How to Raise Polite Kids

Manners are about more than saying please and thankyou. Children learn mostly from their parents, but other outside influences affect them as well such as TV shows, sports heros and video games. While you can't protect your children from what goes on outside your home, experts believe that with patience and persistence, parents can do a lot to make their children polite and courteous:

1. Be a Model. All the training in the world won't persuade a child to behave gallantly if his parents become aggressive, demanding and rude at the slightest provocation. That's why experts agree the best way for parents to improve a child's manners is to improve their own first. Parents need to be especially vigilant not to say something casually that they might be alarmed to hear later in the mouths of their children. If we aren't practising good manners, how can we expect our children to?
2. Prompt and Praise. Rude behavior in children is more often the result of thoughtlessness than of deliberate aggression. Criticism, name-calling and orders only make a child angry and defensive. Use a prompt and praise technique such as before an event the parent explains the expected behavior in a noncritical way, then afterwards praise the child for their good behavior. The idea is to do this often enough so you can eventually move away from the prompt and just give the praise.
3. Have Dinner Together. Experts say that a half hour to an hour of sit-down family time each day may be the most important thing parents can do for their children. Co-operation, punctuality, conversation skills and respect are all learned around the dining table. It's a time when parents can gently impart their values and morals without sounding as if they're lecturing.
4. Develop Rituals. Attitudes of respect, modesty and fair play can grow only out of slowly acquired skills that parents teach their children over many years through shared experience and memory.

While children don't automatically warm to the idea of learning to be polite, there's no reason for them to see manners as a bunch of stuffy restrictions. They're the building blocks of a child's education. Once a rule becomes second nature, it frees us. People respond to good manners. Its the language of all human behavior. Source: Reader's Digest, June 1997