Parenting: Is it okay to let your kids swear?

Kids' swearing might not be cute but does that necessarily make it bad? Image / 123rf

OPINION

Before we had kids, I told my wife I was going to normalise swearing around them and she told me no I absolutely wasn’t, and that was pretty much the end of that discussion.

But now our kids are 6, 8 and 10 and our home reverberates to the sound of swearing regardless. The swearing comes not from them, and not even usually from us, but from Google Home, which has, over the two or three years since we first purchased it, proven the maxim that you shouldn’t worry about being a good parent, because whatever good you do will be immediately undone by the internet.

The way this works in practice is that the children say, “Hey Google, play … ” and then name a song, which Google then plays, without taking into account the fact that it’s a kid doing the asking. Almost all of these songs contain bad language. Current favourites include Doja Cat’s Paint the Town Red, which opens with the word “B****”; Olivia Rodrigo’s Bad Idea Right, which contains the line “F*** it, it’s fine”; and Kevin Lauren’s Haaland, which is entirely in Norwegian, except for the word “f***ing”.

I suspect all these songs, except possibly Haaland, have radio-friendly “clean” versions, but those are not the versions our kids seek out and sing along to. There are probably language filters that could be applied if you’re the sort of person who worries about your kids hearing bad language, but my wife, who claims to be such a person, has never sought them out.

In other words, she wouldn’t allow me to normalise swearing in my own home, but she had no problem with a digital device doing it. I always believed she must have some elaborate self-justification for this, but when I asked her about it recently, I was shocked to discover that not only did she not have any justification, but she had actually taught the children all the swear words herself, during lockdown.

When I asked why, she said: “It was lockdown. It was pretty boring.”

My initial reaction was to laugh at the irony of the whole situation, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfectly it captured in miniature the whole messy journey of parenting. We can read the books and articles of the leading experts, follow every parenting Instagrammer and listen to every parenting podcast, and we can hope to enact their advice, but when it’s just us and our child/ren for hours at a time, and we’re staring simultaneously at each other and into the existential void, we’re just doing what we can to get by. Put another way: it’s all good and well to set out to be perfect role models, but sometimes we just say s***.

Having kids forces you to interrogate your beliefs about all sorts of issues. Because kids so often ask “Why?” we parents are forced to examine the logic of our claims more thoroughly than most. As a result, we frequently find our logic lacking. In the case of a prohibition on swearing the logic is something like: “You shouldn’t swear because decent people would disapprove.”

Well, f*** that.

“Bloody” was once considered unprintable. “Bugger” was even worse. Words pass in and out of the bounds of social acceptability too frequently and easily for us to get too worked up about any of them. Parents already face too many battles, requiring too much energy, for us to have to police an ever-changing list of words.

Regardless of what I do or say to police my children’s language, there’s a good possibility that, at some stage - probably during their teenage years - at least one of them will employ the phrase: “F*** off Dad, you stupid f***ing dips***” and what will hurt most is not the words, but the intent behind them. Because, while I can think of many ways to stop my kids from swearing, I don’t know of any way to stop them from thinking I’m an a***hole.