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" America's parenting customs can shock foreigners. "

Pamela Druckerman

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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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" I was scared to say I was in my 40s because at that point, it sounded really old, and to out myself as a middle-aged human - I felt very awkward about it. "

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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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" I guess we're all supposed to get used to living in a more dangerous world. "

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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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" The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I'm not French. "

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" A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made. "

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" Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark. "

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" Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame. "

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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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" 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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" What you can say, what French parents say to their kids is, 'You don't have to eat everything, honey, you just have to taste it.' And it's that tasting little by little by little that gets kids more familiar with the food and more comfortable with it and more likely to eat it the next time. "

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