I have a foul mouth. I love cursing. Not only can I not help it, but I also don’t want to. Nothing feels more satisfying than shouting, or muttering, a handful of four-letter words when confronted with any of life’s pitfalls or setbacks. And as a lifelong curser, there is no better place to live than New York City. The thrill of huffing out a swear word on a crowded sidewalk, senior citizens and toddlers be damned, can’t be replicated by a deep breathing exercise. I married a woman with the same pleasure, so our home is a constant cacophony of swear words.
When my wife became pregnant, we discussed what kind of parents we would be. We spent time conceptualizing what we wanted our home to feel like, outlining ideas for our family culture, but even as bonafide foul mouths, we never considered what we would do when our child inevitably said his first bad words.
Then around age 2.5 as our son was trying to shove a star block into a rectangle hole, we heard him shout, “damn hell,” before chucking the entire shape sorter set. Rainbow colored plastic pieces soared through our living room, and we froze, unsure of how to respond. He continued repeating the profanities and slamming his pudgy fists against the toy. As his small body flailed and the cursing persisted, high-pitched and incorrectly enunciated, I couldn’t help but laugh. Soon all three of us were howling and he seemed soothed, forgetting about his frustration. My wife went over and showed him where the star block fit and reminded him to ask us for help next time.
After collecting ourselves, my wife and I stared at each other. Well, now what are we going to do? One of the worst parts about parenting is you can’t know if the decisions you make and the structure you set up are working until much later, and generally by the time you can assess your parenting choices, it’s too late. It has either turned out totally fine or is a disaster. In the moment, as we heard him happily singing his string of curse words, likely trying to conjure another laugh from us, we realized we could spend the next decade or more ineffectively correcting him, redirecting him to standard alternatives, and reminding him he wasn’t allowed to say bad words, or we could let it rip. And after all, it didn’t seem fair that we could say certain words while he wasn’t allowed, and neither one of us were looking to cuss less. So, at 2.5 years we decided to lean in to making our home first-amendment-forward and created an open-word policy. The initial boundary was simple: Inside of our four walls, our kid can say whatever he wants.
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As a parent, most of the time when I create a house rule, its premise is to create a “no” and put limits in place of what our son is not allowed to do. Usually, these rules evoke some type of bodily control; no throwing, no kicking, no hitting, no eating sticky popsicles on the couch, you have to wash your hair, you have to brush your teeth. The list of activities my kid must do and must not do is endless. It felt great as a parent to, for once, put an additive rule in place. It seems important to note that in our home, we do not curse at one another, which so far we haven’t had to explicitly discuss, and I assume he has picked up through how we model cursing. This might need to be revisited as he enters his tween years.
Soon after he received the green light to swear, he internalized this cursing-in-the-house rule as a special privilege, and we’ve never threatened to take it away. In fact, he takes the house rule seriously. Early on in our open-policy experiment I was frustrated, likely by something banal like the weather being too windy or our dog walking too slowly during a walk in our Brooklyn neighborhood, when I yelled an expletive. Before the words fully left my mouth, my kid quickly reprimanded me, “You can only say bad words in the house, our car, Grandpa’s house and Auntie’s house.” (The rule has expanded slightly over time.)
Our kid has just turned 5 and the cursing continues to be appropriate and contained. He can just say, “This is f—ing stupid!” when I tell him no more TV, or when he can’t get his Magna-Tiles to stack perfectly. It gives our kid something naughty to do when he’s mad instead of hitting or kicking us. Although sometimes he still hits or kicks or throws, we’re working on it.
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Moreover, cursing is a proven way to let off some steam, and small bodies are full of hot air. Other studies have linked swearing to higher cognitive abilities, improved creativity and even as a way to increase pain tolerance, and why shouldn’t these same positive attributes apply to children? Who knows, maybe we’re fostering long-term useful characteristics in him. Honestly though, even if none of this was documented or true, I’d let him keep cussing, because I know that most importantly, it feels f—ing great.
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