Elbows Off the Table, Napkin in the Lap, No Video Games During Dinner: The Modern Guide to Teaching Children Good Manners

By Carol McD. Wallace

Once upon a time girls stopped wearing dresses to school and put on jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts. It was the Age of Aquarius, when old rules of behavior no longer seemed to apply. But now that the flower children have children of their own, they're starting to wonder what the new rules ought to be.

Manners expert Carol McD. Wallace, who has two sons of her own, comes to the rescue with a clear, contemporary guide to what today's parents should teach their children, when to teach it, and how to do so without turning their homes into boot camp. Here in Elbows Off the Table, Napkin in the Lap, No Video Games During Dinner, in the kind of knowing detail only a parent could offer, are step-by-step guides to:
--Basic Training: The dawn of civilized behavior, or how to teach 3- to 5-year-olds to behave at meals, say "please" and "thank you", share, and apologize.
--The Age of Reason: Refining the manners of 6- to 9-year-olds at home and abroad.
--The Young Sophisticate: How to bring the manners of 10- to 12-year olds to high polish.
--Manners for Parents: Everything from when it's okay to bring your child into work to privacy--your own and your children's.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466884786

Book preview

PART I

Basic Training

Ages 3–5

Nobody expects a three-year-old to be polite. Actually, a three-year-old with good manners would be kind of alarming; you’d wonder what the parents had done to get this very small child to behave so uniformly well.

So why bother? Why even attempt something that looks impossible? Why start worrying about having your child sit at the table through dinner when you are mostly concerned about getting some nutrients into her? Why fret about her habit of shrieking in the car when you can barely get the seat belt around her without resorting to violence? Can’t this all wait until things are calmer?

Yes, of course it can. But there are three pressing reasons for starting to teach manners when your children are preschoolers. One is that manners have to be taught sometime, and they’ll be a lot easier if you start early and gradually build skills. The second is that children of this age are so eager to please that it’s a great time to teach them anything. They want to get it right to make you happy. But the best reason for starting to teach manners to preschoolers is simply this: It’s very pleasant to live with children who treat you with even rudimentary courtesy.

A child at eighteen months is a force of nature, and you can’t do much to tame her. She should be this way; investigating the environment is her life work at the moment. But by the time a child is three, she’s learning the boundaries. She’s discovering what’s acceptable and what isn’t. She’s beginning to get civilized. Or socialized, if you’d rather think of it that way. You want her to share with her friends and to use words instead of hitting and to help clean up her toys after a play date. It’s only a step beyond that to add basic politeness, like table manners and saying Please and Thank you.

And believe me, teaching manners to small children is completely worthwhile. Let’s look at the sitting-still-at-the-table issue. If your child is accustomed to sitting and eating for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, this gives you time to sit and have some (possibly disjointed) conversation with the whole family. I wouldn’t suggest that meals are truly social yet, but you can see them heading in that direction. And you don’t have to keep wondering where Ned has taken that hot dog and whether you’ll find it before it starts to smell. You don’t have to keep coaxing Meghan back to the table to eat just one more bite of corn. When she gets up for good, you know that she’s really done. By the time your child is four, family dinner can really be quite pleasant. Amazing!

Of course, you don’t want to squelch your child’s free development of skills and healthy habits. A friend of mine whose young sons are very polite says she’s careful not to nag her three-year-old about chewing with his mouth shut because, she says, I’m more concerned that he chew at all, and enjoy his food. You certainly don’t want to make a child timid or self-conscious by issuing too many directives.

What’s more, there are certain niceties of behavior that preschoolers can’t be taught. Most of them don’t have the manual dexterity or strength to cut their own meat, for instance. Many youngsters are very shy with new grown-ups. Certainly you can’t expect the average preschooler to handle the phone with