Please and Thank Yous Go a Long Way
Little lessons go a long way
I’ve always been a big fan of please and thank you’s. My parents always made sure that I was polite no matter what I asked or what I was given or how I interacted with people. If I took something that someone gave me and didn’t say thank you, I got a little dop slap upside the head.
It was effective.
Fast forward to my adult years and I’ve always made the point to say thank you, please and give people praise when the opportunity showed itself. Basically, it’s just common sense and good people skills to keep those words in your brain dictionary.
I’m the same way with my kids. Any time they ask for juice, ask for something, do something good, there’s always a please, thank you and a “good job” involved. It’s not gotten to the point if one of them sneezes and my wife and I forget to say, “Bless you,” the girls will say, “Ah bless me please!” We’ll promptly say, “bless you,” and they will say “thank you.” If we don’t finish off the round robin with a “welcome,” they’ll promptly remind us to do so.This leads me to a short story from a pick up school assignment I had this week. My daughter was playing with one of her friends and they were running around the baseball diamond. My daughter was standing at the pitchers mound and her friend came up beside her and blind sided her like Terry Tate the Office Linebacker (quick regress because these videos are hilarious):
Anyways…my daughter immediately came running to me with tears streaming down her face. The other girl’s father, who I just met about two minutes before that, turns to me and apologizes with a mortifed look on his face. He immediately asks his daughter to apologize, but she doesn’t. She’s embarrassed.
I’ve seen this play out where my kid has been the aggressor in some way shape or form, but whenever she does anything wrong, she does apologize.
It’s these little incidents that make me feel better about driving home the importance of please and thank you’s. On the surface, it’s minor, but in the long run, I think it builds a framework for being a good person. It’s a simple concept, but it seems to work.
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Great point, Don.
Being humble and admitting when you’re wrong is not an easy lesson to learn — for adults as well as for kids — but it’s oh so important. And, a quick I’m sorry goes a long way to preventing a rough incident (whether physical or verbal) from fermenting and turning into something worse.
-Mike