This might surprise some people, but want to know one of my BIGGEST pet-peeves...? When people tell little kids to "say please!" or "say thank you!" Even worse is when they teach them to...ugh...SIGN it. Sign language please and thank you...? Poor little kids. I work with little kids a lot (at church, especially—and Matt encounters the same thing at work) and it amazes me how often a child's good manners are completely overlooked. If an 18-month-old, or even older, points to the water pitcher in my hand, smiles at me, and says "that?" and I give them more water and they smile and drink it, that's more than good enough for me. That's kindness. That's good manners. That's also being an effective communicator and not taking a favor for granted. I love it! When someone else—the kid's parent or another adult—jumps in to remind the kid: "uh-oh! What do you say...? Say please. Now say thank-you!" Ugh. [As I shiver with disgust.] It really,
really bothers me. Here's why. First, it's ignoring the kid's independent attempts to communicate, which is criminal in my mind. Second, the kid hears "your communication stinks. You need to say it MY way." Third, and worst of all, it's telling the kid "what you did just now [which was a nice thing] is
not good manners—good manners is all about
saying the right thing." The kid already demonstrated that they equate good manners with being nice—how great! (We could learn so much from kids. It's no wonder Christ tells us to be as little children!) But then some adult replaces that
vastly superior idea with a ridiculous one: that it's
not how you feel inside or treat people that matters, it's how well you adhere to social custom (what everyone is telling you to do). How could anyone actually
want to teach a kid that lesson? It hits their confidence (the thing they came up with on their own was unacceptable), it actually
punishes their kind feelings and actions, and it teaches them to change and become a person who operates according to what other people think or what the "rules" are. Ever seen the kid who gets what he wants then smirks and says "thank you" while running away—never looking you in the eye? Rules stink.
Thinking is what doesn't stink.
And the sign language! Oh, the sign language.... It just hurts me to see little babies telling their parents things with the signs they've been trained to use. Babies communicate just fine on their own. Sure it's more work for an adult to actually listen to their kid's sometimes pitiful attempts to communicate than to recognize the sign for "please" or "more" or "milk" or whatever. But doesn't a kid deserve it? And, also, wouldn't anyone want their kid to learn how to communicate creatively rather than just by wrote imitation? Why train them so young that they'll only be heard when they do it someone else's way...? Give them confidence that what's going on in that little head of theirs is worth listening to—is something that will work for them. Vocabulary helps here and there, including signs, that a baby gets excited about are no big deal. But a concerted effort to train a baby to use signs is really missing a better picture.
I love to help kids think on their own! If a kid asks for something and isn't nice about it, instead of saying "come back here and say thank you!" how about saying, "can you think of a way to do that again nicely...?" And let them come up with something. Sometimes we ask Seth to try again nicely and he gets up close to our faces and smiles ridiculously big. Hehe. Other times he asks again with a soft, sweet voice. Other times he says please or thanks. Other times he gives someone a hug or blows a kiss. It's awesome—awesome!—to see a kid think, and make their own choice of action. And, hopefully, the more we can avoid people telling Seth to say the good-mannered thing when he had already chosen something very nice, the more he will have confidence in knowing what it really means to be kind. And maybe, just maybe, the more he grows up and keeps on thinking about things instead of just learning "the rules," the more confidence we'll have that growing up won't turn him into a loser. :) Hehe. And, most definitely, he'll keep teaching us all along the way...! Because kids are great. They see the better picture....
7 comments:
I love Seth's creative ways of doing it "nicely"...from Paela we get what we can only describe as "eager beaver noises" (half panting, half laughing) when we give her what she had been hoping for. It will be fun to see what else she comes up with as she gets older.
Interesting that signing please and thank you bothers you more than the request to say it...sign language is just another language, no?
We try to remind Samantha to use her nice words and nice voice often, especially now that she is in that I am 3 I know everything stage. We never really got too into signing the only thing I remember was her waving from her highchair when she wanted to get down. For the most part I belive all children will talk and communicate in their own time and way. It is frustrating to me that people rush to the speach therapist when their child is only 2 but "not talking".
Oh yeah, asking your kid to sign please or thank you definitely bothers me even more than asking them to say it. There's something so robotic about it or something.... I think it's not actually another language when people aren't actually speaking it--there's just nothing passive about learning a few "sign language" passwords (it really doesn't resemble normal language acquisition at all...). So when the kid is *already* saying, "I want milk," but the parent is like "buluhblahahlblah" doesn't mean anything to me--what I want you to do is pat your head and stick your finger in your ear and THAT way I'll know you want milk. Oh, and don't forget to rub your chin when I get it for you so I know you're thankful.... Ugh. Me no likey.
Anyway, yes, I agree--kids communicate so well on their own! It's SO fun to get to know them well enough to figure it out. And if they come up with their own signs or eager beaver noises, that's just more fun! Hehe.
Oh, and also.... Hehe. It's true that Seth wasn't always QUITE so creative. Well, just creative on a 12-month-old level, I guess. If he screamed for something and we were like, "whoa, screaming isn't nice. Will you ask nicely?" He'd usually just stare at us. Haha! But stop screaming! :) And eventually would ask in a normal way. My favorite, though, was when he'd "scream" again, just softer. And with a smile, this time. HAHAHA!! So great.
Oh, and the other reason sign-language please and thank you is even more disconcerting is simply that it's when the kid is even younger than when they're asked to say it with words. I can't imagine being worried about social etiquette with a 10-month-old! Yikes. Maybe a 10-YEAR-old.... :)
Hey Auburn -- I gotta say I don't totally agree with you. I don't totally disagree either. "Say please -- please" or "say thank you -- thank you" doesn't demonstrate that the child has good manners. It does demonstrate that the parent is trying to teach something and you have to give them credit for that even if it's not the way you would choose to teach them. It's not the way I choose to teach my kids, either. But I don't think there's anything wrong with please and thank you being part of a child's vocabulary for asking nicely. In fact I think it should be part of the vocabulary because how are they going to learn to do it when they are older if they don't start when they are young? I love it when I take cupcakes to school for Peter or Elizabeth's birthday and every child in the class looks at me and says "thanks" as I hand him or her a cupcake. I know that someone has worked to teach them to have nice manners. I guarantee that before we go trick or treating this year we will have a conversation with our kids reminding them that at each house they need to look at the person who gave them candy and smile and say thank you. If we don't teach them that, who will? And it REALLY bugs me when a child comes to my house and grabs a piece of candy out of the bowl without saying one word or ever even looking to see who is holding the bowl. I think you have to give parents credit for trying to teach their children no matter how they choose to do it. (I'm sure you could come up with an example to refute that, but for now that's what I think). And I recognize that teaching gratitude (or allowing gratitude that already exists) and teaching manners are two different things, but I think both are important.
So on the sign language -- you have to use the same rule we use with food: don't knock it if you haven't tried it. I don't try to teach them when they are babies before they can talk, but as they are learning to talk I love having another level to help me understand. We never used it with Peter because he was such an early and clear talker and I usually understood what he was saying. Elizabeth had no words, but she had big brown eyes and a pointer finger and we managed fine. But I love it that Emily has multiple ways to tell me something. She was trying to tell me about a spider a few weeks ago and no matter how hard I tried, I was not getting the word "spider" so after 4 or 5 attempts she did the sign for spider (unprompted) and I knew the rest of what she was telling me. It's like kids using pictures to help them decode words when they are learning to read. They won't always do it that way, but it's an effective tool to help when they are learning. Plus, for Emily it gives us a little (big, actually) window into what she's thinking at any given time and there's a lot going on in her mind that doesn't always come out of her mouth. When she's playing with something or sitting on the sofa and she suddenly does a sign for something else I know she's thinking about birds or airplanes or whatever. It's so fun to see what's going on in her mind! And she has words for all these things and she uses them and we understand them, but the signs make her happy too. She doesn't use signs for please or thank you and she is the most likely of any of my kids to offer a spontaneous "thanks." I love it when I finish changing her diaper and she says, "thanks, Mommy." I didn't teach her to do it, but I'm glad that she does.
So that's my 2 cents' worth. Oh, I also feel like the sign language is just for our family. I would never encourage my kids to sign anything to other people because they wouldn't necessarily get it. When Elizabeth was about 1 1/2 she signed "thank you" to my OB (unprompted) and he thought she was blowing him a kiss. So he didn't know he was getting a thank you, but he liked what he thought he got, which illustrates the point I think you were trying to make. And now that we've come full circle it's time to end the lengthy comment. :-)
Whoa. That's the longest comment of all time! Well, I maybe should have clarified that I'm talking about tiny little kiddos--one and two and three-year-olds. Any kid who has had their little-kid-version good manners reinforced is going to keep being nice. When they pick up that what people generally do is say please or thank-you, they'll want to do that, too. People ask me how to get your kid to say please and thank-you and I always answer to say please and thank-you yourself! They'll get it. (The best is saying "you're welcome" as if a kid DID say thank-you. Especially since they almost always DID, in their own way.) I will always, always think that if an adult is dissatisfied by the kid (even the older kid) who was perfectly nice just didn't happen to say thanks, then it's the adult's problem. I would never correct a kid for that. (A parent in nursery yesterday snipped at their completely taciturn little 18-month-old who was nervous about nursery to "say thank you, say thank you, SAY THANK YOU, can you say thank you?! Say thank you" when I gave him his snack. Ugh. Poor thing! I just wanted to give him a big hug and tell him he was just fine. I said "oh, he's ok. You're welcome, bud" and the mom stopped pushing it. You see that kind of thing ALL THE TIME, and it's horrifying to me!) Anyway, how will the tiny kid ever learn if you don't teach them? They'll learn from example and from wanting to be nice. (Seth says Thanks to EVERYTHING lately--it's pretty cute. Haha! SO cute. And he's never been reminded to say it.) I'm so much more concerned about how they'll NOT unlearn their innate concern for niceness if parents aren't reinforcing it--and, in fact, are actively trying to replace that behavior with something else. When they're older and you can explain that what you did was nice, maybe just add a thank-you, that could be appropriate--but in younger kids, you really are just replacing something great with something that, to them, is meaningless. With signing, yeah, people used to say all the time, "oh, Seth would be so good with signing! Are you going to teach him?" It was shocking how many people brought it up! But we just could never imagine taking the time to teach him how to communicate with US when it was so great for us to take the time to learn how HE communicated. Signing in and of itself doesn't bother me at all. When it's learned passively, that's great! If a parent uses signs sometimes when THEY are talking, or reading a story, or whatever, and the kid spontaneously starts using some, that's awesome. The thing I've sometimes seen that turns my stomach is a parent sitting with this tiny little kid, saying, "you want more? then do THIS... more is THIS, now you do it. Now YOU do it. More is THIS.... You do it." And they work on it until, success, the kid flashes a sign to get more. That really, REALLY is gross. I've already said why. :) Seriously, it really makes me sick. If parents use signs while they talk, ("oh, you want more? [sign] here you go! You're welcome!) and the kid starts using some, I'm cool.
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