Children struggle to retain the need to use two such simple words as Please and Thankyou, yet will master the grammatical use of any expletive after one single mutterance

Basic manners are non negotiable in my world. There is no doubt that they make a large difference to peoples opinion of a child. You can have the schools "devil child" around to play, but if they offer up a genuine, heartfelt thank you, without a parental elbow involved, then suddenly they are forgiven for trashing the house, climbing on the furniture and stealing a Lego mini figure.
With this in mind, I decided to start the brainwashing very early with my children. So, with the exception of "mummmm" and "dadadada," the first words I drilled into my children were please and thank you. I even taught sign language manners to my middle child who was struggling to get her tongue around the "P's" and "Th's." Okay, I do now acknowledge that I might have been bordering on the obsessive to go this far, but in my defence it was at a time when the use of sign language to reduce toddler tantrums was seriously in vogue.... albeit very briefly.
So, did my diligent approach to politeness pay off? Did it heck! Despite the fact that manners were practically demanded from my breastfeeding babes in arms, I was still there, with all the other frustrated mums saying "yes,what?" and "what do you say?" whenever my children had those painfully frequent memory lapses.

I couldn't count the number of times that I stood over my children, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Basil Fawlty ranting at Manuel, screaming "How difficult is it? If you are offered something you say please, if you  take something you  say thank you!!!!"
It is not even as though it's a complex communication skill with situational variables; the rules are always the same.
I thought that I might have cracked it the time that I saw my 5 year old take a party bag from a post party frazzled parent. She didn't so much as a wiggle her top lip in thanks let alone utter a verbal expression of gratitude. This time I truly lost the plot. Having done the puppeteer parent bit of standing behind her and making her say Thank you, I then took her outside, snatch said goody bag from her sticky mitts and promptly threw it straight in the nearest rubbish bin [checking that the frazzled party parent didn't see, of course] Naturally the result was catastrophic, the grief over the loss of that bag of 'future landfill'  went on for hours. But, as harsh and heartless as I felt,  I consoled myself with the knowledge that she would never forget her manners again. After all, if this traumatic experience didn't trigger the spontaneous manners neurons to start functioning in her little brain, then nothing would .... Sadly, just 3 days later the memory box malfunctions started again.

So, why oh why is it that, on the one isolated occasion that a four letter word escaped from my mouth in her presence it was inwardly digested, stored and regurgitated in perfect grammatical context at the least opportune moment.

I tried desperately to ensure that I embraced the Mary Poppins approach to parenting and never swore. However, it proved to be almost impossible to fulfil this mission when it came to the shock of sudden pain. It's a bit like when the doctor does that reflex test of tapping your knees with that rubber hammer thingy... you have absolutely no control over your lower limp springing forward. I find I have a similar swear reflex response when my oven gloves fail me and I get that sudden shock of sizzling flesh as I remove the dinner from the oven. I have tried to stop this swear reflex mid flow by adapting the vocabulary Shshshshshsh...... ugar is always my mission but occasionally the swear reflex is just too strong for me to beat it and the "it" ending falls out instead.  Radar ears immediately prick up and the equivalent to the Spanish inquisition begins. "What did you say mummy?" "What does it mean?" "Why did you say it?" I thought that I dealt with the situation perfectly. I aimed to answer her questions without making the unacceptability of the word sound that bit more appealing. Two weeks passed and I felt certain the word was forgotten. Then, my hubbys very posh Auntie visited. My daughter ran excitedly in through the sitting room door but unfortunately wasn't entirely focused on where she was going and collided with the door frame.  She hit that bone so inappropriately named the funny bone and shouted, with perfect clarity "S**T!" Before I had time to even consider how I was going to tackle this in the presence of "the royal aunt" she spluttered, through tears of pain, "and I'm allowed to say that word when it hurts - you do!"
There is no logic when it comes to instilling basic manners into your child, but after that incident I was tempted to adapt the English language and substitute the words please and thank you for a couple of expletives as I was confident that my children would at least remember them then.

Thank you for reading - If you enjoyed this please spread the word and start to follow me [on right near top of page] There will be a new Why Oh Why is it that... every Friday.