Kids these days!

As a kid, I used to love to sit at family dinner with one foot on the chair, my knee visible just above the table’s edge. “Who invited you?” my mom would casually ask it. Eventually, I stopped bringing my uninvited knee to dinner.

People tend to say that kids today have no manners. Truth is, they’ve never had any to begin with — only parents to gently teach them. If anything, it’s the gentle teaching part that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

In her new book Generation Me, about an entitled group born in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, psychologist and social commentator Jean M. Twenge argues there has been a decline in manners and politeness as people care less and less what others think.

“Because we no longer believe there is one right way of doing things,” she writes, “most of us were never taught the rules of etiquette.” She also points out parents have a harder time these days getting their message across in a popular culture filled with questionable role models preaching disrespect.

But Louise Fox, the Toronto owner of Etiquette Ladies, likes to look on the bright side. She says today’s kids may have “McManners,” but they are more advanced and perceptive in other ways. About two years ago the graduate of the Protocol School of Washington, who got her start by teaching etiquette to people in the business world, began to teach etiquette to children. For three weeks now, she’s been offering two-hour, in-home group manners parties for $30 to $40 per child.

The half-dozen parents who have hosted so far, she explains, do not seem the slightest bit embarrassed to admit their kids have fallen behind on the whole “please” and “thank-you” thing. “If I tell any parent what I do, they go, ‘Oh my kids need that,’” says Fox.

“Everyone knows how busy parents are. Parents are focusing on other things and they’re saying ‘Wow, this has skipped us by.’ ” Fox says her services are in demand for a number of other reasons, too. Some parents today were raised in the 1960s and ’70s environments devoted to avoiding pretension, and don’t know how to teach manners to their children.

And a growing number of parents from other countries and cultures want their children schooled in the North American way of eating and interacting.

Not only does Fox focus on dinner table etiquette, like keeping elbows in and mouths closed at the table, she goes over other basics, like how kids should introduce themselves and answer their parents’ phone.

Fox points out she has one keen advantage over parents who are trying to reinforce manners at home — a clean slate with kids tired of hearing from their parents.

“You have to keep it positive. Then kids are responsive to it,” she said. “Because what kids hate about manners is they’re in this situation their mothers are saying ‘Don’t do that! Don’t do that! Don’t do that!’ It’s correcting, correcting, nagging, nitpicking. Show them beforehand what they do.”

This article was written by Ann Marie McQueen and can be found at: http://lifewise.canoe.ca/Style/Trends/2007/03/27/3845156-sun.html