Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

Damn That Potty Mouth

December 11, 2009 · Behavior | Influences

Have problems with profanity? You, kid(s), everybody?

Setting Bad Example Maybe Not So Bad

We have, right here in Upper Unsuburb, the world’s most depressing Chinese restaurant. Dark, fantastically dreary, serving food nowhere cheap enough to be so lousy. There ought to be an emergency phone for customers feeling suicidal.

Still, once in a great while, we get the urge and go.  

Last time, Girl Child looked up from her noodles and said, “I can dance better than that damn seven-year-old!”

She means this girl who got bumped up and out of GC's level at Genoa Academy of Classical Ballet. Old news. But GC, who collects grievances like other little girls do Dolls of the World, likes to pull the thing out and fume.

I should focus on the damn, right? And maybe get all stern and censorious.

First a moment of fatherly pride…

• in the way she spoke. Purposeful, pitch-perfect. Damn exactly right. Kid has an ear for the vernacular. 
• in her aggro killer ballerina spirit. Fire in the tutu, man. I used to worry that she lacked the competitive fury for fine arts.

For maybe a second, I think about putting on the daddy hat and scolding.

And don’t.

And I’m glad I don’t.

Sometimes when the kid lets a bad word slip, I tell her not to talk that way because others, if they heard, would think less of her.

But, generally speaking, I don't do a damn thing. Ours is the most bad-word tolerant family with a six-year-old I know of.

I swear like a sailor, which I actually once was, and enjoy it.      

Laissez faire is also tactical. We know our kid, and a big, heavy, frowny-face taboo would make bad words irresistible to her. She’d sound like me, instead of huffing about me setting a bad example.  

And my example, though it irks her, matters not. She gets that there are things she shouldn’t say. And, especially in company, she doesn’t say them.

That damn in the restaurant was exceptional.

Goes to show, I think, that we don’t have to shove every rule and polite social convention down our kids’ throats or – especially -- get our shorts all in knots trying not to say or do things that we don’t want to them to imitate.

Sure, maybe when they’re two and parroting everything. Even I backed off on colorful language back then.

But a six-year-old isn’t so simple

So to hell with making damn and other bad words -- except the most lewd ones -- a major issue. 

Side note: Coincidence – or is it? – that last year GC said “shit” in that same godawful Chinese restaurant. I started to get angry, but she got me to laugh it off by claiming – all earnest and good-girl – that her kindergarten teacher assigned her to say it because “shit” was Word of the Day.

Tactical comedy to distract parents – subject of a future post.

Meanwhile, where are you on the cussing question? 

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