The Polite One's Insights

Happy holidays!  Welcome to the season of heightened and widely varying emotions and behaviors.  Holidays should bring us closer, but distractions often hinder our efforts.  Brick and mortar stores make it easier and easier to shop-till-you-drop by opening earlier and earlier.  Now the populous can push, shove, and sling never-ending profanities when they should be enjoying their pumpkin pie with family.  Alternately, there is always that kind person paying it forward by purchasing a cup of coffee for the customer behind him.  The barrage of unkind and kind behaviors makes me a bit dizzy each year.  You too?  Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a set of holiday rules everyone is required to read?  It would be even better if we all agreed to follow these rules.  Better yet, we all agree to use these rules going forward.  Now that would make all my holiday dreams come true.  We Are Not the Center of the Universe Surpris...

  NAMISS Contestants Typically, I would offer etiquette advice here or some sort of story related to the concept of civility.   Not this time.   I'm shaking it up a bit based on a very recent experience, one I was surprised that I enjoyed.   My partner and I were asked to judge the Miss CA Teen pageant (Northern California) for National American Miss.   My first thought was to politely decline.   Images of "Little Miss Sunshine" danced in my head and the very thought of makeup on a little girl turned my tummy.   What is This Pageant About Anyway? Thankfully, I didn't reply immediately and instead did a little research.   NAMISS doesn't allow makeup on younger ladies and only allows a touch on older teens. Refreshing.   Inner beauty and future goals are a focus.   Now I was intrigued.   But what type of young lady and more importantly what type of parent would encourage participation?   This is important to me and beca...

  Studies indicate that treating others well, or using good manners, helps us build stronger relationships in business and our social lives.   This seems obvious.  After all, don't we all want to be treated kindly? Nevertheless, what do our young people think?  In their eyes, is using good manners at home or at school important?  Additionally, what do they consider good manners?  After reading endless articles of children staging fights just to record them for YouTube, I feared that they could care less about manners.  Surprisingly, from my interviews, I found that this is far from true.  Joshua of Sacramento, CA Knows What Good Manners Are Joshua, a 10-year-old living in Sacramento, California believes that good manners are extremely important.  When asked what good manners are, Joshua did not hesitate to state, “A person is well-mannered when he says please, thank you, and excuse me.  And we don’t ask for things when we a...

Preparing a child for school is more than shopping for the newest fashions and making sure he/she has enough #2 pencils.  Children need to take their best manners to school.  Those with good manners are viewed as socially savvy and are well-liked.  Manners are first taught at home. Not taught at school, manners and social skills are taught by parents in the home, for which there is no better teacher.  This can be a daunting task but shouldn't be.  There are countless teachable moments during each day to use.  When parent and child are together and witness a child taking something from another, this is a teachable moment.  When the child steps into another's garden to pick a flower, this is a teachable moment.  A parenting parent uses this particular moment to tell the child to stop, asks where her tiny feet are and where they should be.  She would then know that it is disrespectful to go into a neighbor's garden bed.  Shared m...

Previously Published by Sierra Style and  is entirely revised and  rewritten .   Parenting involves more than just keeping our children safe and well-fed.  Our responsibilities extend to teaching our children fundamental life skills preparing them for a well-mannered, socially savvy future. Truly, your child will have no better teacher in his life.  We all recognize this.  So, as teachers, how do we teach our children the essential life skill ‘to be thankful’?  Where to Begin It seems like we could simply tell our children to say, “thank you” and that should be sufficient.  But for our children to learn thankfulness we need to do more than just talking-the-talk.  Thankfulness is something they must feel.  Still, we must begin with those magic words, while teaching basic manners .  Basic manners and expressing our thankfulness help our children learn, and feel, empathy and respect, which are vital tools for teaching our chi...

  Dear Polite One I have a question regarding cotillion etiquette.  I enrolled my 12-year-old daughter in cotillion and was very careful to follow all extensive rules about attire.    I have a problem with how the Cotillion staff enforced their dress code rules.  What follows is what happened. Abiding with all rules, I bought a dress from the cotillion section of an upper-class clothier. The straps of the dress appeared to be within the guidelines, but I thought we’d still be safe due to a dressy sweater that was included. Once at the cotillion, my daughter visited the restroom while I went to the cotillion restaurant to get her a juice.  When I returned, I couldn’t find her anywhere and began to panic.  As I frantically searched, a father yelled over to me that my daughter was inappropriately dressed and wasn’t allowed in.  He also stated that she was waiting outside the building.   It was nighttime. Yes, she was outside, b...

Interview with an Etiquette Specialist Q)   Have manners lessened over time and why?  In the ‘50s, manners were taught in school.  Now manners and etiquette are not stressed at all.  Families too busy?? A) So true.  When I informed my mother of my intent to retire from my teaching career to teach, consult, and write about etiquette, she asked why.  She assumed manners were still taught in school.  Perhaps this is part of the problem.  Everyone is incredibly busy; we have more single parents, working parents , and children’s schedules are so full that a ten-year-old needs a cellphone calendar to stay organized—no one has spare time. This is the new family dynamic and parents act as if they assume that others are responsible for etiquette training.  Perhaps parents assume their children will learn vicariously through school or some after-school activity, plus they don’t want to waste any of their ti...

  Manners and Etiquette Tips from Children As an etiquette teacher, I cannot help but notice others' manners.  It's a curse.  Not that I'd comment negatively about etiquette breaches.  Nevertheless, I do notice.  The upside of this curse is that I also notice when people behave politely.  Sometimes they actually surprise me with their good manners , like when the young teen boy that ran over to open a door for an elderly lady or when the 10-year-old knew to say "excuse me" when he stepped in front of others.   Since many young people appear to lack these subtle manners, I become giddy and gushing with accolades when I witness these behaviors.  So, imagine my glee when I witnessed, not one, but multiple acts of great manners by children.  In these cases, the children weren't just using excellent manners; they were with parents who didn't.  They, in fact, were teaching their parents by example...

    Do Manners, Civility, & Etiquette Matter to Our Teens? Do young teens even care about doing what is right?  Do they even know what manners are?  Find out here! How thoughtful and well-mannered are young teens?  Do they truly know what good manners are?  If so, do they consider them important in their lives?  As an etiquette teacher and retired classroom teacher, I decided to interview a group of 12 to 14-year-olds to find out.  Amazingly, they presented themselves with poise and maturity beyond their years-- impressive.  What are good manners and are they important in your life? All those interviewed believe that manners are especially  important  in their lives.  Most have relatively similar ideas of what etiquette and good manners are, like being respectful to others, knowing boundaries, and using good behavior in public.  All acknowledge that people judge the ill-mannered negativ...

Our Young Teens Speak Up  Middle school age children are usually associated with shrugged shoulders, rolling eyes, and contrived drama.   After all, they are just learning how to be a teen.   It can be a confusing time, as all of us who have lived through it can attest.   Even so, are today's middle schoolers well-mannered?   Are they well-mannered enough to teach manners to little ones?   How would they do so?   The etiquette teacher in me wants to know.   Consequently, I am off to interview 12 to 14-year-olds in my Davis, CA community.      Confident and Responsible What surprised me from the beginning was how direct these young people are, even the 12-year-olds.   All made excellent eye contact, were poised, and confident—very well-mannered. I expected that at least some would find my question odd, but no.   They all found it interesting; with some stating that they had not considered their role in younger people's...