Etiquette and Wise Parents

The wise mother does not begin with exhaustive attention to the minutia of etiquette, knowing in that way lies the danger of making her boys prigs, and her girls self-conscious society misses, before they are in their teens. 

"The Wise Mother"

Your wise mother is not given to worrying over trifles, says Harper's Bazar. She does not expect perfection in a day. And she has put from her, as far as the East is from the West, the ghastly possibility of setting vanity up in the room of love. So she does not begin with exhaustive attention to the minutia of etiquette, knowing in that way lies the danger of making her boys prigs, and her girls self-conscious society misses, before they are in their teens. 

She lays down as the law of her household, the broad principles of respect for elders, reverence for women, kindliness for all; and she permeates the home atmosphere with her finest conception of the deference and the sympathy due from soul to soul. Her children very early delight to place a chair for grandmother and to save father steps. They learn to be proud of that restraint, which enables them to keep self in the background, and to defer to brother and sister. 

It never enters their heads that servants are less worthy of respect than other people. They are as unabashed in the presence of wealth and power as they are tender toward suffering and poverty. When she teaches them from time to time her code of manners — and she is careful to perfect it according to her best judgment—she teaches it for home use, and it becomes fixed by becoming natural. —From 1891

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