As parents there are so many things which we want in the characteristic of our children and as much as we envisage a smart, energetic, sporty, attractive child with their head screwed onto their shoulders, we don’t always get the child that we thought. This is fine and in fact, we love our children because of the people that they decide to be and not what we make them into.

One area which we can have a profound impact on however is the politeness of our child. Politeness gets you very far in life and it is something that most parents want for their kids. There is a flip side to this however and whilst teaching our child to conduct life with manners, we don’t want them to be a pushover. Here are some tips which can help make your child polite, but tough when they need to be.

Get in Early

Kids start learning from a very young age and if you want them to be polite then you need to be encouraging it from early on their infancy. Starting off with a simple please and thank you will help your child to grow up with manners.

It Starts With You

If you haven’t already discovered it then you should know that your children will copy almost everything you do, including manners. It is important that you are a good role model for your kids and that you conduct yourself in a polite manner when talking to them and when talking to others around them.

Offer Rewards

A simple reward system works well with kids when it comes to politeness, you don’t need to offer grand gestures but withholding something until you hear ‘the magic words’ is a good way to encourage learning.

Avoid Over Usage

In order to maintain the strength of the words and to help your child from becoming the stereotypical polite Brit, try to reign in over usage. As your child learns new words and sounds they will want to repeat them over and again, when it comes to being polite you should let them know that these words are just to be used form time to time.

Teach The Meaning

As your child gets older you need to teach them what politeness actually is, when they should use it, what kind of actions merit it and how they should approach it. This is the key to keeping your child a little tough and not being overly polite all of the time.

Educate Them on Softness

To keep your child a tough little cookie, you should educate them on softness and over-politeness. Let them know that being this way can have lots of problems and that in order to for their politeness to mean something, they should just offer it when the time is right.  There is nothing wrong with encouraging your child to be tough, the World is tough and they need to be ready for it when they get older.