A couple of weeks ago I was playing the board game Operation with my eight-year-old granddaughter who was visiting us at the Cape. The game involves trying to remove—with tweezers-- tiny cardboard body parts out of their location in a cardboard cut out of the human torso. If you touch any part of the torso with the tweezers it sets off a buzzer to tell you have lost that move. I was intent on removing a kidney when my tweezers hit the torso and the buzzer went off. Although I don’t swear very often, I let out a low Oh Sh…! My granddaughter giggled and I apologized for using a bad word.

I am sure that I am not the only grandparent or parent who has had a similar experience. My granddaughter was old enough to understand both that it was not a nice word and that it was not a word she had ever heard me use before. But preschool children are a different story. And age makes an important difference. A two-year-old hearing that word might repeat it without understanding it. And children are more likely to hear these words today either through the media or in day care facilities from other children. If your young child happens to use a swear word and you get visibly upset, you will only encourage its use. A basic rule in dealing with unacceptable behavior is to ignore it if you don’t want to reinforce it.

Older children, four or five, have a better understanding of the fact that swear words are not socially acceptable. Young children will use these words if they get a rise out of us. They are small and we are big and they are trying to get control of their world including us. If we react negatively they are, in effect, controlling our behavior. One tactic is to ignore the word when it is used but come back to it later. You can simply say that you do not like to hear such words, that they make you unhappy, and that they are not to be used in the house.

Another basic principle in dealing with unacceptable behavior is not to make rules you cannot enforce. You cannot prevent your child from using bad words when he or she is with friends and at places where you cannot hear the conversation. To tell the child never to use the word is making a rule that you cannot enforce and your child knows it. By making such rules you weaken your authority and your child’s respect for the rules you do make.

We also need to help children to appreciate that curse words are sometimes ways of dealing with strong emotions and that it is far better to use them than it is to take aggressive actions. We are human and there are exceptions to every rule. As I explained to my granddaughter, I used that word because I was upset, and that I was sorry that I made her listen to a bad word. It is okay for our children and grandchildren to learn that we are only human after all.