Well, if they come down dressed for school, you have to realize how much effort it would have taken that parent to train that kid to get dressed on a regular basis. Because as you know, early on, that as often as Mom and Dad put the clothes on, the kids take them off.
So, here they are showing up at the breakfast table fully dressed but that gets ignored completely because they didn't comb their hair or they refuse to sit down for breakfast or they took three times to get them out of bed. I'm not saying that other stuff should be ignored, but most of what kids do is appropriate and it's worthy of acknowledging.
All it would take is, "Hey, you look pretty nice today" for routine stuff. For school, I call it "the miracle of the tucked in shirt." Because kids could care less about having their shirts tucked in, but most of them walking around school and at home have their shirts tucked in, but nobody notices. Nobody cares.
But if that shirt's untucked, people are on it. And I say, be on it as often with good stuff or more often than you are with bad stuff.
