A secret to helping kids make etiquette a habit

[Deborah Aboud]

Whether you are a parent trying to instill your kids with proper etiquette, or an etiquette trainer committed to making sure your students really learn your etiquette materials, you probably wonder if there is some magic bullet that instantly causes good manners to become habitual.

Unfortunately, there isn't. Teaching etiquette takes lots of repetition. One parent calls this process, along with parenting in general, akin to "being pecked to death by ducks."

One strategy that we know works well, at least in our household, is positive instead of negative reinforcement. We've learned this over the years, through trial and error, and mostly by discovering that taking things away and giving time outs doesn't lead to ongoing change. Even when my husband and I were very clear about the consequences of poor behavior, our kids still sometimes made poor choices. If anything, they seemed to test us with poor behavior to see how serious we really were.

We have discovered that what does work is positive reinforcement. For instance, suppose your 10-year old son really wants to go to an out-of-town swim meet.  You can give him a target number of "stars" he needs to earn in order to get to go to this meet. He can earn stars through a variety of good behaviors, like listening to us, showing good manners at the dinner table, and getting his chores done.  Set up a board in front of his room, and you can track his progress towards his goal together.

 In short, positive reinforcement can be a huge success!

It still feels like being pecked to death by ducks sometimes, but -- at least in our family and with our kids -- positive reinforcement seems to work much more effectively than negative consequences.

I have seen the same thing when teaching etiquette classes. http://etiquettewithdeborah.com/

Of course, I am only sharing with you what has worked in my family and classes. All kids are different and respond differently to different incentives and pressures. But I am guessing that positive reinforcement in general tends to be a more powerful motivator for kids in general.

What are your thoughts?