Etiquette Is Lost on a Generation of Teens

So Prince William has a little crush on Britney Spears. Brilliant.

So Britney might actually hook up with the future king of England. Awesome.

So let’s imagine Wills and Brit on their first dinner date. Gross.

If Spears has the manners of the generation she sings and swivels to, then we’re all in trouble. Just consider the meeting between the pop teen queen and the Etonian-mannered future monarch. One can vividly imagine Britney showing up to dinner in bare midriff, high-fiving Prince Charles, requesting her Dover sole be super-sized, reapplying lip gloss between courses and asking for a shot of Jaegermeister for the road.

To be fair, Spears might have the private comportment of Audrey Hepburn and the manners of Emily Post (befitting her Southern roots). But as a teen, Spears is the poster girl for a generation weaned on MTV, Jerry Springer, Adam Sandler, the Internet and mall food. A generation that has all but forgotten to address adults with respect, write thank-you notes for gifts received, greet people with a handshake and say “please” and “thank you.”

It may be harsh to saddle the entire teen population with a bad-manners rap, but one needs only to see and hear the Class of 2000 to know it is a generation moving even further away--dangerously so--from decency, respect and basic rules of social conduct.

“We have a generation coming up now that does not know the first thing about why we have manners in our society,” said Noe, who answers etiquette questions for the Web site Etiquette Hell (https:www.thinds.com/jmh/ehell). “It’s not the children’s fault; it’s the parents’. They think their children have common sense and know right from wrong. But does that child know a thank-you card needs to be written when a gift is received? Or that you hug your Aunt Gracie even though you can’t stand her perfume? That kind of training begins at home. It’s polite. It endears us to one another.”

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Noe, who lives in Dallas and says she was “raised with a Bible in one hand and Emily Post in the other,” believes that today’s ill-mannered teens are a product of a generation that didn’t place importance on manners.

“What I’m seeing more and more of in children is actually a fallout of the freewheeling ‘60s, the ‘me’ generation; do it if it feels good,” she said. “They basically threw Emily Post out the window.”

Noe isn’t the only etiquette expert to point a finger--rude as that may be--at parents for the lack of teen manners we see today.

“The parents of today aren’t confident teachers of social skills,” said Joan K. Hopper, an etiquette and protocol consultant in West Hartford, Conn., who teaches children and adults how to manage social situations.

It was rude teen behavior that helped get Hopper into the etiquette business. She remembers about six years ago when she and her husband, while dining at a New Haven, Conn., restaurant, saw a group of well-dressed teens celebrating their prom.

“All of a sudden, I noticed what deplorable manners they had at the table,” Hopper said. “All their physical beauty, at that point, was completely wiped out.”

Hopper, who has taught etiquette the last five years, says parents need to emphasize manners just as much as grades and extracurricular activities such as sports and music. Even more important is resurrecting the family dinner table.

“The biggest travesty of this generation is that families don’t dine together,” she said. “Dining together not only fosters good table manners but good social skills. There’s an awareness of others that comes from sitting down together.”

Author and etiquette expert Judith Re agrees.

“The role models we used to have years ago no longer exist,” said Re, who teaches etiquette at the Judith Re Academie in Fairfield, Conn. “We no longer have the mother or father at home with the child. We don’t have the family meal. Many of the social-savvy tools we have were learned at the dinner table. Now it’s islands and stools.”

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While Re believes teens are not taught social graces, she also believes their generation is getting a bad rap.

“I listen to some of these parents and they say, ‘Oh, they’re a teenager, what do you expect?’ And I think to myself, they might be a teenager, but they’re also a human being. A human being that age still needs to be taught. A parent, or society in general, should never stop teaching simply because someone has reached their teenage years. Teenagers are our future.”

Re has great hope in reversing the tide of ill-mannered teens.

“I absolutely have hope,” she said. “But it’s going to be a bit harder for them because of the structure of the state we’re in now.”

That state is one in which the impersonal Internet rules; where “please” and “thank you” may be deemed superfluous; where manners aren’t seen as tools to get ahead and negotiate a successful life.

And nothing could be more wrong, said Peter Post, co-author of “The Etiquette Advantage in Business: Personal Skills for Professional Success.”

“It’s not enough to have the job skills--you have to have the interpersonal skills, too,” said Post, the great-grandson of Emily Post. “What etiquette does for us is produce an opportunity to have better interpersonal relationships. The problem is that most people don’t have the confidence in their ability to make correct choices. So they get stuck; they get nervous, apprehensive and antsy.”

Post said we’re seeing a generation of young business people who are suffering for ignoring manners. The young business barons-to-be may know all about economics, but when they sit down to the dinner table with the president of the company they don’t know what to do, he said.

“Etiquette is a way to become comfortable with that,” he said.

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But Post, like his etiquette advice peers, believes the tide is shifting. Society, he says, is recognizing a need for better manners in teens.

“People are perceiving that there does seem to be an increased amount of rudeness and uncivil behavior in teens today. I don’t have the numbers. I’m not interested in that,” he said. “But I am interested in people caring about it. They are concerned with it and want to do something about it. Without that desire to do something about it, nothing can be done.”

“I do see a great hope,” said Hopper, adding that some schools are addressing the issue of manners and etiquette training. “The awareness has come back. There is a societal awareness. The other way just didn’t work. Consideration for human kindness really does work.”