What a holiday in France will teach you about better parenting

“Does it taste like a strawberry lollipop from a supermarché, or more like mummy’s perfume?” Christine Bertoli, the wine expert at Languedoc resort Château Capitoul, asks my seven-year-old son as he gingerly holds a white wine glass by its stem and swills its dusky pink contents.

Happily the brisk plonk on offer today is 0 per cent ABV, a lively cabernet grape juice that didn’t make it to the vast wine fermentation vats in the neighbouring cellar. “Letting children taste the flavours of wine is all part of the French philosophy of treating children as petits adultes,” Bertoli explains.

It’s 12 years since the publication of French Children Don’t Throw Food, a bestseller that hymned the tricks and philosophies of French parenting through an outsider’s eyes. Written by the American journalist Pamela Druckerman, the book introduced us to a rarefied monde in which babies sleep through the night, children sit for long, peaceful hours at bistro tables, eating what is put in front of them, and new mothers are “more likely to be seen in skinny jeans than tracksuit bottoms”.

It also introduced scruffy Anglo-Saxons to terms such as goûter (a small snack French kids have at around 4pm, often a reserved sweet treat) and French shibboleths such as the rééducation périnéale (state-funded therapies to whip women’s pelvic floors back in shape).

It doesn’t take holidaymakers long to clock key differences between French and British parenting cultures. Guilty Britons might note fewer small children being babysat by iPads in public spaces, for example, and French kids taking themselves off to tackle black runs unaccompanied at ski resorts. Contrast Château Capitoul’s wine-tasting initiative with reports in January that a pub in London refused to serve apple juice to a five-year-old girl in a champagne flute to toast the New Year with her parents in case it “encouraged” the tot to drink booze.

Set on a vineyard-fringed hilltop overlooking the sanded lagoons of La Clape, Château Capitoul is one of four vineyard hotels in the Domaine & Demeure’s Languedoc stable. A collaboration between the French wine producing family Bonfils and the Irish hoteliers Karl O’Hanlon and Anita Forte, the villa site has the usual 2020s luxury trappings: fine dining, an infinity pool with 180-degree views over sweeping vineyards and an elegant full-service spa. It also goes hard on all things viticulture.

Amongst the wine offerings are the on-site cave, which hosts daily tastings with Bertoli; a soon-to-launch immersive wine cellar tour; and initiatives to introduce kids to the hallowed products of the vine. As well as tandem wine and wine juice tasting for parents and kids, these include a summer camp where children learn the wine-making process and play amid the property’s vines. “Why should life’s great pleasures be only for adults?” Bertoli asks. “For the French, parents and children do not inhabit separate worlds.”

In 2022, Dr Jo Mueller, a British clinical psychologist who specialises in parenting, was sitting in the summer sunshine outside a restaurant next to Lake Annecy, in southeastern France. Mueller and her husband Adam had ordered an amuse bouche of Dordogne foie gras and were amazed that her son and daughter, then aged four and two, were presented with their own tiny portions.

“I think I told the kids it was a type of ham,” Mueller laughs. For a while Mueller lived between France and the UK and says the stereotypes about French parenting are accurate. “French kids do not have their own special foods and are expected to sit and eat adult food at the table because they are seen less as independent people and more as part of the family,” she says. Meanwhile, Mueller adds, there’s little in the way of “helicopter” parenting or parenting fads in France.

“There is one way of doing things and that is the traditional French way.” Mueller also believes that the vous and tu structure of the French language, with children typically addressing elders with the polite “vous”, instils an intergenerational respect that’s absent in the UK.

As any Briton who’s had to cobble together dinner for hungry kids from aperitif nibbles will know, French kids eat later (usually around 8pm with their parents) and go to bed around 9pm (an hour later than the average British youngster). At Château Capitoul our family of three was, in true British style, seated for dinner at 7pm, with French families only beginning to arrive with their babes in arms as we were left.

Guillaume Marly, the French joint MD of London’s five-star Hotel Café Royal and Hotel Lutetia in Paris said that French hoteliers have to adapt to this difference if they want to cater to UK guests: “In the UK, kids tend to eat earlier, around 5pm, and in France, whilst the diets are more similar than you might think, children eat more fresh, raw vegetables, and, of course, cheese.” Most ultra-luxury hotels will cater to early dining, however, something Marly says is also demanded by American tourists.

“There’s zero concept in France that kids’ bedtime means adult time can start,” Mueller says of night-owl French children. “On the other hand, it’s very normal for parents of babies to get a sitter to go out to a restaurant for adult time.”

Although (posh) chicken nuggets have made incursions in the French capital in recent years, designated children’s menus are so thin on the ground that the Paris Office de Tourisme makes a feature of the handful of restaurants that offer anything for smalls beyond the obligatory steak haché (the French bunless beef burger). They include brasserie Bofinger, which offers twists on its famous fruits de mer platters stripped of more challenging additions such as whelks and langoustines.

A guide for French tourism professionals, written by the Brittany regional development authority, weighs in – fabulously – on the peccadilloes of the British family tourist. “Les Britanniques”, it reads: “are used to museums that open all day from 9 to 5 and have a lunch space on-site as well as soft-play areas for children. They like less formality and are very sensitive to safety messaging – ‘mind the step’, ‘mind your head’ – and quick to claim damages in the case of injury.”

Is this notion of two nations divided by distinct parenting methods convincing to this parent-traveller? Yes and no. On one hand the extended family group at a table is an indisputable feature of French life; on the other hand these days I routinely see Parisian parents plugged into their devices at restaurants, barely aware of the steak tartare arriving at their elbow. So on the point of better parenting en France, at least, the jury’s out.

Back at the Château Capitoul wine juice tasting, how is my petit adulte getting on? Unlike his maman, Leo clearly isn’t a merlot man. “It tastes like my sports socks,” he simply concludes. “Très bien!” Bertoli beams.

Sally Howard was a guest at Château Capitoul, where a two-bedroom villa with a garden (sleeping four) costs from £400 per night (chateaucapitoul.com; 0345 686 6506)