If your child swears, do you make it an issue? I am convinced that every adult swears every now and then. If you hit your finger with a hammer, your newborn baby wets his entire romper in the middle of the night while changing or you discover at the supermarket checkout that you have forgotten your wallet. All of those moments when it's best to throw out f*ck, GVD or sh♥t. But if your child curses, what do you do?
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Few adults really care if they curse themselves until they have a child. Surely you should set a good example and so in any case not swear in front of your child? For example, at the birth of my first I taught myself to say PIT instead of sh♥t. After some practice, I must confess that it is just as relieving. Perhaps even better, because there really is a lot of fierceness in the word 'pit'. Try it.
Despite perhaps fantastic exemplary behavior, you will in any case find that your child utters a word that makes you think 'At least he didn't get that from me!'. How do you react then? Do you get very angry? Do you let your child wash his mouth with soap (I used to have a kindergarten teacher who saw this as the solution…), do you ignore it or do you start the conversation?
About a year ago we noticed that our son (then 9 years old) used the word GVD every now and then. Not something we were happy about. We discovered who his source of inspiration was:Enzo Knol. Our reaction at the time was:'If this is the result of watching his videos, we would rather you no longer watch them.'
What he understood and so he stopped looking and indeed we didn't hear the word in the house anymore.
With the oldest, parents are often a bit naive and so my husband and I (almost cutely) thought the problem was solved. In part it was. Partly yes, because instead of Enzo Knol he switched to other popular YouTubers and they were no better. With the only difference that my son was smart enough to take his language into account indoors. My child no longer feeds, I thought…
Last weekend he took a nice bath and asked if he could use his daily screen time while chilling. Fine! He asked me to set up a video of Jeremy Frieser – Always Compilations. I myself was still busy in the bathroom and was amazed to hear the language of this social influencer. With an average of a swear word or 3 per sentence, I spontaneously needed a little more powder to bring some color to my face.
My brain was working overtime:what do I think of this? And more importantly:how do I/we deal with this? I thought of the quote I had printed on cards for our company just before:
Successful educators are not the parents who don't make mistakes, but the parents who learn from their mistakes.
The solution from a year ago clearly hadn't produced any lasting results, so what to do next? I decided to leave it as it was for a while and come back to it at a later time. With that I wouldn't ruin his chill moment now, I could let my thoughts go about it and discuss it with less emotion at a later moment.
Later in the day, when we were in the car, I asked almost nonchalantly, 'What do you think of Jeremy's language? You don't have to give a socially desirable answer. I'm genuinely interested in your opinion.' He said he thought it was a bit much.
My husband made the conversation more approachable by saying that swearing, despite knowing it's not good, is nice every now and then. This made our son feel free to say that he thought it was 'cool' too. And we ended up in a very nice conversation about favorite swear words, really incompetent swear words, lots and few swearing friends and coolness.
He understood us and therefore hardly uses the swear words indoors. And we understand him. We have also been young. And even now that we are older, we sometimes miss a curse word. And how bad is that really? There are even multiple benefits to swearing:
The association against cursing existed for 100 years in 2017 and is still fighting. I personally question its usefulness. Even after 100 years of noble efforts, the use of curses by the Dutch is still increasing. Partly under the influence of the increasing use of social media and probably also popular youtubers - it does not stop with Enzo and Jeremy. But not only my child curses. From garbage collector to surgeon, even once every 29 minutes, we all curse! As long as it stays within limits, you can wonder what the problem actually is.
Furthermore, you may wonder if your child curses when he says the word shit. After all, this word is used so often that it has almost become established. In any case, our son continues to watch his favorite films and we watch it relaxed every now and then after our nice conversation.
