When that line first came up in the Addams Family movie, I remember laughing hysterically. Wednesday asked for something and Gomez said and what do we say? And she said “NOW” as opposed to the please. The use of the word ‘please’ is something we drill into our children. It’s how we teach them to make pleasant requests as opposed to demands.
Demanding Natures
All babies are born demanding. They have no other way to be. If they are hungry, they demand to be fed. If they are tired, they demand to be comforted and put down for sleep. If they are wet, they demand to be changed. A baby demands what they need. They have to – because they have no other way to fulfill those needs.
As they get older and achieve more sentience and communication ability, we begin to gentle that demanding nature by urging them to request rather than demand. This begins primarily with how we speak to them. We pepper our conversations with liberal uses of the words please and thank you.
We rephrase their questions and answers with the polite terms we want to hear. This is how we teach them, by showing them and by doing them. It’s important that you limit your own demands or at least temper them during the initial teaching phases or you will be confusing your toddler more than you know.
For example, instead of saying “NO! DON’T TOUCH THAT!” – you may instead say. “No, sir. We do not play with that,” or “No, sir, please do not touch that.”
How about “please bring me the toy” or “thank you for that, that was very sweet of you”?
Demonstrate What You Mean
When my daughter was about 13 months old, she had a very limited vocabulary. In fact, she said “dada” and “best buy” very clearly. The rest came out garbled or in her own language. By the time she was 15 months old, she had a more extensive vocabulary, but I had gotten into the habit of saying thank you to her every time she took a bite of food because we were working on eating solids neatly and trying new foods.
So, she’s about 16 and a half months old, she’s sitting in her high chair and eating some crackers while I was eating roast beef and roast potatoes. She was staring at my potatoes with intensity and said, very succinctly: “Thank You, MUCH.”
I looked at her and then looked at what she was staring at. I broke off one of the small potatoes and put a small bite on a fork and held it over to her. She opened her mouth and started chewing it happily. After she swallowed, she looked back at my food and said “Thank you MUCH” again. So I gave her another bite.
She said “Thank you MUCH” for please for months. It wasn’t until she was about two and a half before she said please in the same context or with the same intensity. So remember, your son or daughter is demanding by nature – all babies are – and we teach them to be polite and we teach them how to say please and to make requests.
Have patience, they all get it sooner or later. How did you teach your little one to ask for what they wanted rather than demand?
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