Training A Child to Speak Politely

Q: What would be a good way to teach children to address adults as either ma’am or sir? We live in the South, and this type of respect is very common. I want my two children, ages two and five, to do this as a sign of respect and a nod to our culture. But I’m always nagging my older child to add the ma’am and sir. I’m tired of sounding like a broken record. I don’t want to make this a big deal, but I want results and no more nagging!

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A: We, too, believe in adding ma’am and sir after yeses and nos, and it took a little time before our children caught on. We simply decided that it was a big deal and then worked on it with all of the kids at once (the youngest was around three at the time).

The easiest way to do this is to tell your children that you expect them to answer any adult—including you—with yes/no ma’am/sir. Inform the older child once, then stop giving second chances. No prompting, “Yes, what?” The younger one, you’ll need to make it more of a game, but he should follow the example of his older sibling in time.

When he doesn’t answer correctly by just saying, “Yes,” then send him directly to his room for an hour, keep him inside for an hour or pull the plug on a favorite TV show for the day—whatever you think will make an impression on him. At five, he’s plenty old enough to remember to say ma’am and sir.

With the holidays just around the corner, now is the perfect time for practicing his manners. Before we head out to go trick-or-treating, I remind my children that if they don’t remember to say, “Trick or Treat” and “Please,” and “Thank you,” when they knock on door—in a voice loud enough for us to hear them—then the candy they receive goes into Mom and Dad’s stash. That’s enough to make them overcome their “shyness” and remember their manners.

Coming in early 2014, Sarah and Mary Elizabeth Peritti will speak on Parenting With Love & Leadership in a four-part webinar series. Contact Sarah through her website for more information.

Parenting Basics: “You can do that yourself”

Grandma was right! There is an easy way and a hard way to raise kids. By and large, today’s parents are choosing the hard way. This series of blogs will tackle familiar phrases that used to be commonplace but fell out of favor during the last few decades of the 20th century—and why parents should not be afraid to follow the sentiment expressed in the phrases.

How many times have you done something for your children that they can do for themselves? Most of us do way too much for our seemingly helpless kids. The phrase “You can do that yourself” has not gotten much of a workout these days.

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It’s hard to watch our kids struggle with a task, whether it’s learning to tie their own shoes or figuring out the fingering on a piano piece or finishing a particularly tricky bit of math homework. But what we fail to realize is that by jumping in and doing the task for the child—or significantly helping a child with the project—we are actually enabling her to not learn to do it herself. 

Many parents have forgotten how to say to their children, “You can do that yourself.” Instead, enabling has taken over modern parenting. Enabling is evident whenever a parent does something for the child that the child is perfectly capable of doing for himself. Many parents fail to figure the cost of enabling and how it affects the child—and themselves. The cost of enabling to the child is increased dependence on parents, which increases the anxiety of the mother.

The child feels inadequate and helpless, lacks problem-solving and competency skills, and lacks appreciation for his personal strengths and weaknesses. In turn, that fuels the mother’s increased frustration at having to teach the same things constantly to the child.

Enabling also lowers the child’s academic performance, triggering in the mother a tendency to personalize her child’s school performance, as she ties his school performance with her worth/performance as a mom. 

To break the enabling cycle, we as parents need to stop doing so much for our kids. Start by taking counting to ten and repeating to yourself, “She can do it herself” whenever you see your child struggling or getting frustrated with a task. Turn away and focus on something else when your child is attempting to figure something out, such as homework, so that you won’t be tempted to jump in too soon.

Sure it's hard to watch your child fall down while learning to ride a bike and skin her knee. But only by testing her limits will she learn the sweet taste of doing it by herself. Give your child the breathing room to fail—and you will be surprised at how often she succeeds.

In October, Sarah will be giving a series of talks on The Well-Behaved Child: Discipline that Really Works through the City of Fairfax Parks and Recreation Department. Also in October, Sarah and Mary Elizabeth Peritti will speak on Parenting With Love & Leadership in a four-part webinar series. Contact Sarah through her website for more information.

A Modern Umbilical Cord

A very long time ago, mothers used long apron strings to keep a toddler out of harms way, tying the child to a piece of furniture that allowed the kid movement but not to run away or fall into the fireplace. Most parents would agree that it’s not necessary to have apron strings today, but what they don’t seem to realize is that cell phones have replaced apron strings as a way to keep a child connected to the mother ship. (Let’s face it: most fathers are not the ones advocating for their kids to have cell phones—it’s the mothers who feel the need to stay in near-constant touch with the children.)

Today’s child is connected to his parents more than any other previous generation because of the rise of mobile devices. An article in Psychology Today put it this way: “The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises,” the child calls the parent immediately for guidance. “They’re not learning to manage for themselves.”

Cell phones for kids have stunted their growth in that children are not learning how to internalize an image of their parents and the values/advice Mom and Dad imparted to them. That image and recollection is crucial for children because it’s used whenever they find themselves facing difficulty or uncertainty, becoming the adults they know and being able to make a good decision. But with Mom or Dad only a quick call away, kids are not figuring things out on their own, relying instead on calling their parents for the answer.

Another way cell phones are undermining growth is the inability to plan ahead. Teens and college students often phone friends with things like, “I’m finished studying. Let’s go out for pizza.” If they didn’t have mobile devices, they would have to think about their schedules and arrange a meeting time—planning ahead.

Mobile phones also “promote fragility by weakening self-regulation.” In other words, cell phones condition the user to getting what she wants right away. That in turn generates frustration and impatience at the drop of a hat. And it also makes it harder for relationships to succeed because the person has a much lower threshold for frustration and wants things to work out immediately.

Definitely some food for thought when it comes to children and mobile phones. Personally, we have no plans for any of our children to have cell phones, mobile devices, tablets, etc., until they are old enough to pay for said devices and data plans themselves. Information like this makes it that much easier for us to keep that goal in mind as our children grow.

Until next time,

Sarah

Note: Information quoted came from “A Nation of Wimps,” Psychology Today, originally published Nov. 1, 2004.