Etiquette and Love

                                            

Table Manners Change When They Fall in Love

The many mothers who have asked for suggestions, pamphlets and general helps in teaching their children table manners, especially boys, would laugh to see me wince and shrug my shoulders. It's the hardest job I have been asked to tackle. Perhaps women folks might thing it easy enough, with their delicate appetites and refined instincts, but there is something about being a boy that's different.

I recall so vividly my own mother’s attempts to teach me. I know so well that exasperated look that only mothers can mirror when one or more healthy boys stampede the table. Boys seem to eat everything in sight if company is present. That’s the way mother sees it. And they eat in such voracious fashion that mother thinks the guest may be moved to wonder if her boy is not a cross between a savage and a pig.

Sympathy With The Boys

And yet, shocked as mothers may be, my sympathies are with the boys. Every grown-up on the place assumes that a boy’s meal time is the one opportunity for a lesson in correct eating. On behalf of us boys, I would like to suggest that a better time to teach a bag to stand upright is when it is full. And the same applies to boys.

Demonstrate by example, rather than by precept, the social graces of eating. One thing is certain. To make a boy the brunt of the family wit or sarcasm or nagging because he “gobbles” his food, as one mother puts it, never converts him into a boy with socialized table manners.

Unique Training

A fine suggestion came from a mother with whom I discussed this problem the other day. The children are served apart from the family, either in their own room, the kitchen or at a small table in the dining room. Mother, father or an adult brother or sister may sit at their table. This older family guest at the children's table encourages the youngsters to take turns playing host to each other. They are complimented for conformity to correct standards. A favorite dessert, & small favor, or some interesting small reward should accompany success.

Mothers, please realize that children should not be expected to have perfect table manners before the adolescent stage and many of them not before the end of adolescence. Of course children can be coerced to conform before that age, but to develop the social graces naturally is your desired objective.

Encourage the boy. Exemplify charming manners, yourself. Teach your children to hold a chair for mother at age 4 or 5. Accustom him to the demands of civilization a little bit at a time. Develop one habit at a time. It may seem a slow process. But there comes a time in the life of every boy when correct eating habits develop rapidly.

Interested In The Ladies 

We can usually tell what has happened when a boy becomes tremendously interested in the spoon to use for his soup and the proper fork for his salad. He is interested in the ladies. Up to that time he believes and insists that he is living in a man’s world.

Whenever I think of this problem I recall the table manners of certain kings and queens of but a few short centuries ago. In those days a leg of mutton was merely a good-sized bite to an experienced diner. And when I remember that those royal diners tossed their bones under the table to feed the hounds wandering about the banquet hall, I am consoled about the table manners of modern youth. – By James Samuel Lacy, 1930

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia