French defense plans I'm working with my 1300 USCF kid on his opening repertoire. In the French defense, I have a few questions/problems I'm trying to resolve:

1) In many of the closed lines (after e5) we go after placing a knight on f5. Usually we go at it with ..h5, ..Nh6, ...Nf5. 
a) Sometimes people take the knight once it reaches h6 and we recapture with the rook. I struggle for a good plan after that, especially since the rooks are disconnected.
b) When the knight does get to f5 it sometimes gets challenged by the white (light squared) bishop. The question is whether to reinforce this f5 knight with g6 and allow the capture, recapturing with gxf5. We try to play on the open g-file. I haven't been getting good practical results and wonder if I've got this wrong.

2) This question pertains to the advance variation. I've suggested using a quick ..c5, ..Qb6, ..Bd7, ..Bb5 to swap off the bad bishop. In this line we don't have the french Qside pawn storm at first. Moreover, 
I've been telling my son that if white breaks the tension with dxc5 we can recapture with ..Bxc5 which I thought was a "French dream".
But recently in this "dream position", I've been hit with b4 and a queenside
pawn storm initiative. Connected with 1a) above I've been getting bad games
(no black queenside pawnstorm, and no Nf5 post). I'm wondering if there's
a simple thing to do to create some black queen side space when the Queen
is out front (perhaps ..a5)?
I would suggest that you look up some theory in the French defense if you're planning on using it. What we seem to have here is a complete home brew.

For example, playing ...h5 before playing ...Nh6 is very uncommon. One of the reasons is that playing h5 as black actually makes Nh6 harder to play for black, as Bxh6  cannot really be answered with gxh6, as the h5 pawn becomes very weak. Thus black is encouraged to play Rxh6, which isn't ideal. If you want to play Nh6 in the advance variation, I suggest you play it without playing h5 first. You do not have to worry much about Bxh6 from white, as that makes b2 harder to defend, and gxh6 doesn't really give black many problems.

More importantly, if you are afraid of playing with the light squared bishop as black in the french, then the opening is not worth playing at all. I think that you may be underestimating the potential of that bishop, if all you want to do with it is trading it. A French player has to be able to play with the light square bishop as black to be successful in the long run. In essence, it's not worth the trouble to trade off the "bad" bishop.