[MaryPoppinsIAin't]

This is another one of those grown-up things that NEVER made sense to me.

My parents did it all the time. And it drove me NUTS, because I could never tell if they really meant "please" or if they were just "being polite". Tone of voice, body cues, none of it "read" clearly enough to me, or consistently enough, and every time I thought I'd figured it out, I'd read someone wrong and get confused again. And then when *I* would use "please" as a just being polite thing, and get angry when the person said no, I would get told off for being disrespectful or getting above myself. Same if I just said "Do this, thank you." Even if it was just to my brother. I had to say please, and I wasn't allowed to get mad if the person said no, no matter what it was ("will you please get your trucks out of the toilet and go away so I can pee????" true story), but when an adult said "please", I wasn't allowed to say no. Very confusing, and all it really succeeded in doing was making me mad and obstinate out of frustration.

If you have a child that readily picks up on and understands unspoken social signals like tone of voice, body language, facial expression, then you may have more success with the "politely worded command". But if your child has any sort of hang-up in that area (whether it's age related, sensory issue, autism, etc), then he or she may a) not be able to grasp the "authority asks politely but it still means do it now" concept, or b) see right through the whole double standard of it and refuse to cooperate until the adults start to behave in accordance with their own rules! That's basically what happened in my head... I couldn't figure out the complexities of the game, so I just decided to stop playing until someone simplified the rules.

I've noticed this problem in the way I communicate too. I was so heavily conditioned to "ask politely" that I screw myself up in talking with my husband. Because he wasn't raised that way, when I say "Please think about what you want for dinner", he hears "Please think about what you want for dinner, and deciding that you don't want any is fine too." Problem is, what I really mean by that is "Decide what meat you want for dinner, go downstairs, get it out of the freezer, and put it in a bowl to thaw so that come 4pm I can cook it for you." And then 4pm rolls around, nothing's thawed, and nobody's acting like they have any intention of cooking, and I get mad because hello, the nursing mama needs to eat, people! So I'm trying to break the habit and say what I actually mean. Hopefully this will help when JJ starts getting verbal and needs me to be clear in my communication!