My Upper Room

On our side of the world today was the first day of school for most students around the country. A day when parents all around the land team up and collectively storm the bastions of education in a united front to show their children exactly how much they love them, by clogging the parking lots and driveways of said institutions, as well as inundating the hapless teachers with all the same questions they are going to ask at the first parent-teacher evening in one week's time.

It is also a day in which the true character of many parents is revealed. It's the first day of school, for some kids it is the first day of school, ever, and I watched as grown adults acted like the spoiled brats they don't want their children to be. Basic disregard for the way your actions impact on others in the worst possible example you can set for your children, because it is how they see you act that they will learn, not by what you say. If you tell your child to clean up after him or herself, yet your bedroom looks like a pig-sty, how do you think that child will act? The same applies to the way we teach our child social skills and manners. We can tell our young sons to hold the door open for a lady, to be a gentleman until we are blue in the face but if we can't let a lady into a parking space ahead of us simply because "I'm waiting, too" then don't be upset when he learns that it's only ok 'some of the time'. 

Manners are most important when they cost us something of ourselves. Many times social skills and manners contain an element of sacrifice. It costs time, effort and sometimes a few grey hairs to show courtesy to someone else, but the reward is worth the cost. I was once told that giving means very little unless it hurts a little bit. That is the attitude of courtesy, of manners and social graces that we need to show our children. It's not always easy to be gracious, sometimes it feels like the wrong thing to do, when all you want to do is lash out, and make yourself the centre of it all. 

Teach your children, be they boys or girls, that showing courtesy and manners to others is an all-time thing. It's never wrong to think of others, and the only way we can teach our children to do that is by practicing it ourselves.