Recently, in an angry moment, my daughter called me an “ass.” I wasn’t surprised or shocked. As it turns out, the day before, she had heard me call another driver and that driver had treated me badly. But the insult was delivered with the seriousness of a 7-year-old, and I had to leave the room to laugh.
My husband and I don’t liberally pepper our conversations with swear words, but they do come out of our mouths from time to time. As lovers of words, we acknowledge that we have a wealth of adjectives that can be utilized in most situations. But sometimes someone is just an asshole or something is just plain stupid. And to be honest, these opportunities seem to have increased over the past year.
Using “bad words” while growing up is an inappropriate behavior worthy of reprimand, if not punishment, and it’s more than just a four-letter word. I grew up in a household where “farting” was a bad word. My husband’s mother didn’t buy the helluva dip because it referred to a bad place.
In general, I often find myself focusing on external perceptions rather than those that reflect a person’s true character. I saw some really bad behavior from people. never Let curse words cross their lips.
There are some environments where it’s not desirable for my daughter to use certain words, such as at school or at her grandparents’ house, but I’m not going to punish her if she ends up using them. Because so far, although she has heard “bad language” at home, there have been no reports from the school that she taught her classmates to swear. (I may have just jinxed myself there.)
There teeth In other words, these are words I don’t want my daughter to hear too often. Words like stupid, stupid, ugly, and fat. In fact, it is a negative, prejudiced, or prejudicial word. These are the types of words I recommend not using with her. Words that can hurt others, words that can attack us and damage our self-confidence and self-esteem.
Outside the house, she hears stupid voices much more often than her butt. These types of words appear in the books she reads, the shows she watches, and the conversations she overhears at school. And unlike words we consider “bad words,” these words are generally not considered taboo. These cause more damage than the four-letter variety, but they don’t lead to riots or book bans.
Now that I’m a parent myself, I’m more concerned about raising a child who isn’t an asshole than about her being an asshole. The report from the school that makes me angry is that she failed to treat others with respect and kindness.
Unfortunately, she has already experienced the pain of being teased and bullied by her peers. I’ve been made fun of for my interests, called names and insults like I’m stupid, and been excluded. Although this was a terrible experience as a parent, it gave me the opportunity to discuss how I should treat her and how I should treat others.
The reality is that you can cleanse your language by avoiding “bad” words, but that doesn’t mean you still don’t use words that hurt others. How we talk to and treat others is more important than whether we drop a bomb every now and then.
I want my daughter to become a good person who considers the impact her words and actions have on others. I’m not a bully. I’m not one of those people who thinks that just not saying bad things makes me a good person, or that my personal beliefs give me the right to treat other people like shit.
In other words, I’m not a disgusting person.
sarah row mount She writes about motherhood, mental health, neurodivergence, and other parenting topics for publications such as Scary Mommy, Business Insider, and Huffington Post. In addition to her writing, Sarah has worked in a variety of educational settings, including facilitating literacy workshops. She is the mother of an amazingly imaginative and neurotic daughter.
