Tag - teaching kids good manners

“SHUT UP!” As a kid I marveled at how two words like shut and up, harmless when they stand separately, could join up to become so hurtful.  Like when hydrogen and oxygen come together, these words become something very different from their component parts.  And when my son bellowed “SHUT UP!” to an acquaintance, mortification didn’t begin to describe our reaction.  It seemed the world stopped spinning.  Proverbial crickets chirped so loud that our ears were ringing. The stunning paralytic effect of those two words kept us from swooping in and immediately rectifying what had gone terribly wrong.  Our reaction, or…