Teach your child to have excellent manners

It sometimes seems as though the good old days of children saying “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir,” are gone, and perhaps they are. It is apparent that the words “please” and “thank you” have also experienced a marked decline in usage among the younger set. How can you teach your child to have these valuable social skills that will serve him throughout life?

The first thing that any parent should do is model the behavior that you want to see. Telling the child what to say is not enough. The child needs to hear you say it. For example, when you are in a store, and say, “Excuse me sir, can you please help me find the olives?” your child is hearing an example of how he should speak as well. You should display your own manners consistently; because if you do not, your child will notice and may very well mention it to you. Just as language is learned naturally, so are manners. It is an unfortunate reality that if your child does not display good manners it will reflect back on you.

Of course, if your child is behaving rudely, it is not necessarily your fault. Rude behavior can also be triggered by interactions with peers. This is much easier to correct when a child is younger than it is when he is older. When your child is in preschool and elementary school, he may not realize how rude he sounds when he calls the teacher, “Miss,” or makes requests without saying please. You can tell your child, “In our family, we say please when we ask for something,” and then discuss the reasons for developing that habit.

You can also play games with young children using dolls and stuffed animals. Those tea parties can serve a very important purpose! Perhaps children are not having enough tea parties for their dolls anymore, but you can certainly bring up the idea and participate. What a wonderful opportunity to practice those social skills! Playing with stuffed animals and puppets who use nice words and manners also help your child to see manners as part of his everyday world, and become habitual, like brushing teeth.

One way to help your child to understand the importance of manners is to read books about different social situations in which people are called upon to behave a certain way in what may be an awkward circumstance. The Berenstain Bears series is an excellent one for teaching lessons about social skills for children ages three to eight or so. In fact, one of their books is called, “The Berenstain Bears Forget Their Manners.” Books are an excellent way to make points about manners without your child feeling personally singled out.

Be sure to compliment your child when he uses good manners. You can say, “That certainly was nice when you thanked Mrs. Smith for the brownies she brought us. I’ll bet that made her feel really good.” Children enjoy having the power to cause good feelings in others, definitely encourage them to use it! This is the opposite of reacting strongly to displays of bad manners, which might reinforce the behavior, because even negative attention is attention. If your child behaves rudely, correct him in a matter of fact manner. Do not make a really big deal out of it, because then you are giving him the power to cause you to have a reaction based on his poor behavior. You definitely do not want the behavior to become a pattern.

Explicitly teaching manners is more important than it was when we were growing up. Television programs have changed for the worse. Children do not speak to adults respectfully on television or in the movies, rather, they challenge adults, and often see if they can get the best of them. We live in a culture where television ratings are more important than the values our parents held dear, and where acquiring material items is presented as being more desirable than showing simple acts of kindness. Next time you watch a television show during prime time, keep this idea in mind, and then think back to the sort of shows that were on when you were a child. Even if we turn off the television, these messages won’t go away, because they are pervasive. However, as parents, it is our responsibility to contradict these messages. We may actually need to spend more time teaching manners than our own parents did, as modeling may not be enough anymore.

As your child gets older, you can try role-playing, and asking him to be in the role of his teacher or friend. You want to be able to get him to imagine what it feels like to be spoken to rudely without him actually having to experience it. He may already be experiencing it from peers, and may have developed some rude mannerisms in order to fit in. You will not want him to fit in too well with peers who use rude words and treat others poorly, so at this age, you want to make sure that he is attending a school where the majority of the parents share your values, and inviting friends over who have good manners instead of poor ones. You can also role-play ways to handle potentially difficult situations with peers or teachers, and can be very specific if there is a particular situation that he does not know how to handle.

Make sure that your teenager has the opportunity to spend time with other adults who also use good manners so that he will be able to see how these skills will serve him later in life. This way, he will not be quite as inclined to see them as a family quirk, as he might if he is around many individuals who do not have these skills.

The most important thing is to never give up teaching your child manners. There will always be new situations for him to handle, and negative examples from media and other parts of society. Always model how you want him to behave, even as he gets older, and even if he goes through periods where it appears that he has forgotten everything you have taught him, you can rest assured that he knows what manners are, and will be able to utilize them when needed.