A book can help with
For the endless reminders, and the day it finally sticks.
Manners can feel like the most thankless bit of parenting: the same prompt, three times a meal, for years. But underneath the please and thank you is something worth having, which is a child who notices other people and treats them decently. That’s the actual goal, and the words are just the outward version of it.
Books help by making the point without your voice attached to it, which children hear rather differently. The funny ones work best, because a story about spectacularly bad manners lets a child laugh and quietly draw their own conclusions, and nobody has to be told off over dinner.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
The magic words
For the very youngest it’s repetition and rhythm: hearing please and thank you often enough that they stick.
Mr Panda offers his doughnuts around, and every animal demands rather than asks, until one small lemur says please and gets the lot. The joke is repeated and obvious, which is exactly why toddlers love it and why the point sticks. Deadpan, funny, and far more effective than another reminder at the table.
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Mo Willems runs through the situations where manners matter, with tiny mice popping up to comment, and it’s very funny rather than preachy. Children absorb the point while laughing at the mice. A cheerful, painless introduction from a master of the form.
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Learning by bad example
At this age nothing teaches manners like watching somebody with truly appalling ones. These are gleefully instructive.
Enormous dinosaurs demonstrate every terrible table manner imaginable before showing how it should be done. Small children love the sheer scale of the misbehaviour, and the correction lands without any nagging. A very effective, very funny series.
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Mr Rabbit is worried about his new otter neighbours until he works out that he should treat them as he’d like to be treated, which covers manners, kindness and fairness all at once. It’s daft and wordy in the best way, and children find it hilarious. A staple in classrooms for good reason.
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Beyond please and thank you
Once a child is out in the world a bit on their own, manners stop being a household rule and become the thing that makes other people glad to see them coming. What follows is practical rather than moralising.
Two psychologists writing a straightforward manual for the social side of school: joining in, taking a turn in a conversation, reading a room, handling somebody who is being unkind. Short chapters with cartoons. It treats all of it as learnable rather than as something a child either has or has not got.
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About the trail a child leaves behind them online and how quickly it follows them about. Cook writes to a formula, and this one earns its place because online manners are the ones nobody gets demonstrated at the table. Useful in the week a child is handed a device.
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Not being the rude one
By eleven a child minds a great deal about how they come across and has usually stopped taking instruction on it from a parent. Something they can read on their own tends to land better.
A pocket-sized, cartoon-heavy guide to not being the person everyone dreads sitting next to, covering the table, the phone, being a guest, and a chapter on online etiquette. From Free Spirit, written straight to the child, and funny rather than nagging. Aimed squarely at the reluctant end.
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Awkward moments and how to survive them, which at this age is most of what manners are actually for. It normalises the mortification instead of telling anybody to grow out of it.
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Something to do together
A light-hearted table-manners chart for the whole family, grown-ups included, since it works far better when everyone’s playing. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
What you’re really teaching isn’t the words, it’s the noticing: that other people exist, do things for you, and deserve something back. The please and thank you follow along behind that.
So model it more than you demand it, thank your children as often as you prompt them, and let the funny books do some of the nagging for you. It takes years, and then one day you overhear them being lovely to somebody else.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.