Often you can tell the way a family is functioning and how each member is fitting to the system by observing the group during mealtime. The dinner table is one time during the day when (optimally) the entire group is together in close quarters.

Issues around table manners come up with most blended families who seek counseling. Several elements help account for anxiety at mealtimes. First, each adult involved with the child has his or her dinner time experience and his or her learned standards for eating behavior. These influencing adults include the non-present biological mother of the child, perhaps a step-father, and often grandparents, aunts and uncles. Indirectly, beliefs about table manners include the ideas of potentially eight sets of grandparents! Think about it. Your ideas were taught you by your parents. If both of your parents’ parents were divorced and remarried…as you see, the teachings of many adults form our ideas of what is allowable regarding table manners and whether or not good table manners are important.

The influence of these many sources is emphasized to enable parents and stepparents to loosen their death grip insistence on there being only one right way for children to behave at meals and only one right way to teach manners. If mealtime has become a flashpoint, that is, a time when differences in goals for the children are aired, the first step, is to back up, recognize all those influences and take a wider, less-rigid approach. Once we’ve identified a chronic flashpoint situation, we approach the time more anxiously as does everyone else at the table. Manners were important to more important to my parents than manners were to the children’s father or the children’s biological mother. Thus, when I announced my expectations for my stepchildren’s table manners as if I was proclaiming the Ten Commandments—my presentation was neither appreciated nor taken as law.

So, first step—take a deep breath. Because a child eats asparagus with her fingers, it’s not automatic that she will never have a date or end up in prison.

That said, hopefully, you will be enjoying many meals with your stepchildren and guide them as best you can toward table manners which will result in their being welcomed guests at any table. Two elements are particularly important for your success. First, make it clear that table manners are not merely empty rules made up by adults to torture children. Table manners have been developed over tens of thousands of years by humans trying to share food without being annoying. You can add a bit of levity by having children guess what they think cavemen and women would have had for table manners.

Thus, we insist that people at the table eat with our mouths closed because half-chewed food observed in a person’s mouth is annoying. We do not reach over someone else for an item, because having someone obstruct your movement while you are eating is annoying.

The second helpful tip involves dealing directly with the children in explaining your system of manners at the table. If you choose to try to have the system you’d like to see in place brokered through your husband—that is, you tell him what you’d like and he tells the children—your efforts are much less likely to be implemented and problems between your husband and yourself will go up. Figure out a pleasant way to be a leader at the table. Make learning manners fun.