Say the Magic Word!
Dear Em and Lil,
I’m the full time nanny for a 7 year old who never says please or thank you. For example, she’ll just say “I want lunch.” Or the other day, she lost a book and I ended up finding it, and instead of acknowledging that I helped her she said “I knew it would appear.”
She’s not a bad kid, and I don’t want to be one of those adults who’s always like, SAY THE MAGIC WORD! But at the same time, if she was my kid I would want her to have better manners, and not gonna lie, I sometimes feel like her servant. Should I teach/remind her to say please and thank you? Should I talk to her parents about this?
-Wannabe Mary Poppins
EM: You gotta make that kid say please and thank you! If nothing else, it will help you not murder the kid (murder is not parenthetical to the goal of babysitting). In life, there are short stints and marathons. A short stint, in this case, would be a one night babysitting gig. On a one-nighter, it is in no way your position or to your advantage to address the kids’ behavior. You haven’t gained rapport, you won’t see the kids again, so who cares. Let the night play out as easily as it can by letting things go.
This, on the other hand, is a marathon. You see this kid all the time and it’s time for her to start saying please and thank you. Seven is old enough for you two to have a sincere conversation about why saying ‘magic words’ is polite and neglecting to do so is rude. I see no need to involve the parents! It should be a simple enough conversation and I think you can handle it!
LIL: Another difference between babysitting full time and once in a while is that the kid will pretty quickly start to see you as a series regular rather than a special guest star. In that way, you can look at this as a victory. This kid feels comfortable enough to treat you like she’d treat family (which is to say, rudely!)
As a babysitter, you have a certain amount of discipline points to spend, and you probably don’t want to blow them all on this one thing. If you suddenly start prompting pleases and thank yous every time she asks for something, it’s going to get old fast for both of you. And while you might be able to train her to say the magic words, I suspect there won’t be much genuine gratefulness behind them. So, my advice is to keep it light and mix up your strategies.
If you’re playing with legos or stuffed animals, have them tell each other to say please and thank you. Create a universe where the consequences of bad manners are so comically terrible that she will want to join in on enforcing them.
Teach her please and thank you in another language. Then, make it into a contest to see who can use them more often. A spoonful of sugar does make the medicine go down, but so does a spoonful of competition.
The next time you do something for her and she doesn’t acknowledge it, ham it way up! Lie down on the floor, claiming that you are so exhausted from being her servant that you must sleep for the rest of the day. She will probably say, “get up! You’re being weird!” But she won’t be able to completely ignore that you helped her. At the very least, you will get to pretend to sleep for a few minutes which is the highlight of any babysitter’s day.
