When my daughter was born in January 2025, I found myself engaged with a part of the internet I had previously only glimpsed in passing. Overnight, it seemed, my TikTok For You page was flooded with Day in My Life videos showing mothers across the world filming their daily routines: changing diapers, washing bottles, rocking screaming babies. I’d never been much interested in vlogging-type content, but now I found them strangely comforting to watch. They confirmed how similar we new mothers were in our exhaustion, in the mundanity of the everyday and in how small our lives had become in the “newborn bubble.”
But there was a side of that parenting-focused internet that was less comforting; if anything, it seemed to only stoke all the anxieties inherent to being a new mother. This was the part that trained a moral lens on every parenting-related choice, casting judgment on other moms for the kinds of diapers they bought, whether they sleep-trained or co-slept. And this part of the internet made something that should be so simple — feeding your child — seem like an impossible, herculean task, one that, if you got it wrong, meant that not only would your child suffer, but also that you were a Bad Mom.
Just a few of the numerous considerations parents must make when it comes to feeding: Breastfeed, formula feed or combo feed? Exclusively breastfeeding or pumping? When do you introduce solids? Purees or baby-led weaning? Protein-heavy or vegetable-forward? Sugar or no sugar? Dairy or soy? Snacks or no snacks? The list goes on. And while the internet has no doubt been an incredibly helpful resource for answering these questions, it’s also a fount of constantly shifting, often conflicting advice that can leave new parents more confused than when they first began.
“Parents are constantly hearing that there’s only one right way to feed a baby or a child. If you don’t do baby-led weaning, your child will become picky. If you do baby-led weaning, then they won’t. You’re told to pressure kids to eat, and also never pressure them. It’s confusing,” Jennifer Anderson, a dietitian and the author of Feed Them Well, said in a recent Substack interview.
Couple that with the government’s recently shifting guidance on nutrition — including a crackdown on the artificial food dyes lurking in a lot of kid-oriented treats — and it’s no surprise that some parents are making a conscious effort to remove all the noise and return to a simpler way of feeding. TikTok’s recent “butter mom” trend is perhaps the best example of this. The ’90s-coded aesthetic archetype rejects diet culture and moralistic judgments around “good” and “bad” foods — there’s no hand-wringing over going full fat as long as everything is eaten in moderation — and instead embraces a return to comforting, nourishing meals cooked with whole ingredients. It’s a direct response to the “almond mom,” who glorifies diet culture, obsessively counts calories and prizes sugar-free and low-fat over the alternatives.
When food content creator Madison Vitale had her first baby late last year, she immediately began thinking about how she could translate her love of food into healthy, delicious meals for her son.
“I’m obsessed with food, and I want to be giving my kid the best, and not like anything processed or kind of junk. I just feel like I eat good, so he should eat good, I guess,” she tells Yahoo.
For Vitale, who identifies as a “butter mom,” that means shopping organic, cooking whole foods and loading up on full-fat butter and dairy.
“Because I’m in the food space, I’m around all kinds of food all the time, whether it’s fatty [foods], tons of sugar, cookies, sweets, things like that,” she says. “And I just live a life with everything in moderation. And so [I’m] showing him that like, yeah, we’re active, we move our bodies, but also we enjoy. We don’t restrict things.”
The “butter mom” approach to eating may be a somewhat new trend in the U.S., but eating full-fat, whole-ingredient foods in moderation and without restriction is just the way things are done in other countries like France, where my daughter was born. In the U.S., 3 out of 5 parents make separate meals for their children. But in Paris, where I live with my French husband and daughter, kids eat everything the parents eat. My daughter, now 15 months, loves lobster and scallops, soft, salty cheeses, mushrooms roasted in olive oil and thyme and the crunchy knob end of a baguette.
I realize this sounds obnoxious, but it happened without me even trying — at her nanny share, which she attends five days a week, her French “assistante maternelle” has been feeding her fresh fish, seasonal vegetables and homemade fruit compotes since she was 7 months old. In fact, the meals French kids receive at day care and at school are so healthy, so gourmet, they’re practically legendary. When the late chef and journalist Anthony Bourdain visited an elementary school cafeteria in Lyon in 2014, he observed: “The kids attack their food like hungry trenchermen, wiping out three servings in the time it takes me to eat one,” before declaring of the butternut velouté: “This is good.”
Kimberley Blanchot, a Parisian publicist and mother of 5-year-old Amelia, agrees that “schools in France have healthier offerings.”
“They might seem less exciting to kids, but the menus are quite varied throughout the week and pay closer attention to balancing the key nutrients (protein, vegetables and carbs),” she says.
“Amelia is at an age where she’s picky and doesn’t eat as many vegetables as she used to, but I still try to get her to taste new things regularly and make sure she has a balanced diet,” Blanchot adds.
Part of the reason French schools offer such well-balanced lunches is that food is truly key to the culture, as important a subject to learn as math or history.
“France has a very strong food culture in the sense that there’s specific moments where you eat specific things, and it’s really part of the culture. And I feel like that doesn’t really exist in the U.S.,” says Isabelle Bertolami, an American dietitian and mother to two French-American kids who lives in Aix-en-Provence.
When she lived in the U.S., Bertolami says she’d frequently hit up places like Whole Foods for the “healthy” versions of snack foods. She loved brands like Halo Top for low-calorie ice cream or protein-packed popcorn. But after moving to France, all that changed.
“I’m in a totally different food space since moving here, just simply because I realized, coming here, it’s sort of just like back to basics,” she says. “Of course, there’s probably just as much processed food as you could get in the U.S., but the fact that there’s such a culture around going to your local market, knowing your butcher, knowing your fruits and vegetable person, and you kind of form these relationships, that’s been a big change for me.”
And while there’s been a push in the U.S. to teach kids about “intuitive eating” in recent years — the practice of listening to your body and following your hunger cues — that style of eating has long been the norm in France. In one 2021 study on the portion sizes French parents feed their preschool-aged children, researchers found that “determining portion sizes is an intuitive action that depends on habits and mainly arises from experiences with feeding their child and his/her appetitive traits,” and that “most parents do not search for information/recommendations to guide their practices.”
“France raises intuitive eaters,” Bertolami says. “From such a young age, they expose them to so many tastes and flavors and food. So they start off with a really good base, but at the same time, no one’s ever really restricting things from them.”
For many French children, there’s a strict schedule throughout the day that dictates when you’re supposed to eat: breakfast, lunch, “goûter” around 4 p.m. (a snack, typically something sweet, like Nutella on a piece of baguette) and dinner. This schedule keeps kids from snacking all day, and means they’re actually hungry at mealtimes. By contrast, in the U.S., a recent study found that snacking makes up about 27% of American children’s daily caloric intake, and there’s been a substantial increase in snacking over the last few decades.
“It’s shocking when I go back to the States and I’m with my friends and all their kids, and it’s just, like, snacks, packaged snacks, packaged snacks. They’re everywhere, right? And I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy,'” says Bertolami.
Taking cues from the French has long been a favorite pastime of American parents. In 2012, Pamela Druckerman published Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, and it quicky hit the New York Times bestseller list. In the book, Druckerman, an American writer living with her family in Paris, interviews French families to gain insight into what American parents can learn from them. To many French moms, the revelations gleaned may seem rather obvious — teaching patience and self-control around food, allowing kids the space to learn independence and self-soothing — but for some American fans of the book, it’s changed how they parent.
“[The book] taught me to relax at meals at restaurants and to expose my little kids to fancy foods even if they’re not accustomed to it,” a TikTok mom named Bethany Ellen posted recently, calling the book “life-changing.”
Of course, it’s much easier to encourage healthy eating habits in children in France, a country where everything from the health care system to the parental leave system is set up to support families, and where organic and healthy foods are much more affordable. Even though I’m a freelance writer, the French health care system paid for my three-month maternity leave, and once I went back to work, it helped subsidize child care. (And don’t even ask about how inexpensive it was to give birth.) When families receive so much support from the state, it frees them up to have more time, money and energy to focus on living a healthier life. And in large cities like Paris, there’s no such thing as a food desert; markets and grocery stores are practically on every corner.
“I do feel like, in the U.S., motherhood just isn’t as balanced, because it’s harder to have child care. Everything feels a lot harder,” says Bertolami.
With so much government support, it’s easy to see why France treats feeding children less as a problem to solve and more as a structure to inherit—and why, despite the shift toward a “butter mom” lifestyle, that might be a lot more difficult to do for parents in the U.S. But that won’t stop American moms like Vitale from trying.
“Butter has gotten such a bad rap of, ‘Oh it’s bad for you,’ but honestly, it’s something that I enjoy. It makes me happy. And I just don’t want my son to be shying away from anything,” Vitale says.
“I want to have a house that’s full of home-cooked food,” she adds. “Not, like, you know, a cabinet full of random snacks.”
Dining and Cooking