Miss Manners?

This being American Thanksgiving, there are lots of interesting articles on food-related questions. One of the best sites, believe it or not, is the venerable New York Times. The Dining section has a great series of short videos presenting their take on the classic turkey and stuffing dilemmas.

What caught my eye this morning was a post on the Motherlode blog about teaching children table manners in anticipation of visiting family and being under that particular kind of scrutiny that can only be found amongst parents at family gatherings. The post is clever and true enough, but the comments to follow were what fascinated me most.

As you can imagine, many people chimed in with horror stories about "the youth of today" and the general decline in manners that is often invoked. One woman posted near the top of the comments how she had been "shamed" by the parent of a childhood friend for the way she held her utensils at dinner, and that from that moment had vowed to teach her children properly to avoid a similar fate for them.

But then a whole host of critics began to criticize the mother from the story for being "cruel" and "presumptuous" enough to "impose her values" of "proper" manners on a child, and a visiting child at that.

Now, I don't want to make too much of this, but in a way, you can see the dissolution of society written right into the comments on this tiny corner of the internet. That is, our society seems to be at this inflection point where we lament the loss of a particular standard, while simultaneously acknowledging that we have lost the nerve to even maintain those standards. I wrote the following as a comment to the blog, but I'm not sure if it's up yet.

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I'm also raising four children under 12 and table manners are an important daily conversation. What makes it hard to persist is the feeling that you're "majoring on the minors" which is to say, putting over-emphasis on things that don't really matter. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to teach children habits of any sort without traveling well-past the boundary of what is seen today as bald-faced coercion.

Witness the comments here that, on one hand, lament the loss of social niceties, but pounce on someone who recounts a story of being forced (or shamed, or whatever you want to call being made to conform to a structure not of your own immediate choosing) to follow "proper" table manners. Even the notion that there is any universal measure of propriety is challenged, so the very foundation of the system of passing on cultural values is undermined. Whose values? Yours? Mine? The kids'? Who's to say.

No parent or teacher who has ever taught children cursive script, or to chew with their mouths closed, or to practice an instrument long enough to master it has ever been able to stay entirely on the "friendly" side. One of the greatest costs of parenting is the realization that you will occasionally have to seem like a monster in order to teach your children well. The Bible points out well enough that "no one likes discipline"; what it's taken me a while to realize is that no one really likes meting it out either.