Our daughter is going to be eight months old in three weeks. According to the books, she may start to crawl, pull herself up on the furniture, sit up, play peek-a-boo, and eat finger foods. Those are fun and all, but the most stirring change I have been witness to lately is her ability to observe and copy what we are doing. She watches me clap my hands, and she clumsily claps hers. She watches me pet Zoe, and she tries ripping her ears off (almost the same). My favorite Simon Says so far is opening and closing my mouth like a fish, making a pop, pop, pop sound, which she ever so graciously indulges me in. But this revelation of mimicry is also a bit troubling, because it makes the whole "being a role model"-thing REAL---that every action she sees us perform, her little brain synapses are strengthening and telling her to try the same. And that especially goes for language.
Now, Zach and I are relatively intelligent folk. We throw in some SAT-level words in our day-to-day conversation, and Zach loves to babble differential equations to Addie when they sit on the couch. But we also swear...a LOT. Not like every other word is fuck, but you have the usual shit, hell, asswipe peppered into daily conversation. And we've come to the point where we know she is keenly listening to our speech patterns, and we have to act on curtailing, or banishing, the "bad" words altogether. Preferably before her first word is cocksucker.
I know it can be done. We have perfectly polite conversations with nary a douchebag when we're talking to friends, colleagues, and the check-out person at Trader Joe's. But you know how your slang, your tone, your level of vocabulary, changes depending on the context of the situation and the people you're with? When Zach and I get together, there's just a natural inclination to swear--it adds color, depth...GRAVITAS, to the stories we tell each other at the end of the day.
"That bad, troubled, drunk man swerved into my lane and almost killed me today."
"Helen told me she and her husband are making love like jackrabbits to get pregnant again."
Just doesn't have the same pizzazz, si?
Of course, my fear is that we will have a child like the ones you see on Nanny 911 (or whatever the show is called with the British lady who looks like she gets kinky in the bedroom). The ones who bite people and kill cats and tell their parents to go fuck themselves. I've seen a five year old gleefully saying "shit, fuck, shit, fuck" in a sing-songy voice on that show. But I also have a feeling these children are the product of more then just swearing.
At $.05/word, you owe me about..a Nintendo Wii.
I know Adeline will eventually hear all the words we try to shield her from. And I'm torn, because I believe that words only have as much power as we give them. So should we stop swearing altogether? Wouldn't it make the words more powerful and appealing for kids who often want to do exactly what they're told not to? Do we try our best to curb our language around her, and if she asks about it, tell her they are "adult words" and shouldn't be used with her peers? Or am I making WAY too much of this and just continue with our colorful conversations? I remember my Dad swearing intermittently; my mother, never. But I never ended up repeating his most popular phrase ("Get your head out of your ass.") to my 10-year old friends, and still don't to this day.
I guess there's only so much you can do as a parent to teach your child how to express herself without swearing, and then at some point, they're going to decide whether to incorporate that language into their speech. I'm genuinely curious what other parents' experiences have been like regarding this subject---Do you have a curse jar you put money into when you're caught? Did you explain to your child that it's a "bad" word, or, that it's perfectly acceptable in certain situations, which they may discern when they're older? Did you curse when they were a baby, and now you're paying for it?
Any funny stories with little ones and words? :)
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