[Sidenote:  Lack of Perception]

(1.) In the first place, too much must not be expected of the young savages in the nursery.  Remember that the children there are in a state very much more nearly resembling that of savage or half-civilized nation than resembling your own, and that, therefore, while they will undoubtedly take kindly to showy ceremonial, they are not ripe yet for most of the delicate observances.  At best, you can only hope to get the crude material of good manners from them.  You can hope that they will be in the main kind in intention, and as courteous under provocation as is consistent with their stage of development.  If you secure this, you need not trouble yourself unduly over occasional lapses into perfectly innocent and wholesome barbarism.

Good manners are in the main dependent upon quick sympathies, because sympathies develop the perceptions.  A child is much less likely to hurt the feelings or shock the sensibilities of a person whom he loves tenderly than of one for whom he cares very little.  This is the chief reason why all children are much more likely to be offensive in speech and action before strangers than when alone in the bosom of their families.  They are so far from caring what a stranger thinks or feels that they cannot even forecast his displeasure, nor imagine its reaction upon mother or father.  The more, then, that the child’s sympathies are broadened, the more he is encouraged to take an interest in all people, even strangers, the better mannered will he become.

[Sidenote:  Bad Example]

(2.) Bad example is more common than is usually supposed.  Very few parents are consistently courteous toward their children.  They permit themselves a sharp tone of voice, and rough and abrupt habits of speech, that would scarcely be tolerated by any adult.  Even an otherwise gentle and amiable woman is often disagreeable in her manner toward her children, commanding them to do things in a way well calculated to excite opposition, and rebuking wrong-doing in unmeasured terms.  She usually reserves her soft and gentle speeches for her own friends and for her husband’s, yet discourtesy cannot begin to harm them as it harms her children.

It is true that the children are often under foot when she is busiest, when, indeed, she is so distracted as to not be able to think about manners, but if she would acknowledge to herself that she ought to be polite, and that when she fails to be, it is because she has yielded to temptation; and if, moreover, she would make this acknowledgment openly to her children and beg their pardon for her sharp words, as she expects them to beg hers, the spirit of courtesy, at any rate, would prevail in her house, and would influence her children.  Children are lovingly ready to forgive an acknowledged fault, but keen-eyed beyond belief in detecting a hidden one.

[Sidenote:  Double Standard]