Manners Matter All Year Round
September is coming to an end and that means that National Children's Good Manners Month is almost over as well. But as most of us know (and hope) good manners aren't reserved for a specific month, but are instead a year-round practice. Imagine a world with no manners for 11 months of the year!
Luckily for us, as with most skills and practices, the concept of manners can be shared with children at an early age. Most children develop a sense of awareness by the age of 18 months and begin to understand that the people around them have feelings too. This can be a great time to start teaching little ones that their behaviour can affect others.
While working on these habits together, why not try reading a few books on the theme to help generate some discussion on manners, respectfulness and kindness. Here are some titles to get you started:
Please Say Please! by Kyle T. Webster (Ages 3-6)
No Slurping, No Burping!: A Tale of Table Manners by Kara LaReau (Ages 3-7)
Madeline Says Merci: The Always Be Polite Book by John Bemelmans Marciano (Ages 3-7)
Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf by Judy Sierra (Ages 3-7)
Please, Mr. Panda by Steve Antony (Ages 2-5)
Are You Quite Polite?: Silly Dilly Manners Songs by Alan Katz (Ages 5-8)
The rules of etiquette aren’t written in stone and change from time to time, household to household, and from one country to another. Have a look at this manual of manners from 1900 to get a sense of the attitude towards children and manners at that time.
At the end of the day, the message that we’d like to share with children is that the purpose behind manners is to promote social harmony and respect for those around us. In the words of Emily Post: “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.”
2 thoughts on “Manners Matter All Year Round”
It’s so neat that you included a link to the book from the 1900s! I’m totally dying at the title, “Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants.” 😀 Thanks for sharing!
I hope you have a chance to look through the book, Suzanne – it’s quite interesting. Gelett Burgess seemed to have been really into “goops” (the word’s origin has been attributed to him). The library has a few more titles by him and I’d love to take a look at “More goops and how not to be them : a manual of manners for impolite infants depicting the characteristics of many naughty and thoughtless children, with instructive illustrations.” (http://bit.ly/2do0lJS)