Teaching Toddlers Manners: Please and Thank You

This idea of please and thank you goes under the guise of this big word, right? Manners.

And as parents, caregivers, teachers, we desperately want kids to have them.

But we, per usual, skip to the action part.

Are they using them? If they are, green check mark.

If they're not, red X must fix.

Why? We always come back to that here.

Why, toddler tribe, why do we want kids to use manners? Is it to please us or is it because we want to teach them how to truly access a place of gratitude, humility, connection, and cooperation with other people that they can use throughout their entire lives.

Please is a word that is grounded in request, right? When we want something, we use the word please.

When that request has been met, The next two words, thank you, that little phrase, reflect our personal gratitude for it being met.

When we force kids to say thank you without helping them tap into that internal place of, I'm really grateful that this request I just made was met.

We're just force feeding them the words and they're just rote spitting out the words.

So this may be an unpopular early childhood education development perspective.

Wow.

Trip over my words much, but I do that when I get excited, right? And it's okay, but I would much rather spend the time to teach a child what it felt like so that they say thank you all by themselves, then have them parrot back at me the words when they don't mean them.

I have episodes about I'm sorry that are very similar.

Have a listen.

See if this philosophy, this shift in thinking is something that is making sense to you.

However, there is also The early childhood education development truth that kids learn through repetition.

Yes, this one, you know, because they do it.

They do it naturally.

They do it organically.

Everything they do, they repeat over and over and over and over and over until they master it.

And then it goes into the mastered skill category and they're working on the next thing that they're repeating, repeating, repeating, whether it's physically, whether it's emotionally, whether it's cognitively.

Okay.

So yes, we want them to be using the language repeatedly, but we don't want our cue to do so to make them feel that ick feeling internally, that I'm supposed to, I have to, she's making me, he told me to, because you know how that feeling feels inside your body.