Swearing With Kids: The Six Stages Every Parent Needs To Know About

Taboo language is universal to all cultures, and once someone knows the words, they know them, so why shouldn’t they use them? “My worry with my kids swearing is that it’s like shorthand for a bad kid,” says Will. “We work hard to be good parents, and I wouldn’t want one ‘shit’ slipping out to make us seem like we were doing a terrible job. I feel like once someone hears my six-year-old swearing, she might as well have a fag in her mouth and a big plastic bottle of Strongbow in that person’s eyes.”

“We always tell our daughter off when she says ‘Oh my God’, and correct her to ‘Oh my gosh’” says Mat. “I don’t personally think ‘Oh my God’ is offensive, but I still find it sort of coarse and unpleasant coming from a four-year-old in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. Otherwise we try hard not to swear around her but say things like ‘Oh shit!’ a lot so it’s an uphill struggle.”

4. Evolving Curse Machines (7 to 11 years)

As children become more independent, they’re going to express themselves more colourfully. Emphasis, enthusiasm, outrage – all can result in the air turning blue around prepubescents. This can either sound really cool (‘The Goonies’) or completely hideous (like when the kid from ‘Love, Actually’ says ‘shit’).

By this point, most children at least know what is and isn’t appropriate in certain situations. “I swear in front of my children, and my wife has a mouth like an open sewer, but they don’t swear in front of us,” says Dick, a father of three daughters. “They don’t say ‘crap’, ‘fart’ or even ‘bum’. We tried not to swear in front of them until they were eight or nine, old enough to understand the idea that there is a time and a place for it, and that you need not to do it at the wrong times or in the wrong places. We had an ongoing conversation about it, and about how I want them to be better than I am.”

Attempts at self-censorship are questionable, especially given everyone’s endless exposure to profanity in popular culture. “My sister is quite an aggressive driver, but tries to censor herself when her kids are in the car,” says mum Kate. “She says things like ‘fricking’, but when you’re muttering under your breath, it sounds exactly the same as ‘fucking’. Also, if you’re saying ‘I’m going to fucking kill you’ to another motorist, the ‘fucking’ bit isn’t necessarily the part you don’t want your kids hearing.” 

5. The Luck Pushing Years (12 to 14 years)

This is the golden era of boundary-pushing, when you find as many excuses as possible to use gentle swearwords like ‘crap’, ‘arse’ and ‘bastard’ in conversation with adults in a bid to seem grown-up. And if you’re quoting someone, woof, fill your boots. “Steve told me to fuck off and I told him I wouldn’t” is reportage, not swearing, surely, mum? Quotes, impressions and faux-naive questions are all beloved tools of the precocious swearer yet to be hit by the humourless train of adolescence.

6. All Bets Are Off (15 to 18 years)

Nobody’s ever slammed a door and shouted “I flipping hate you!” Teenage trauma, hormone-led illogic, frustratingly greasy faces and the non-stop horror of teenagers (being one or parenting one) mean everyone has bigger battles to fight than a bit of bad language. As the parent-child dynamic flip-flops between nemeses and quasi-equals, down come all the walls. There’ll be times talking to your teenage children when whatever you say you won’t be listened to, won’t be heard, won’t be understood – just like when they were babies! Everything comes full circle, or should we say, full fucking circle…