Reply to Is anyone afraid we are raising a generation of spoiled impolite kids

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Drilling politeness into kids under 7 or 8 is stupid and old-fashioned in my opinion. At that age they're just being shamed into it or blindly following orders. When they're a bit older (depending on the maturity of the kid, but for my kids it was mid-late elementary) they're able to understand why you are requiring politeness, what the word sorry really means, and why we should treat others with respect. At that point you can teach them to be genuinely kind and respectful to other people, not just socialized monkeys.[/quote]

Right. And they listen when you teach them to look both ways when crossing the street for the same reason: "because this is what we do". So it becomes habit. Then, when they're crossing the street alone as an 8 or 10 year old they won't get run down by some jabroni texting on their phone.

They're not developmentally astute enough to know why we eat with a fork, go to bed on time, or pee in a toilet. So we teach them. It doesn't make them monkeys. It makes them part of society. [/quote]

Except those things aren't really the same.  It doesn't really matter why we eat with a fork.  It does matter why we apologize.  You can make "please" and "thank you" incredibly rude (and thereby defeat the purpose of saying them) if you have no thought about why you saying them, because tone matters.  It would be as though the kid look both ways before crossing the street, but didn't stop even though he observed the oncoming car.  Further, drilling these kinds of rules just leads to the sort of well-mannered, but truly horrible people that think because they complied with some social custom, they're fine, even if it results in some extremely cruel outcome.

None of which is to say that politeness isn't important.  Or that some things must be done simply because that it is the proper way to do something, i.e. pee in the toilet, not on the wall.  But when it comes to humans and social interactions, I think it is much better to focus on kindness than rote learning of some rule.
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...it's not that deep.[/quote]

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