In the News
Michèle O’Reilly’s Table Manners For Children and Teens Class Featured in The New York Times
Smile, Make Eye Contact and Don’t Burp
by MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: December 02, 2007
(NEW CANAAN, Conn.) MANY of the children were not pleased that their parents had signed them up for a three-hour manners and etiquette course on what was otherwise a perfectly decent Sunday morning.
“Yucky,” said Tristan Murray, 9.
“It wasn’t what they wanted to do,” said his mother, Monica, who, against all odds, is a firm believer in teaching children manners and had also enrolled her two daughters, MacKenzie, 11, and Delaney, 7.
Even parents whose children seemed to have high potential for manners had modest expectations. Carmen Murphy’s son, Kyle, 10, regularly attends cotillion, where he’s learning to waltz. Her hope for the manners course? “Maybe someday, when he’s 25, he’ll learn to use a napkin.”
A Table For Tots At Holiday Meals
©2007, The Hartford Courant
by
Courant Staff Writer
November 16, 2007
Holiday meals are a challenge for hosts and hostesses, but perhaps most of all, they test small fry, children from tots to teenagers who are expected to stay still, sit up straight, keep napkins on laps, ignore the discomfiting itch of frilly holiday clothes, and endure hours of adult conversation until, finally, dessert is done and the magic words “May I please be excused?” may be spoken.
In many families, the way around this pint-size endurance test is a kids’ table, an arrangement of diminutively scaled tables and chairs designed to accommodate the younger generation.
For grown-ups, a kids’ table preserves a measure of civility in the adult realm (provided Uncle Joey doesn’t ingest the contents of the holiday punch bowl). Hosts can be relatively assured that Granny Mae’s heirloom tablecloth won’t be destroyed by gravy stains. Adult conversation flourishes. And Uncle Milt can help himself to thirds without worrying that he prevents little Jimmy from racing back to his cousin’s Wii.
But if having a kid’s table is a longstanding tradition, it poses a number of questions from how or why to set one up to how to help keep children in their chairs.
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