Manners are vital, let’s teach them!

Well, thank you very much for expressing so clearly what many people think. What’s more, you have — quite calmly and with little emotion — put your finger on a huge social problem. Offering this topic as ‘something different’ for this column, you are clearly writing straight from the heart, yet give no personal details at all.

A very old friend of mine once confided, some years ago, that she and her late husband used to be rather shocked when their grandchildren would arrive and walk into their kitchen without bothering to greet them in anything other than a perfunctory way, before rushing off to gawp at their phones or whatever.

This was a civilised, privileged, happy middleclass family. The parents of those grandchildren all went to private schools and were/are delightful people whom I’ve known since they were small children. Yet they said nothing when their children were (let us be honest) pretty rude.

Telling me this, my friend just shrugged — but I could see it bothered her. So why didn’t her wellbought up family tell their kids, ‘Hey — say hello to granny and grandpa!’?

Probably because we’ve become anti-respectful — an anti-authoritarian culture too ready to infantilise adults and let children in school and at home get away with unchallenged opinions and bad behaviour. Do I sound like a dinosaur? Guess what — I don’t care if I do! Of course children are careless and wrapped up in their own world — and that is why they need to be told.

Surely the kind of indifference you describe in your concerned/sad email begins when children are young and their indulgent parents don’t bother to lay down rules. And don’t we see the results all around?

Your phrase, ‘be made to think’ will probably shock those who don’t believe children should be ‘made’ to do anything. But if you have a family or if you decide to teach for a living it must be an essential part of your job to teach children how to behave. And that needs to start young.

See what you’ve done, Shirley? You’ve set me off! The sorrows of lonely older people have often appeared in the column and never fail to make me very sad. Sometimes family estrangements happen for complex reasons, and sometimes older people can be cantankerous and selfish and in the end alienate their families. But it often feels as if adult children (and therefore their children, too) are just too ‘busy’ — or lazy — to care about the feelings and wellbeing of the old.

You ask me about the future — but I’m not ‘Mystic Mooney’ and have no crystal ball. Generalisations are dangerous, which is why I fight the blanket pessimism behind your questions. But I will say I believe that the old-fashioned concept called duty should play a part in how we treat the older generation — even when they aren’t easy to deal with. I also believe that telling kids to ‘Mind your manners’ is an essential part of teaching them to be careful about the feelings of others.