After waking up from his nap, our nearly 3 year old son came and asked me in a sweet and sheepish voice, “Mommy, may I please have some goldfish?” He meant goldfish crackers, not the real goldfish. I was shocked! This little boy of ours is our less talkative one, a slow talker as well. He simply didn’t talk much until recently. Furthermore, 90% of his vocabulary has been in Mandarin Chinese.  But thanks to frequent exposure to his older brother, who speaks English more, he has now started off with sentences. What a kid.

The reason I was shocked was because I’ve never taught him how to properly ask for things. I didn’t teach him to speak in complete sentences either.  If he had merely said, “Goldfish?” that would have aligned more with my expectations.  Or perhaps, “Mommy, goldfish?”  But, no, he comes out and shocks me with the more formal, “Mommy, may I please have some goldfish?”  I’ve certainly never taught him this form of request!  However, I have taught his older brother manners and how to ask for things in a proper and respectable way!  Voila!  Mystery solved!

One of the benefits of teaching older children manners (and other guidelines for behavior) is that the younger ones follow along. Even though they may not understand or talk at the moment, they are watching and learning. Even though training our children is difficult and extremely time consuming at times, it does get easier, and as more children are added to our family, they follow their older siblings’ examples.  This gives us both hope for the future (that child training will become a bit easier) and a good reminder that persevering with older children has payoff of the “trickle-down” sort to younger ones.