American - Writer | -
When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful.
Pamela Druckerman
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Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.
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Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide.
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The overarching conventional wisdom - what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as articles of faith - is that restrictive diets generally don't make you healthier or slimmer. Instead, it's best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you're hungry.
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We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we're not sure what's in them or whether they're good for us. And we expect to customize practically everything: parenting, news, medicines, even our own faces.
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Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits.
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As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.
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Where Americans might coo over a child's most inane remark to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening.
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Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.
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Earnestness makes British people gag.
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I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.
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One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.
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