Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

When this past term in my sixth grade character education class we began to discuss manners — you know — the so-called opening doors thing, the please, thank-you, even, you’re welcome, routine, the students howled at the need for such a review. What’s up here? they reacted. How do routine manners or what the older folks call or used to call etiquette, have anything to do with what we’re studying about anti-violence? Surely major ideas like preventing bullying, paying attention about cliques, watching for students who are unusually sad or mad — now that’s important. What’s that got to do with what you do with your napkin on leaving the table?

By the end of this manners unit, however picky table and guest rules seemed at first, the real tie-in was accepted as students, through example and school observation made the connection by themselves. It all boils down to respect. If a child does not respect himself and others — it’s likely that disrespectful behaviors will emerge and perhaps take over big-time, students concluded. Through analysis, they expressed that disrespect may be exactly what eventually created the Columbine High School tragedy.

Seem a stretch, parents? Not really. Just how badly would two boys have to feel about themselves to eventually do such malicious harm to their school and classmates, even to themselves? Didn’t anyone see it coming? Were there no signs of rejection? Of sadness or anger? Was anyone watching these boys’ manners? The word manners has to do as much with all daily behaviors, including conversation, style of doing things, response to situations, standards of dress, and patterns of activities, as it does to merely passing the salt and pepper or excusing yourself from the table.

Just watching and accepting somewhat unusual behavior as usual is terrible. Even in other cases of angry children acting out such as bringing weapons to school, afterward, parents, teachers, and often classmates realized they’d earlier noticed odd or unacceptable behavior. They saw, but really did nothing about it. Often it was dismissed as normal for teenagers, ignored, or even laughed at by fellow students.

Nothing done? Too late.

Schools nationwide have recently mounted an effort to teach how important respect is to human comfort, encouragement and positive growth and development, making the study of character education a part of the curriculum. However, everyone in a child’s life needs to teach these ideas. The following are some parent guidelines which will assist you to build self-confidence in your children and their friends. These guidelines may also help you avert a disaster.

Respect-Building Guidelines

1. Model and expect your own children to respect themselves and others. A good example of how to do this is to help people — perhaps the elderly or homeless — together and to discuss how important it is to be this responsible both for those you help and for yourself. Feeling good about oneself as a helper is a great self-respect builder.

2. Discuss events in the community and world, not in the political sense, rather, in the human sense. When Hurricane Katrina occurred some families sent aid, all the while talking about “what if it had happened to their own family?” Work such feeling and imagining into family activity and play. Get children to think, “What if it were me?”

3. Talk about and plan ahead what to do if the child sees, hears or experiences a problem either ongoing or emerging. Often children, such as the sixth-graders I teach, are reluctant to do anything because they think they may make matters worse, or worse still, become involved in some scary or hurtful way. They believed they are helpless. At my middle school, Carwise, and at many others, students are encouraged to talk with their guidance counselor and remain anonymous in doing so. Whether they are worried about themselves or see someone else upset, unduly sad such as being bullied, they’re told it’s important they talk with an adult, preferably their parents. In one case, after hearing this advice, one student finally told her mom about a serious problem. The family sought help.

So remember, tell your children to seek help. We wonder if all the school incidents and behind the scenes situations which adults and students only recognized through hindsight, had been reported early, would the Columbine students have died?

4. A growing and common problem in these days when very young children have expensive technology in their purse or pocket is that they may be online with a predator! While it seems so grown-up for a pre-teen to talk with supposedly a teenaged boy this way, and to try to meet her online “friend,” this new contact op goes way over the traditional manners line.

Remember? It used to be that through your friends or someone you knew or while having fun in some place safe, you met new people. That was the mannerly, no, safe and respectable thing, to do. Parents and children knew it then. But do they know it now? Old-fashioned? Maybe. Yet, hiding behind that so-called smart (or new-fangled) computer screen is pretense; danger lurking and ready, the rules of respectful living, even life itself, boldly set aside — because they can be. Notice that — just because they can be!

So what about manners? They were and are consciously employed. As I ask girls about the boys they’ll date — one who’s a slob while eating and doesn’t help you out of a car or into a building? And boys, how about a girl who talks with food in her mouth, calls your house late at night, or is rude to your mother? Who shows respect? Who does not?

If parents start paying closer attention to manners, to helping their children to practice politeness, courtesies which include respect, cooperation, sharing and caring, will it actually rid us of every potential student problem which can lead to violence? Of course not. However, awareness of what’s polite and what’s definitely not makes for some nicer, happier kids, less likely to strike out against others. Respect=Prevention!

Parents, if you care about how everyday family life feels, if your family conversation is more pleasant without smart-mouth one-liners copied from sitcoms, then do it — those real and right family things today, practices which expect respect.

No kidding, you’ll prove, as time passes, just how much your family matters!

© 2006 Rosemary Lee Potter. All Rights Reserved.