Want to know how you're doing as a parent? Check out how your children are doing when it comes to minding their manners.

I don't mean just etiquette. How you set a table properly, when to use the little fork across the top of the plate and where to seat the groom's mother at a wedding reception are only small parts of the equation.

Are your children thoughtful? Do they get up from the dinner table and offer to help with the cleanup? Are they polite and cheerful to other adults they encounter?

No, they won't absorb all the rules by age 7. But "our most important goal should be that they become courteous, honest, unselfish and well-behaved persons," Karen Santorum, wife of the junior senator from Pennsylvania, says in her recent book, "Everyday Graces." None of us is perfect, she says. But we must all strive to live decent and respectable lives and treat others by the Golden Rule ? and consistently teach our children to do so.

Santorum's book uses a variety of devices to get the message across, the most charming of which is the storytelling from some of the world's great authors. A quick flip through the book finds entries from A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson and others.

Take the story of the pansy. Once upon a time there was a king who had a beautiful garden," it begins.

One day, he went there and found everything drooping. He asked why. The vine said it couldn't grow tall and strong like the pine tree, so it saw no use in trying. The pine tree, in turn, couldn't produce tasty fruit like the apple tree, so why bother? The apple tree produced only small, simple flowers, unlike the beautiful flowers on roses that everyone loves.

Finally, the king came upon the pansy. It had avoided this trap. The king asked how. "I am happy because I know that when you planted the seed out of which I grew, you didn't want a pine or an apple tree or a rose. You wanted a little pansy. So to please you, I am going to be the best pansy I can be."

Continued...