Pamela Druckerman Quotes
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Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver's license, and your diploma. Then, in your 20s and 30s, you romance potential partners, find jobs, and learn to support yourself.
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I've gotten used to being a foreigner.
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When I tell French parents that I know lots of American kids who will eat only pasta or only white rice, they can't believe it. I mean, they can understand how the kid left to his own devices might do that, but they can't imagine that parents would allow that to happen.
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I don't like rules, because rules, you have to follow.
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Get rid of the idea of kids' food. Kids can eat whatever adults can eat. You know, there is one dinner, and everyone has the same thing.
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Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.
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I guess we're all supposed to get used to living in a more dangerous world.
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In my 40s, I expect to finally reap the average-looking girl's revenge. I've entered the stage of life where you don't need to be beautiful; simply by being well-preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty.
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When we're in the U.S., my kids instantly start snacking all the time. I don't know how it happens. There is just more food available all the time. There aren't all these little different varieties of snack foods in France.
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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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Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists.
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Earnestness makes British people gag.
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Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.
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Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.
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In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.
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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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One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.
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A lot of French comedy is satire.
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When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely.
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Around my neighborhood, I'm known as the American who talks to her computer while she types.
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My family was once invited to lunch at a chateau owned by a friend of a friend. As we drove our rental car up to the giant castle, my kids gasped and said, 'They must be rich!'
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When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.
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Parisiennes rarely walk around wearing the giant diamonds that are de rigueur in certain New York neighborhoods.
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We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true.