Children Go From Learning ABCs to Learning to Mind Their Ps and Qs : Manners: Etiquette classes teach youngsters the social graces. Experts say lessons are not being taught at home or among peers anymore.

Ten-year-old Lindsey Glock twisted the telephone cord around a small finger and politely told the caller that her mother couldn’t come to the telephone. She gently offered to take a message.

“All my friends call me ‘The Manners Princess,’ ” Lindsey said as she rolled her eyes and hung up to the giggles of classmates and the applause of her teacher.

Julia Spelsberg, the etiquette teacher, then talked about a boy who answered the telephone but forgot to write down the message, making big trouble for his father.

“What’s the lesson?” Spelsberg asked.

“Kill your brother?” said Allison Cutlip, 9.

“No, tell him to write it down,” Spelsberg replied.

Across the nation, etiquette for children is making a comeback, thank you, in classes like Spelsberg’s.

Manners, courtesy and thoughtfulness are simple and basic lessons all too often ignored at school and forgotten at home.

“It’s kind of sad you have to call in a specialist, but I recognize it’s necessary because people are not teaching these things,” said Judith Martin, whose Miss Manners column appears in 250 newspapers three times a week.

“It’s like any other language. If you learn it early, it’s much easier.”

When Spelsberg, 42, an advertising manager, watched her 9-year-old son spit a piece of meat out of his mouth onto the floor, she said, “It was just like a light bulb.”

“It’s not that etiquette is a lost art,” she said, “but maybe people just don’t put the emphasis on it. It was just something we sort of forgot about.”

Spelsberg put together a course from various etiquette books and began offering private classes last fall.

Since the first flyers went out around nearby Weston, she has had an overwhelming response from parents eager to get their kids’ elbows off the table and their thank-you notes written.

“It’s something (from which) we can’t calculate the benefits we derive,” said Tina Levelle of Morgantown, whose two children are enrolled.

“I think it’s a very important part of their upbringing that they don’t get from their peers anymore. I think we’ve lost that in some of the youth today.

“More importantly, I wanted them to think their mother was right.”

Suzanne Glock of Morgantown enrolled Lindsey and sisters Ashley, 11, and Tori, 8, to fine-tune their social skills.

“I’m hearing a lot more ‘please’ and ‘thank-yous’ at the dinner table. Their manners are better,” Glock said. “It makes a difference when someone other than Mom and Dad says this is what you do in a social situation.”

Martin says manners began to take a turn for the worse in the 1960s, when many parents took a hands-off approach to teaching etiquette.

Those children are now rearing families, where both parents work and dinners are often shared with the television.

“Those are the people who are flooding my mailbox, saying, ‘My parents lied to me. (Proper etiquette) does matter,’ ” Martin said.

“It would be equivalent to pushing a child on the soccer field and telling him, ‘There are no rules; just kick the ball.’ ”

Tish Spaulding, who has been teaching etiquette to businessmen and businesswomen since 1991, began offering classes similar to Spelsberg’s two years ago in Birmingham, Ala.

“When you see the need for it at the adult level, you realize a lot of this starts when they’re kids,” Spaulding said. “I could see we needed to back way up.

“A lack of manners is going to walk them right into limits, and no one’s ever going to tell them what’s wrong except their family, maybe.”

Martin, whose books include “Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children,” says courses have become popular over the last decade but too often focus on “snobby etiquette.”

Rather than learning how to eat at home with Mom and Dad, they learn how to eat in elegant restaurants and ride in limousines, she says.

“How many kids know how to ride on a public bus?” Martin said. “They’re teaching snobbery, and snobbery is bad manners, and I find it appalling.”

Spaulding agrees. Her classes range from proper introductions to going to movies and concerts.

“It’s just about respect for the other person and putting them at ease,” she said. “It also gives you a set of rules to get you through some difficult situations in life.

“When you radiate that confidence and have the ability to put people at ease, it instills trust in you, and that carries all the way into business.”