I say please and thank you to my kids, but not when bad behaviour is taking place unless it’s a new behaviour that they haven’t been taught is unacceptable yet (like curse words). I’ll tell my son to please pick up his room or please feed the dog. I’ll tell him thank you when he does it without me asking a second time. I’ll probably stop when he gets into the habit of doing it on his own. But I still want to get my kids into the habit of saying please and thank you to others as they get out into the world. Those two sayings will get you quite a ways with people sometimes.
My daughter is at the hitting stage right now and it has gotten to the point where the daycare provider has brought it to our attention. I told the provider that I slap my daughter’s hand when she hits, tell her sternly that it’s not acceptable and may send her to her room if it’s happened before in the very recent past. Unfortunately these are not options for the daycare provider. She is not allowed to physically punish a child for any reason by state law. She can put them in timeout but my daughter was hitting while she was in timeout. We needed to work out something that could be enforced at both the daycare and our house (need that consistency). My wife and I sat down with the provider and came up with a solution with my daughter listening in. We told her (the daughter) that if she was mad at somebody and wanted to touch them (hit them) to give that person a hug instead and tell them that she is mad at them. So far, it’s been working pretty good. We have to be very consistent with encouraging this behaviour modification or she will quickly lapse into her old ways.