Month: October 2025

• Earlier this year, mealtime at my house was feeling out of control.
• My kids were talking with their mouths open and complaining about each others poor manners.
• We introduced new rules gradually to avoid overwhelming the children and offered an incentive.

Earlier this year, I realized that dinnertime had gotten out of hand at my house. It seemed like each of my five family members spent half of our mealtime together complaining about each other’s poor manners. My teens often didn’t love that their younger siblings would interrupt during conversations or chew with their mouths open. Everyone made their feelings known.

After spending an hour or more making a nice meal, the time together was nothing but nice — and that wasn’t working for me

We needed a reset at the dinner table

Collectively, we knew something had to change. Not one kiddo at the table was showing what older folks would call “good manners.”

I came up with the idea of making a simple poster of rules to hang up in our kitchen. The plan was to start with two rules, adding an additional rule or two each week depending on how things were going. We didn’t want to overwhelm anyone, and we were trying to be reasonable. The goal was to build skills slowly, and hopefully, with practice, the skills would stick.

The poster was nothing fancy, but it was something that we could all see from our kitchen table, and it was something my husband and I could easily refer back to if things started getting unruly as someone passed the butter.

The rules got the kids to focus on specific issues

At first, the kids changed their tattling from pointing out a random act of bad manners to calling each other out on the rules on the list. For example, our first two rules were to stay in your seat and chew with your mouth closed. The kids hounded each other, meal after meal, including when either of us parents broke a rule.

When they shifted to monitoring themselves better, and we added more rules to our list. We asked that we do not interrupt each other, put napkins in laps, and not to take jumbo bites of food.

Some rules were easier to follow than others. In order not to take jumbo bites, we had to do a lot of practice cutting food into reasonable pieces.

It took time for the kids to change, but a reward helped

Of course, we didn’t do this experiment without offering a reward. Our goal was to get ice cream at our favorite parlor in town after meeting our goal of learning and practicing all of the family table manners.

It took us about two months to get there, but we met our goal.

The gentle rollout of rules allowed us to focus on bigger lessons

Throughout this experiment, we talked to our kids about why good manners are important. For example, we let them know that staying in their chairs is an important thing to do outside of the home, too. We also shared how it can be embarrassing or distracting to shovel food into one’s mouth, talk with their mouth full of food, or even leave the table several times to go back to the food line to get just one more item.

We also talked about the importance of sharing gentle reminders with each other. Barking orders and constantly tattling isn’t positive or effective communication, nor is it very motivating. It’s important in life to be able to share, and receive, gentle criticism. This was perhaps the hardest part of our dinnertime manners adventure. At the end of the day, we are all tired, yet we had to use the right words and tone to remind each other what we should and shouldn’t say to one another.

As a parent, I try to teach my kids that working towards a positive goal, such as ice cream, is much more effective than ongoing lectures. Do we have perfect manners now? Not even close. However, we took the time to build a foundation that is meaningful — and, most importantly — a much more pleasant mealtime together. And we can always put the list back up when we need reminders.

• A lawmaker sent a letter to corporations funding Trump’s White House ballroom project.
• The letter demanded they answer several questions, including whether they had federal contracts.
• The East Wing was demolished this week as part of the renovation process.

The giant hole in the White House left by construction crews this week could be a metaphor for something bigger, one lawmaker says: the erosion of public trust.

The East Wing of the White House was demolished on Monday to make way for President Donald Trump’s new 90,000 square-foot ballroom. The president says the project will cost upward of $300 million — paid for by corporate donations.

Mississippi Rep. Bennie G. Thompson is now demanding answers from those companies.

“It looks like you’re tearing an abandoned building down, and you are looking at the citadel of democracy just being attacked by a bulldozer,” Thompson told Business Insider.

In a letter sent on Friday, Thompson demanded that over 20 corporations share information, including the amount of their donations and whether they had been promised anything in return.

“Today, there is a gaping hole in the side of the White House, and no one in the White House has been honest with Americans about the construction plans or the costs,” one letter addressed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said. “You owe Americans an explanation.”

Thompson said the Trump administration bypassed the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Presidents who want to renovate the White House typically submit plans to a commission and hold forums for historians, citizens, and experts to weigh in on the project’s outcome, he said.

“That obviously did not occur before demolition started,” Thompson said in the letter. Construction began as the federal government remains shut down.

Thompson gave the corporations until November 7 to respond to his questions, which also include a request to list any current federal contracts they hold.

“I’m thinking that a lot of the information we are asking for, they would’ve asked the same questions before they agreed to give the money,” he told Business Insider.

The White House this week released the list of donors contributing to the project.

It includes Amazon, Apple, Google, Coinbase, Comcast Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and several other notable companies. Some of these companies also donated to Trump’s 2024 inauguration fund, including $1 million contributions from Meta and Amazon.

YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, contributed more than $20 million to the ballroom project as part of a legal settlement following its suspension of Trump’s account, according to court filings. The donation was made on Trump’s behalf to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit entity dedicated to restoring and preserving the National Mall.

Trump initially said the ballroom project wouldn’t affect the current building.

“It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” he told reporters in July.

A construction crew, however, began demolishing the East Wing on Monday, two days before Trump told reporters that the project’s cost had grown to $300 million, up from his previous estimate of $200 million.

Thompson said his office hasn’t received any responses to the letter yet, but expects to in the coming week.

“I know of no other symbol of this great democracy than the White House, so if you are putting money into any kind of project toward that symbol, then the process has to be public,” Thompson told Business Insider.

Read the letter in full below: