Quotes from Pamela Druckerman

In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.

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.

A lot of French comedy is satire.

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!'

America's parenting customs can shock foreigners.

I've got letters from all over the world saying what you're describing as American parenting is Chilean middle-class parenting, or it is Finnish middle-class parenting, or it is Slovak middle-class parenting.

One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.

My husband is so upset by President Trump's scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims, he refuses to even visit the United States.

When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.

When I was 41, I had a very bad back pain, and it turned out to be Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

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.

When people used to ask me what I missed about America, I would say, 'The optimism.' I grew up in the land of hope, then moved to one whose catchphrases are 'It's not possible' and 'Hell is other people.' I walked around Paris feeling conspicuously chipper.

The question on my husband's birthday is always, What do you get for the man who has nothing?

In your 40s, you kind of know how things are likely to go, and you're better at saying, 'You know what? That just doesn't suit me...' I remember thinking in my 30s, 'I should go to Burning Man. I could be a Burning Man person.' And in my 40s, I'm like, 'You know what? I'm never going to go to Burning Man.'

Every time I pass a cafe, I imagine it being stormed by men with Kalashnikovs.

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.

If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.

The French aren't perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

To be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

When my mother in Florida mentions that she's off to play golf, I think: Golf? In the age of Trump?

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful.

Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'

I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.