Teaching the Younger Generation Respect and the Value of a Name

I can’t say just when I began having the children of my closest friends go from calling me “Lonnae” to calling me “Aunt Lonnae” or “Miss Lonnae.” And my insistence on “Mrs. Parker” for the kids of people I don’t know well seemed to creep up on me from nowhere.

I had my older daughter when I was 26 and felt a lot like Lonnae and very little like Mrs. Parker. That name was reserved for my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law--grown people for whom a title was appropriate.

Those were casual times, and we young mothers were Lonnae and Stephanie and Terina and Shonda--certainly a switch from how things were when I was a kid. Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, I didn’t think adults even came with first names. They were always, without exception, Mrs. Tate, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Farrow, or Aunt and Uncle so-and-so. There was simply a certain ingrained way you talked to grown people.

“All adults were like teachers to me,” recalls BET online producer Stephanie Crockett, now “Aunt Stephanie” to my two daughters. (I’m now Aunt Lonnae to her 8-year-old daughter.)

“I don’t remember calling folks by their first names when I was coming up, even with a Ms. in front of them,” she says. “It was Mrs. and Mr. and their last names only.”

As a young mother, “I felt like I wasn’t a grown-up,” Crockett says, and only real adults should be addressed with titles. “Now I feel like it is just a matter of respect.”

Certain cultural and geographic traditions are repeated, says Karen Grigsby Bates, co-author of “Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times” (Doubleday, 1996), an etiquette book targeted to African Americans. For many black Southerners, self-definition became an important counter to a history of disrespect.

“To have somebody 16 call you ‘Sally’ was very insulting when you’ve lived five times as long as they have,” Bates says. “When we got the chance to say how we were going to be addressed or how we addressed ourselves, we were very careful to extend to each other the courtesies that others were not willing to give us.”

My first memory of deliberately using “Mrs. Parker” came nearly three years ago, while on assignment with Washington Post photographer Susan Biddle. We were introducing ourselves to the 6-year-old daughter of a man I was writing about.

“Hi, I’m Susan,” said Biddle.

“Hi, I’m Mrs. Parker,” I said.

Biddle, who is older than I am, calls herself an Army brat who grew up with strict rules and “standard operating procedures.” She was taught always to use Mr. or Mrs. unless she got specific permission not to, she says--a habit she still uses when talking with older adults.

Still, she doesn’t feel it’s inappropriate or disrespectful to invite a child to call her Susan.

“I’m not married,” Biddle says. “If I were married, I’d maybe say, ‘I’m Mrs. Biddle.’” Besides, “I like kids a lot, and I want them to relate to me. I think it’s easier for them to relate to you if you use first names. You don’t have that teacher image.”

Experts say the last 25 years have produced a marked decrease in the culture of formality surrounding adult-child relationships.

“We have gotten busy, and these old rules of manners have fallen by the wayside,” says Sheryl Eberly, author of “365 Manners Kids Should Know” (Three Rivers Press, 2001). “Kids have become very peer-oriented, and there are times when kids don’t even respond when adults talk to them.”

Eberly says recent generations have “spent a lot of time doing everything we can to develop our children’s self-esteem and encourage them to be honest about their feelings, and what we have gotten is children who think they are the center of the world. I think it is time to have the pendulum swing the other way a little bit and have our children become more aware of others. We aren’t peers.”

P.M. Forni, author of “Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct” (St. Martin’s Press), publishing this month, theorizes that distrust of formality is a deeply ingrained part of the American character, dating to the colonies’ break with England. This distrust was combined with the status change of children a couple of generations ago, when they went from an inferior class (to be seen and not heard) to one of special regard.

Add the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and “it is no surprise that empowered children would eventually address adults as their equals,” Forni says.