The Folly of Please and Thank You

← All Insights

The word that gets produced on cue was never the manners. It was the sound that ended the waiting.

I think most parents prompting please and thank you genuinely believe they are teaching manners. I want to argue, directly, that in the moment of prompting, almost nothing is actually being taught at all, and that the whole approach misunderstands how a child comes to be genuinely polite in the first place.

What This Approach Assumes

Prompting a child for please and thank you assumes manners work like a fact, something told to a child and then repeated until it sticks, the way you might drill times tables. I think this is simply the wrong model for what politeness actually is. Politeness is not a fact. It is a social behaviour, absorbed the way almost all social behaviour is absorbed, by watching it modelled, again and again, over years, until a child genuinely understands what it means and offers it because they mean it, not because an adult is standing over them waiting for the correct sound.

How Children Actually Learn This

A young child spends an enormous amount of time simply present around the adults in their life, absorbing interactions they are not yet old enough to take part in directly. A parent thanking a shop assistant. A visitor welcomed warmly. A genuine apology, offered sincerely. None of this is staged to teach the child anything. It is simply ordinary life happening around them, and a child absorbs it at their own pace, on their own developmental timeline, whether or not any adult ever says a single instructive word.

This process cannot be rushed by prompting, and I think prompting actually works against it. A toddler told to say thank you is not expressing gratitude. Genuine gratitude is not yet within their developmental reach. They are producing a sound that ends an uncomfortable moment of adult expectation, and calling that manners is, frankly, a mistake most parents have simply never had reason to question.

What Forced Politeness Actually Teaches

I think there is a real cost here, one rarely discussed. A child repeatedly corrected in front of other people for the missing word experiences this, more often than not, as a small, public failure, however gently it is delivered. Over time this attaches a faint pressure to words that were supposed to express warmth and consideration, precisely the opposite of what they are for.

Worse, I think it can teach a child that please and thank you are simply the correct sounds required to make an adult stop waiting, a transaction, rather than a genuine expression connected to how another person has just been treated. A child fluent in the transaction may have absorbed remarkably little about actual consideration for other people.

What Tends to Help Instead

I am not arguing against good manners, and I am not indifferent to how a child treats other people. I am arguing that a child genuinely included in a family where warmth, gratitude, and consideration are simply how people already treat each other will absorb this over time, without being prompted for it in front of an audience.

This asks more patience than prompting does, and a willingness to let understanding develop on its own timeline rather than producing the correct word on demand. In practice, it tends to produce exactly what parents actually want, a child who eventually says thank you because they mean it.

A Different Way of Reading Behaviour

Please and thank you is one small example of a much bigger assumption in modern parenting, that a child must be directly instructed and corrected into good behaviour rather than trusted to absorb it, gradually, through real life. Once you start looking at learning this way, I think a lot of ordinary parenting habits start to look considerably less necessary.

If you find yourself prompting for the magic word more often than you would like, I am not asking you to stop caring about how your child treats other people. I am asking you to consider what they are actually absorbing from watching you.