My 17 year old niece has lived with us for two years now. Her table manners were atrocious when she arrived. She resembled a wild animal when she ate. It was borderline revolting to eat with her. She is better, but she has lingering habits that are driving me crazy. I try to just not watch her, but tonight I looked her way to ask her to pass something just as she was licking the full length of the palm of her hand rather than use a napkin. I let out a groan and stood up to reach the item I wanted rather than have her use her newly slobered hand to pass it to me. She acted clueless and said, "what?" So, I demonstrated what she had done in hopes that she could SEE how it looks. She apologized, but she has dozens of habits like this. I feel like it's time to just let it go, but her lack of manners make meal time unpleasant. She's away for much of the summer, but come Fall, I find myself trying to arrange our dinner times to avoid eating with her. If she has a meeting at 6pm. I'll feed her early, and then the rest of us will have dinner at 6:15. If she has classes until 5:30. I'll have everyone fed by 5pm, and I'll just save a plate for her. I wish someone other than my husband and me would speak to her about it, but I sometimes wonder if she doesn't pull out the "good manners" when she is with others. I asked her after she'd done something gross like forcing a really loud burp at the table if she'd do that in front of her friends. She said, "No." However, she tried to play it like it was a compliment to us that she felt comfortable being crude in front of us. I told her that I didn't want her to be THAT comfortable. She has one more year with us before she graduates. At this point, do I try to ignore it, because I have talked to her about it so much that I crossed over the River Nag a long time ago. Anyway, that's for letting me vent, and I welcome any advice!
I'd say something. And I would guess that she does know better, and really wants you to correct her. But that's a big difference from putting elbows on the table or even reaching in front of someone. There's no way I'd let it pass!
I wouldn't let it pass. She feels comfortable doing these things in front of you because you have let her. Maybe you could make a game out of table manners for the whole family. I read something like this somewhere just resently to where the family has a "night off pass." It is a circle of paper that says, "night off." It starts off in front of last nights winner and if someone sees that person do something wrong then they call them on it and get the "pass" and so on. The person at the end of the meal with the pass doesn't have to help clean up the kitchen after that meal. Does that make any sense? Hope so.
Sounds like she knows what she's doing isn't acceptable. Maybe inviting a friend of hers to dinner once a week would help. If she has a boyfriend maybe you could invite him to dinner once a week. Plus you'd get to know her friends/boyfriend better. I'm not really sure how a teenagers mind works... maybe earning privileges for good manners and losing privileges for bad manners?
Definitely do not ignore it. I am not in your situation, but I wouldn't work family meals around her schedule in order to avoid her eating habits. She is living with you for a reason that I do not know, but maybe she feels left out of dinner time and is intentionally acting out because it gets her attention. Dinner gatherings are very important. It is family time. This is why it is said over and over that families should at least sit down to dinner together. If I was living with a family that was not my immediate family, I would want to be part of the family and not outside the circle. If she is living with you but not dining with the family, then where is she getting that special gathering time where families sit and share their day, likes, etc... Initially, I think she didn't have manners, but you have taught her. She is ignoring them for a reason. Again, I do not know why she is living with you but at her age she is old enough to notice that she being the extreme of poor manners. This is why I think she is trying to get attention rather than simply being a person with bad habits.
Bad habits at the table are difficult to break. May I suggest placing a mirror in front of her while she eats. Most teens are mirror addicts anyway so let her see herself eating.
I’ll try to give more information without writing a book. My niece came to us for two reasons. She needed a safe haven away from her mother who has a disease that is robbing her of her ability to reason and to control her emotional responses. (Think Alzheimer’s at the angry stage.) She also came to live with us, because she’d started failing in school and homeschooling seemed like the best option to get her back on track. She is brilliant, but she has focus and attention issues (The school said ADD...I say she developed the ability to tune out as a self-defense against what the disease was doing to her mother...it wasn’t until her mother started acting out that my niece started having “focus” issues. I think she learned to tune out completely to make it through the verbal tirades.) So, she came here with issues --ones far greater than her eating habits. I had to deal with those first. I didn’t feel like I could address all the problems at once or else I’d sound just like her mother fussing at her all the time. God took care of most of them. After two months with us, she committed her life to Jesus. With God working on the heart issues, that just left us with the annoying habits (-:! Habits related to food are perhaps the worst. I think she has some issues with food; it was almost as if she worshiped food. No matter what I fixed, she’d cheer and dance and squeal like a toddler. When I’d serve the food, she’d jiggle up and down in her seat as she stared at her plate. She’d sing love songs/chants to her food. I am not exaggerating. We finally got her to realize that that behavior was disturbing coming from a 15/16 year old. I don’t think she understood, but she did curb her enthusiasm a bit. So, I think that this issue with food is at the root of her lack of table manners. She licks her hand rather than waste those morsels in a napkin. She licks her utensils back and front again so that she doesn’t miss a taste. She gets a large spoonful of mashed potatoes and consumes it from the side of the spoon...not in one bite but using her lips to kiss bites of the utensil. She stabs a large piece of broccoli on her fork and holds it up to her face spinning it around gazing at it. She’ll take a bite off of it, and then hold it out to lovingly examine it again. She literally scraps her plate clean. She presses her finger on microscopic crumbs to pick them up. You get the idea? Actually, having written all this out, I think I am getting the idea. I was wrong to make this an issue about manners. Poor table manners are just the symptom of the problem with her relationship to food. So how do I address that!?
Is it is possible that she is displaying learned behavior that she might have witnessed in her mom? I am just tossing out an idea here. If you think it is a symptom of another problem, then you might consider therapy. I hesitate to say this being that I believe we live in a therapy saturated world that treats symptoms but doesn't work on problems and often times therapy isn't necessary at all. If anything, it sometimes manipulates the truth. Still, there are a few good professionals who might be able to help if this truly is a symptom to a much great problem.
You might want to consider that this is a sign that she needs more help than you can give without professional guidance. Children who have been in a situation of being abused or highly insecure due to the unpredictable or illogical actions of another person with whom they must live can get "stuck" in differing developmental stages quite unevenly. In other words, she could be acting out as a two or three year old about food and just a bit immature about other things and normal for about her age on still other things. The fact that you have mentioned she has had other abnormal behaviors suggests that she needs more than just learning what is acceptable. I mean, you could teach her to act "normal" but the underlying problem would still be there and that could cause her more psychological problems when you really meant to help her.
That's exactly how it seems! She does seem to be stuck at varying levels of maturity in different areas of her life. How do I find a good counselor? Counselors are like chiropractors. A good one can do wonders, but a bad one can disable you for life!
Is there a Christian College in your area? They often have counselling programs, and may be able to recommend a therapist/counselor to help. You want to avoid someone who's done a 6 week crash course, and go for someone who has real education behind them. Easier said than done!
From what you say, it sounds like she is getting her needs met for possibly the first time in her life. Being hungry has to be the worst. But being hungry and a child has to be excruciating! There is hardly any way to help yourself. So I imagine that I would absolutely celebrate someone feeding me and it would never get old. That said I would tell her I am going to need you to celebrate the food with words or a hug possibly a jig but before we sit down to eat. Can you help me think of things you could do or say to celebrate other than what you do now? I would make sure she chooses something you can live with. I do understand how you feel. Besides being a foster parent for many years, I have an adopted daughter who went through quite a bit in her first 11 years before she came to us. She cussed like a sailor. I told her "Don't say that" so many times over the years. Our son was 2 years old then and I was talking to the neighbor on our porch and the neighbor cussed. My 2 year old went running toward her with his fingers up to his lips saying "Shhhh Don't say that! Momma says don't say that!" The good news is he will probably never cuss much. And she curbed her cussing to barely any as a young adult. Sometimes we don't see the good we do till later. Just some thoughts I had Cally
Let me clarify that she was never lacking for food. Her parents met her physical needs; in fact, she was actually quite spoiled with things and food. Her mother wasn't actually diagnosed with this disease until about four years ago when the physical effects became obvious. The mental effects could have been working on her for five or six years prior to that judging by her over-the-top reactions to stuff my niece would do as a six or seven year old. If I were going to put on my pretend psychologist's coat, then I'd say that with her mother's irratic behavior, my niece may have turned to the stuff her mother would get her as proof of her love since she couldn't get any consistent proof from her words. In recent years, I've witness her mother going from "Awww baby, I love you so much. I'm so proud of you...blah, blah, blah" to an angry verbal dress down over something stupid -- all in a 15 minute conversation! Now, my niece can understand that it is the disease doing that and not her mother, but when she was six, no one had any idea that there was a disease. (The flips were further apart back then. She still had enough control to feel bad when she flipped out on my niece, and she'd try to compensate.)
