Well-mannered children are a delight to be around. With this in mind, we do our best to impress good manners upon our children, with varying degrees of success. I have no idea, for example, when using a knife and fork properly will finally kick in. I suppose we just keep trying… Other table manners aren’t too bad – Pearl will ask to leave the table (Fainjin doesn’t, but we’re working on it), and usually remembers to thank whomever did the cooking.
In some areas, we’re doing quite well. “Please” and “Thank you” are regularly heard, not just to grown-ups but to each other as they share toys (when they remember to share), or ask for stories. It’s heart-warming to hear “Sto-wee, peeeeze Pul” as Fainjin climbs onto the couch next to her, with book in hand.
Now that Pearl is old enough to have to pay for a bus ticket, she regards it as a high honour to have to stand up for an adult, and anxiously scans the bus hoping it will fill up so she can offer her seat.
Thank-you letters are something of a battle, but are usually completed and sent out within a reasonable time. I started when she was a baby, writing them for her (obviously) but making her mark on them by holding a pen in her hand and “helping”. As she has grown, the thank-you letters have become more her work than mine, progressing from letters from me with her “drawings” on the back, through her writing her own name at the end, to her writing a sentence as well as her own name, and now she writes the whole thing. I hate to disillusion you, if you’ve received one recently, but they are not exactly individually crafted. We sit down at the start and make up a form letter for her to copy, with a few choices so she’s not writing the same letter a dozen times. Her writing skills have improved markedly over the past year, so I’m hoping that we will soon progress beyond form letters.
Meanwhile, Fainjin is about to enter the “writing his own name at the bottom” stage, while Babess can now make her own mark instead of me having to hold the pen or crayon in her hand. I’d like to think that their sister’s good example will make them think that writing thank-you letters is a completely normal and unremarkable part of life, but I know that complaining about having to write them is as strong a tradition as mothers enforcing them.
Someone tried to tell me recently that children of Fainjin’s age were “too young to know about please and thank you”. I was astonished and appalled. After all, whenever we cross the road at school, courtesy of the school patrol (10-year-old children with orange vests and safety lollipops), I thank them, and hear a little “aa-ooo” echo from Babess. Sometimes she even gets it out before I do!
