PEARL 39

Swearing and Bad Language

It hits us like an ice-water Jacuzzi. That innocent little foundling we

once dandled on our knees and whose vocabulary consisted exclusively of
coos and goo-goos tramps through the door one day spewing forth a
string of expletives that would make a dockworker blush. Sometimes our
kids are mimicking their schoolmates. Other times they seem to use
obscenities merely to watch our neck hairs stand straight out. Whatever
the reason, our children’s bad language can be a troubling thing for us.
In many cases it is a mere rite of passage — a phase kids go through on
their journey to maturity. They hear older kids swearing, and wanting to
be big like them, they develop a vocabulary more in tune with that used
under an NBA backboard than in a Christian home.
We could respond with a diatribe of indignation: “You’re not going to
talk like that in this household! How many times have we told you to
clean up that mouth?” Or, for that matter, we could wash out their mouths
with soap, but then they’d only resolve all the more to exert their
independence. So our immediate response should be to move the problem
out of earshot. Without anger, tell the child, “I’ll be happy to talk to you
when you can speak civilly to me and use clean and mature language.”
When both we and our child have calmed down, we should talk about
the problem itself. One approach is to address the child’s sense of worth:
“I think a lot of people who use that sort of language are people who
don’t feel all that good about themselves.” Or we may want to take an
intellectual tack: “Some people who use that sort of language have a very
limited vocabulary. They don’t know many words, so they pull out those