I'm seeking advice on how to help my kid develop (what I think are) reasonable age-appropriate table manners.
We have two kids, ages 7 (let's call her Deanna) and almost 11 (Aaron). We generally have a sit-down family dinner most nights, except maybe a pizza-and-movie night on the weekend. Aaron has, maybe not atrocious, but certainly pretty bad table manners. He's constantly chewing with his mouth open, talking with his mouth full of food, eating with his hands or using his fingers to push food onto his fork instead of using another utensil. He takes bites so big he can barely fit it all in his mouth.
We're constantly reminding Aaron (during meals, mostly) to slow down, take smaller bites, use his utensils, wait until he's finished chewing to speak, etc. I would say at a given dinner it might be like 7-10 times we ask him to close his mouth, use his fork, etc. When we do remind him, we try to do it in a pretty neutral way. There's no punishment, we're not trying to make him feel like we're disgusted by him or anything, we're just approaching it from a perspective of "these things are hard to remember all the time, here's a reminder" and hoping that it helps him build a habit. Well, we've been reminding him for years, and it is clearly not working. I don't want to continue just doing the same thing forever if it's not going to have any results.
My wife and I try to model polite behavior. Our daughter Deanna also has some similar struggles, and we do remind her, but much less frequently. Mostly I would say that's because we have lower expectations due to the four-year age difference.
On the one hand, it's important to us that Aaron be able to behave politely. On the other hand, I can see that as a young person, being constantly criticized for how you eat has got to be a bummer, and it puts a damper on our family meals.
Full disclosure: I have a brother who is a wonderful human being in most respects, but who has (what I consider to be) atrocious table manners, and I don't want Aaron to end up like that. It's possible that this is more my (and my wife's) hangup than a matter of earthshattering importance that's going to wind up with him overdosing in the gutter or whatever.
I guess I have three related questions here:
- What are reasonable expectations of an 11-year-old in terms of eating politely, keeping their mouth closed, using utensils properly, etc? (I'm just talking normal knife/fork/spoon here, not, like, keeping track of a salad fork vs dinner fork and soup spoon vs teaspoon or whatever.)
- What are some ways to approach helping him with this that don't involve us constantly telling him how to eat and making him feel like he's failing at basic life skills?
- If my expectations are unreasonable, how can I try to chill out about this and let it slide a bit more?
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