpful! Please post your questions and I’ll answer them next week along with some answers from France!