No, they are not.
A resonant detail from a sociolinguistics lecture some years ago was that in Chinese families, designated ‘polite’ words are not used between family members. I had already noticed this in Japan. When my host mother was angry with my host father she would speak to him in flowery, honorific language over breakfast, possibly thinking that I was tone deaf to the conflict (and granted, for the first 9 months or so I was).
English is weird like that. It’s weird that we expect our children to be polite to us, when we’re supposedly the only people in the world they’re actually stuck with, who receive unconditional love. Why should we require our children to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when inside the home?
Perhaps the fear is that children must learn to use manners robotically, because if they were to leave the safety of the home environment and speak to strangers without manners then they wouldn’t get on in the world. More darkly, their powers to manipulate others into doing as they wish would be compromised.
I’m all for teaching respect. But teaching respect for others, including an intolerance for inequalities, is not at all the same thing as teaching manners.
There are many, many ways of expressing gratitude other than with ‘thank you’. It’s in the smile, it’s in the tone of voice, it’s in the eye-contact. Don’t get me wrong — there’s nothing wrong with a ‘thank you’ and I wouldn’t like to see it die. I am a robotic user of manner-words myself after a careful upbringing — but there is so, so much more to it than that.
Sometimes strangers correct children. They say, ‘What’s the magic word?’ There are no magic words, because there is no magic. There is no way to magically make someone do what you want them to do. There’s no magic way of getting the same favour repeated. When we teach that there are special words that guarantee results, here’s the effect: The child eventually feels ripped off, and a ‘no’ is met with ‘But I said pleeeeaaase!’
And another sorry life lesson must be learnt.
