Why my kids swear like sailors: A parent’s struggle with swearing norms – Greg Bruce

Is it okay to let your kids swear? If so, how much?

THREE KEY FACTS

• The world has been said to be in a “polycrisis” across multiple domains: environmental, economic, geopolitical, societal and technological.
• Swearing has been shown to be cathartic.
• Children will learn new words more quickly if they’re symbolic and tend to learn symbolic words at a younger age

I recently stood on my 7-year-old’s leg, and though it was an accident, he was understandably pissed. I tried to comfort him but he pushed me away and, through the tears, yelled: “You’re a huge dick!”

Before we’d had children, I’d told my wife I was going to normalise swearing around them. I’d said it in part because I like to provoke, but also because I thought it might be the right thing to do, or at least not obviously wrong, and because I felt (and feel) obliged to rebel against the all-pervasive right-on, modern “research-backed” parenting industrial complex, because if there’s one thing I know about kids, it’s that nothing is more resistant to research.

Anyway, none of this matters because my wife forbade me from normalising swearing, which would have been fine, except they chose to normalise it for themselves.

The first few f***s were pretty cute – even adorable – and I think I probably laughed too often and too hard, and soon we were living with three tiny sailors; maybe the most foul-mouthed people I had cohabited with, and all of them under the age of 10.

They quickly developed a physical addiction to swearing, which they nourished by asking our home-based smart devices to play the songs they knew to be most chock-full of curses, and if those devices began playing them a clean, radio-friendly version instead, they would stop it and find “the proper one”.

A couple of years into their swearing journey, our kids’ usage of, and affinity for, bad words shows no sign of stopping. It’s now so common for them to say f*** that we no longer even bother policing “s***”, “a**hole” and “p*** off, d***head”.

I do still try to stop the f***s and f***-adjacents, but half-heartedly, because the genie’s out of the bottle and because technology has more power over them than I ever will and because there are too many other things to worry about, like the price of watermelons.

My point is that one day in the not too distant future, these adorable little foul mouths will be all grown up and will inherit the f***ed up world and property market their grandparents broke. Is it really that wrong to let them feel, for at least a while, the joy and freedom that comes with the use of forbidden language, before it loses its thrill and becomes just another way of coping with a life they can’t afford?

I texted my wife during the writing of this article to ask for her favourite examples of our children’s swearing. She replied with: “Haven’t you written about the kids’ swearing already?” I told her I had not, but then I checked and discovered I had. Worse, I’d done so barely a year ago.

“How has this happened?” I asked myself. The only rational answer is I am deteriorating mentally and the reason is that I am a parent – because having kids is not just the greatest thing in the world, but also the hardest.

Legendary poet and grump Philip Larkin, who didn’t have children, famously wrote: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do.”

No parent would have written those lines, partly because they wouldn’t have had the time, but primarily because it’s so hard to see one’s own faults when so overwhelmed by one’s children’s.

Nevertheless, in my more clear-eyed moments, typically when the kids are watching TV, I have to acknowledge Larkin had a point. Yes, having a kid is f***ing hard, but so is being a kid. Why should only one of us be able to say it?