It is our responsibility, as parents, to help them learn to do this. Children are naturally self-centered and need to be brought out of this narrowness to become mature adults. It is not just an age difference! It is a difference in the attitude towards self and others to begin with.
I agree that these types of things do reflect deeper moral or cultural attitudes in that we seem to be losing the much needed distinction between adults and children. This is just one of the ways we seem to be allowing children to run our lives now days rather than the other way around. And if the interruption is insignificant, the child needs to be told not to interrupt again unless it is important. No one is bleeding! Even very young children can be made to “wait their turn” so to speak by putting one’s hand on their arm or shoulder to show that they have been heard, finishing one’s sentence or listening attentively to the other adult finish his sentence, then excusing oneself to respond to the child. And I am not referring to situations of emergency. Rather than teaching these children that they are not the center of the universe and showing them to respect others by making them wait until sentences are at least finished, parents are breaking off conversations mid-sentence to respond immediately to children. I can’t say how many times I have been in a conversation with another parent, and a child, small or otherwise, interrupts quite rudely.
What a great topic and much needed! I am increasingly appalled at the lack of manners being taught to children. The Republic is one of the most widely read and influential of all books.
Plato (427-347 B.C.), a student of Socrates, and teacher of Aristotle, is considered one of the greatest philosophers of all time. It is worth asking ourselves whether we are cultivating customs that reflect and buttress our moral convictions, and whether we are leading by example in the areas Socrates mentions, and in “everything else of that sort.” Education can and should, in its most basic sense, be going on in all our homes. But perhaps it is too easy to point fingers. Education-and this taken broadly to mean how we form the young-is what sets the standards, and by and large determines such things.Ĭonsidering the state of education over the past fifty years, perhaps it is not a stretch to say that our conventions-many of which even if not perfect did contribute to good community and real happiness-have indeed been destroyed. Soon after the above statement Socrates points out that such matters are normally not the subject of legislation we don’t make laws about hairs styles, posture, manners, or even the care of parents. He also thinks that these customs can express, and cultivate, fundamental moral dispositions and convictions and thus make an important difference in life. He seems to think that certain customary habits didn’t just slip away, or fade out of fashion. Hair styles, standing-up or not, deportment: do we have the energy to notice and evaluate, much less address such issues? Parallels between Socrates’ day and ours can be rather striking. We easily slip into judging certain things to be insignificant-in any case in the shadow of, well, other looming issues. Things like this: When it is proper for the young to be silent in front of their elders, when they should make way for them or stand up in their presence, the care of parents, hair styles, the clothes and shoes to wear, deportment, and everything else of that sort. These people will also discover the seemingly insignificant conventions their predecessors have destroyed.
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