"Occasional"

Pamela Druckerman, the woman behind the book (books!) telling Americans how to have well-behaved, vegetable-eating French children, has written a guide to taking the kids to Paris. It contains amazing advice, everything from "where to find a potty" to "Paris is not a den of anti-Semitism or adultery." (But what to do when the potty contains lewd and anti-Semitic graffiti? Apart from hope that your child can't - yet - read French.) There's advice on how to get food for picky eaters, which... isn't that Druckerman's thing, that children need not be picky eaters? And then she suggests McDonald's?

She doesn't let up entirely, though: "Croissants and pain au chocolat are of course on offer too, though these tend to be occasional treats for French children." What what what? If you're in Paris for a week (or, ahem, a semester), damn straight you're eating croissants every morning. That's your "occasional" right there - that you don't actually live in France. Find some other road to cultural immersion that doesn't involve pastry deprivation.

Or you could go the more ascetic route, as one father advises: "One thing that proved helpful was buying a fresh baguette in the morning when we left the hotel and breaking off pieces of it for them through the day. They were quite happy with that and a bottle of water."