Manners! It seems like it’s a constant challenge to try to teach our children good manners and social skills. Teaching the basics like not lying or hurting anyone seems to be understood pretty easily, but teaching your children to talk nicely to each other is a different story. You can remind your children about this over and over and they seem to understand, but getting them to actually do it is another thing altogether.

If you have a similar problem, here is a game that will help reinforce the idea of talking nicely to each other. It’s easy to do and the kids think it’s fun too.

What you need are some of the jumbo paperclips that you can get at your local office supply store. My children like the brightly colored ones that have stripes and dots on them. Give each child five paper clips and let them join them together to form a chain. Now, using a large safety pin, pin a paperclip chain to each member of the family.

The rule that you will be teaching can vary, but for this example, we will be using the "talk nicely to your family members" rule.

The rule is:

You must talk nicely to all family members.

You must talk respectively to all family members.

No yelling.

No screaming.

No name calling.

No sarcastic comments about another family member.

No ridiculing another family member.

No insulting another family member.

Any time a family member catches another family member breaking one of these rules, the offender has to nicely and promptly give them one of their paperclips. If they do it with a bad attitude, they lose two.

So the ones that are following the rules don’t lose any of their paperclips but the ones that break it lose theirs. It becomes a game to see who can have the longest chain at the end of the day or however long you decide to play the game.

You can play this game starting when your children get home from school or play it all day long on the weekends. An immediate benefit you will notice when playing this game is that everyone immediately becomes very quiet! Ahhhh….

You can also adapt this game to teach any other manners that you want like table manners, phone manners, doing chores, etc.

So if you’ve had trouble teaching your children manners and are tired of "nagging" about it, try adding some fun to your teaching methods. Your kids will have a good time, it involves the entire family, and your kids just might learn some manners.

Jason Ladock

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