Earlier this year, I realized that dinnertime had gotten out of hand at my house. It seemed like each of my five family members spent half of our mealtime together complaining about each other’s poor manners. My teens often didn’t love that their younger siblings would interrupt during conversations or chew with their mouths open. Everyone made their feelings known.
After spending an hour or more making a nice meal, the time together was nothing but nice — and that wasn’t working for me
We needed a reset at the dinner table
Collectively, we knew something had to change. Not one kiddo at the table was showing what older folks would call “good manners.”
I came up with the idea of making a simple poster of rules to hang up in our kitchen. The plan was to start with two rules, adding an additional rule or two each week depending on how things were going. We didn’t want to overwhelm anyone, and we were trying to be reasonable. The goal was to build skills slowly, and hopefully, with practice, the skills would stick.
The poster was nothing fancy, but it was something that we could all see from our kitchen table, and it was something my husband and I could easily refer back to if things started getting unruly as someone passed the butter.
The rules got the kids to focus on specific issues
At first, the kids changed their tattling from pointing out a random act of bad manners to calling each other out on the rules on the list. For example, our first two rules were to stay in your seat and chew with your mouth closed. The kids hounded each other, meal after meal, including when either of us parents broke a rule.
When they shifted to monitoring themselves better, and we added more rules to our list. We asked that we do not interrupt each other, put napkins in laps, and not to take jumbo bites of food.
Some rules were easier to follow than others. In order not to take jumbo bites, we had to do a lot of practice cutting food into reasonable pieces.
It took time for the kids to change, but a reward helped
Of course, we didn’t do this experiment without offering a reward. Our goal was to get ice cream at our favorite parlor in town after meeting our goal of learning and practicing all of the family table manners.
It took us about two months to get there, but we met our goal.
The gentle rollout of rules allowed us to focus on bigger lessons
Throughout this experiment, we talked to our kids about why good manners are important. For example, we let them know that staying in their chairs is an important thing to do outside of the home, too. We also shared how it can be embarrassing or distracting to shovel food into one’s mouth, talk with their mouth full of food, or even leave the table several times to go back to the food line to get just one more item.
We also talked about the importance of sharing gentle reminders with each other. Barking orders and constantly tattling isn’t positive or effective communication, nor is it very motivating. It’s important in life to be able to share, and receive, gentle criticism. This was perhaps the hardest part of our dinnertime manners adventure. At the end of the day, we are all tired, yet we had to use the right words and tone to remind each other what we should and shouldn’t say to one another.
As a parent, I try to teach my kids that working towards a positive goal, such as ice cream, is much more effective than ongoing lectures. Do we have perfect manners now? Not even close. However, we took the time to build a foundation that is meaningful — and, most importantly — a much more pleasant mealtime together. And we can always put the list back up when we need reminders.
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