To ask how you'd deal with a sweary infant?

[MargotsBumpyNight]

I'm from the unfortunate Malcolm Tucker school of Scottishness.
Husband is no better. I see him reaching for acceptable words for the children, brow furrowing in concentration, a split second before he calls them 'buggers'.

We know we are neither big nor clever.

Our reward for our verbal indiscretion is our 3 year old has recently taken to exclaiming 'BLOODY HELL' in the last few weeks.

Now I'm not particularly offended by swear words, but I know others are and this would not be appropriate, for example, while struggling with the play dough sausages in nursery.

I've told DS that those are grown up words and should only be used at home. He seems to be accepting this. Obviously if he was using swear words in a different way, calling people names, I would handle this differently and it definitely wouldn't be Ron Weasley cute.

I suppose I'm wondering what the general MN consensus is on swearing and appropriate language?

I had this and just stopped saying the word myself and found that they soon forgot about it and stopped too. Better than making an issue out of it.

We used to use the word Farkle as it sounds suitably rude without swearing however that stopped when I got beeped at by workmen to which my then 5yr old daughter shouted , oy you that's my farkling mummy your farkling beeping at . Over the years I gave up correcting bloody and damn as I don't think they are horrific (not even sure where they got them from as neither me or my partner use them

My 2 year old spends a lot of time with her grandparents (who are lovely kind people) but my dad has an over fondness for the word nob head (only ever aimed at inanimate objects never people). The result is my 2 year old now shouts nob head a lot when things dont work. I have tried ignoring, I have tried shouting, i have tried talking. We are now going on for 2 months and it isn't showing any sign of stopping so I am following with interest (also my parents have now stopped saying nob head in front of her)

My son is at the tail end of the swearing phase luckily he only did it at home and now he just calls me a naughty bitch when he’s tired. Daddy is a police man and used to forget that little ears were listening and would come home ranting with the swears. So often I would be told that “nanny is doing my fucking head in” as bad as it is and I didn’t and still don’t approve i couldn’t help but laugh the first few times he did it
I think we’ve had maybe two months of it

Don't tell him off!! Worst possible thing to do as hell realise it gets him attention.

Do correct him when he swears & tell him he's saying it wrong. Mine picked up Piss Off from nursery we just looked puzzled & asked her if she means Fish Fluff & told her the boy she'd heard it from was saying it wrong too. She used FF for a few weeks, which we ignored & it was bloody funny at times & then she forgot about it

@mbosnz I am shocked and awed at the soap and water! I always thought that was an old wives tale!

I'm liking 'blegger' and 'farkle'.

Thanks everyone, I'm taking all your comments on board. We were caught on the hop at the time and my thinking was I didn't want to give the words any power so played it down.

Obviously DH and I need to have a proper conversation about how we handle it moving forward.

I think I use swearing as a sort of tension release and looking back my mother was a sweary sort when she was stressed, though I didn't start swearing in earnest until my teens. Now that I have 3 under 4 I can relate!

I definitely need to find an alternative method of stress control. Possibly involving cake.

Hi to fellow Tucker graduates!

Just say Oh my Goodness.

FISH FLUFF!

I'm dying

I agree you need to curb your swearing in front of your DC. It’s a massive double standard to expect him to be able to control himself and only swear in appropriate situations when you and your DH aren’t capable of doing the same thing.

It’s just language. It doesn’t bother me if it’s used in the correct context.
I occasionally swear if I hurt myself or break something but DS doesn’t seem to have copied me.
I do say things like ‘oh bugger it’ quite a lot as to me, it isn’t swearing.
DH very rarely swears.

We swear at home and our 6 yr old knows which words are swear words and that he cant say them as he is not an adult.We dont swear at him and never would but I think its important to behave naturally in your home.

I suppose you could just perfect your shocked face and say "Goodness me, the things they pick up at nursery!".

I must say it doesn't bother me as an exclamation of frustration, eg fucking hell. What's the harm? If it's being used against someone eg you fucker, fuck you, that's not acceptable.

Ah, swearing, I do love a good curse. I think your job is simply to make sure he doesn't hear the really bad ones till he is old enough to easily understand what context to use them in. By the time he's about 9 or 10, it's fair game, specially if you're in Glasgow (I say that as a Glaswegian btw, not trying to cast aspersions!)

I had to try really hard not to swear in front of the kids. I used a lot of "fecker" and "aaargh for... goodness' sake" and things like that. (Which was funny when the weans went on a pony riding course thing in Ireland and one of my kids comes up to me at pickup time and she's like "oh my pony's stall neighbour is such a total fecker" in her wee English/German accent and the pony lady was like )

Then about a month ago they came in fron school and IDK something came on the telly or something and the older one goes "what the fuck?" but like in a German accent and I'm like, where did you get that, and she's like oh Kayla showed us someone saying it on TikTok and I'm like why has your 7yo colleague got a phone with Tiktok installed? But anyway, I explained what it was and then her face lit up. "Like daddy says all the time!" Sigh. Yes.

I mean, just stop swearing in front of them? If they swear, tell them off.

I don't think "bloody hell" is swearing though tbh.

Op you could be me. Our eldest never used a swear word until he was about 8 (and still doesn't, really). But the three year old!! Just as we thought we'd contained it to inside the house only, he let out a huge sigh in the doctors waiting room and said "oh fucking hell". We were impressed with the context but... Well. Ahem. If it helps, he has pretty much stopped now and we replaced it with "oh my golly" in a stupid voice

I would seriously struggle to keep a straight face.

lol I remember those days. Yep best to ignore and they'll forget about the naughty word. I really had to bite my tongue to break the habit of swearing but I managed haha

Ignore it completely and stop swearing in front of him.

Swearing is only rude if there's someone there to get offended by it. DS (3) called me a silly knobber the other day. I couldn't stop laughing. I can understand someone else might be offended, at which point they are welcome to correct him. I'm pretty sure he's smart enough to understand there are different rules at nursery than at home. He certainly understands at nursery he has to sit down to eat and finish his mains before dessert, at home needs further convincing I wouldn't worry OP. Ignore the pearl clutchers.

They are linguistically astute and unlikely to swear in places where their peers don’t.

Absolute rubbish. They do swear at school and it’s shocking to hear from such young children. It also taints the innocence of their peers who haven’t been exposed to such crude language.

I was on the bus with my mum when I was a toddler. She said to me that she hoped she wasn't going to be late picking my brother up from school. I shouted out "he'll be saying where's my f*ckng mummy. She was late as she was so embarrassed we got off the bus and continued on foot. To be fair, he had been outside watching the workmen.

We're quite Malcolm Tucker here too. I love a really good creative swear.

DH and I caught onto ourselves when DS shouted 'For Fucks' Sake' at the dog aged 3 (we shout For Fucks Sake at the dog a lot, because the dog is a dickhead). Unfortunately he was going through a very Enid Blyton RP accent phase at the time so it came out more 'Far Farks Sake!', which was somewhere between hilarious and utterly cringeworthy.

DS is now 8 and will tell me off for the mildest swears. We had an interesting discussion about whether 'frickin' was acceptable or not the other day (it's in the Bears versus Babies card game). He never swears around us, and I've never heard of him swearing around other kids or parents. I am confident he probably does, or will soon, but at least he didn't bat an eye when he moved up a level of football training and one of the coaches was yelling 'Just Fookin Kick it' to the older squad.

It's just words, I can't get to emotive about it. I am happy with the fact that if they every really REALLY needed to tell someone to go away they'd have the vocabulary to do it quite effectively.

My DCs have been allowed to swear in the car, but only when I’m the only adult with them and only when I’m swearing at the bloody useless drivers he cut me up ffs

So they know that these are car Words and they don’t get used anywhere else.

I agree with @Hoik -- they can pick it up anywhere. Once when mine were little, we were out in public and one shouted to another, "Get the fuck over here!"

I was embarrassed and said very loudly, "We don't talk like that!"

He said, "Oh, only mommies talk like that?" : )

I still have no idea where he picked that up. ; )

I still have a hard time not swearing but my kids are older now and look at me in a very disapproving way whenever I do. So there's hope (for them...).