My parents would have spun my head around if I did that!

Don’t open your mouth when full of food
Don’t wave your fork about, you’ll put somebody’s eye out
Don’t pick bits out of your food (onion)
Eat it all up, there are millions starving in China
No pudding if you don’t empty your plate
Go to the toilet before you sit down
You’ll eat it all up and like it.

Don’t speak with food in your mouth
Chew with your mouth closed
If your mother can cook it, you can eat it
There better not be 1 crumb left on that plate

Elbows off the table, cut with the left hand, switch utensils after cutting. Mouth closed. Napkin on lap. Your left hand should be in your lap, not hovering on the side of your plate. Your face should not come down to the plate, your forkful of food should come up to your face.

Lots of time spent learning proper table manners and how people will judge you based on your table manners.

If you want to see how people really should behave at a table, look at royals when they’re eating.

Nothing was said about having to eat all my food. If I didn’t like it or didn’t want to eat it, no biggie.

BOTH my parents had survived the Great Depression & understood what it was like to go truly hungry!!! To BOTH of them, food was a precious item that was NOT to be wasted.

My Dad’s parents had both died when he was about 6 y/o leaving behind 3 little brats, 5, 6, & 7. An Aunt took them in mainly because they came with a healthy life insurance policy. The Aunt’s attitude was you are lucky to have a place to live & even luckier to have food on the table. She browbeat the kids that whatever she cooked they were going to eat…like it or not. That seemed to have left a lasting scar on my Dad as he was the one who held deeply to that rule. My Mom was a kind & loving soul. IF she ever cooked something that any of us just couldn’t eat, she took that out of her lineup never to be seen again!!! As we kids got older, we fixed our own plates. Therefore, we were supposed to know how hungry we were when we fixed our plate & should NOT be a glutton taking food we did NOT need!!! Hence came the rule that since we had taken it, we were going to eat it. Since we could go back for 2nds, there was NO reason to take out too much to begin with. I became very adept at knowing exactly how much I was going to eat. Dad did check our plates before we were allowed to leave the table & I missed 1 pea 1 night. I wasn’t allowed to leave until that 1 pea had been eaten. To me…I knew the rules & it NEVER bothered me!!!

My cousin’s father made them eat all the peas on the plate, and she’s in her 60’s now and to this day, she hates peas. It’s really trraumatizing and horrible for parents to use food as punishment, and can cause lifelong issues.

There were no rules about eating when I was a kid. We only ate together on Thanksgiving. There was no adult supervision at home. Mom was always at work or sleeping. My Father died when I was 4. My two older Sisters made dinner which the best of which was macaroni & cheese, frozen pot pies and TV dinners. A lot of the time it was eat whatever I could find in the kitchen (which was mostly very slim to nothing). I made a good sugar sandwich. HA! I learned manors at the Boy Scouts (please, thank you, sir and ma’am). That was the most valuable thing that I learned from the Boy Souts.

Close your mouth when eating/chewing.

Nah, I was raised by wolves

We were allowed, even encouraged to converse at the table. If things got boisterous he would say, “Shut your mouth and eat!”

Smacking or slurping, of course. But we were always able to converse civilly and not rush thru eating. It was a family event where we were together and enjoyed eachother’s company, then we’d all go do other thing’s.

I second @jca2.
My parents lived through the Great Depression, but didn’t develop food issues because of it. They didn’t push food on us. I was always so hungry at dinnertime they didn’t need to. They also didn’t feed us snacks between meals.

We were taught manners growing up. Most of our meals were taken around the kitchen (not dining room) table but our napkin was on our lap and we made no unavoidable noises. On hamburger night mother put potato chips on the table and noise was allowed on that night. That was about once a month.

ohmigosh! @SnipSnip‘s post just reminded me of this…when we had chicken, we had to cut the meat off the bone. Once we got off all the meat that we could, we were allowed to pick it up with two fingers only! Thank goodness Mom wasn’t like that about corn on the cob!

But yes, I learned table etiquette, and to this day I’m grateful that I know how to have a meal in public or with other people. I also learned how to set a table and the various levels of embellishment – placemats or tablecloth, cotton or linen, etc.

I have a friend who, when she eats, it’s a nightmare. Mouth open while chewing loudly and talking at the same time! It’s quite ugly.

We were taught not to talk with food in our mouth but other than that, dinner time was a chance to share your day.

Dinner time for me was a time for Mom and Dad to watch Walter Cronkite.

”...and that’s the way it was…”

Walter came on at 10 pm.

^^ No, he came on at around 6pm. Actually he was on from 6:45 until 7:00. In 1963 it was expanded to a 30 minute news show.

But whom did he come on?

I forgot about the 6 pm newscasts