Dear Miss Manners: Should I send thank-you notes to my pre-K religion class students for the Christmas gifts they gave me?
If you want children to grow up to be people who write thank-you notes, the best possible thing you can do is let them see you writing thank-you notes. If you have children in your home, that means writing thank-you notes where your kids can see you do it. And if you have an opportunity to do so, that means writing thank-you notes to children.
My own parents tried to raise me to be a person who wrote thank-you notes, but the actual result was they made me extremely resistant to writing thank-you notes.
Why? Because I never saw an adult do it.
My parents made me and my sister write thank-you notes. Some (but not all) of my cousins were made by their parents to write thank-you notes.
But I never once in my life saw a thank-you note from any other person, and I never once saw one from an adult.
Because of this, I felt like writing thank-you notes was kind of...degrading? Demeaning? Humiliating? I felt like it was intended as a punishment to deliberately reinforce the idea that I was seen as Less Than the adults, perhaps as punishment for having received gifts when my parents didn't.
One possible reading of the letter is "I shouldn't have to sent thank-you notes to my students because they're just kids!"
And that very attitude is what made Child!Me feel it's demeaning to send thank-you notes. Grownups don't send thank-you notes, grownups don't see kids as worthy of receiving thank-you notes, so they must be making me do it to reinforce my degradation, to drive home the fact that I'm less worthy.
However, if you send thank-you notes to children, it positions it as a normal thing that grownups do, with none of the baggage.
It will also model for children what a properly-written thank-you note looks like. One of the reasons why I found writing thank-you notes humiliating was I could tell intuitively that "Thank you for the [gift]" was insufficient, but I had no clue what else belonged in there. (Child!Me assumed that if my parents wanted me to be able to do it properly, they would have set me up for success by telling me how.)
On top of that, some people feel positively when they receive thank-you notes. If the children in question will feel positively, that gives them an early opportunity to experience the positive emotion that comes with receiving thank-you notes, and realize that they are empowered to instill that emotion in people who give them gifts.
In short, the best way to make children grow up to be adults who write thank-you notes is for the adults in their lives to send them thank-you notes.