Cuss Police

If I have done nothing else right as a parent, I take pride in knowing that very early on, I cautioned my kids against using swear words.

While there are many things wrong with this world we live in, I must confess one thing I find particularly revolting is to hear ten-year-olds in the street or in depressed communities spouting out profanities (usually in Tagalog) as part of their everyday conversation. Naturally, this reflects poorly on their parents, who were just as ill-educated as these kids are and as their eventual descendants will undoubtedly be barring some sweeping socio-economical-cultural paradigm shift.

Those of us, however, who have gone to college and law school and/or med school and/or graduate school, are presumed to know better, so if our kids were to spout out the usual four-letter words, and or their counterparts in the vernacular, it is a truly sorry statement about us. That is why, even before my son knew how to talk I strove to inculcate in him the attitude that swearing is bad, and gave a list of words he shouldn't use, going so far as to include more benign words (for adults, anyway) such as "stupid" and "loser."

Of course, as with many things adults teach their kids, the whole swearing education program becomes a case of "do as I say, not as I do." Yes, I still swear periodically, most frequently when caught in the throes of road rage.

But as a countermeasure against that age-old problem I've been striving to adopt an equally age-old solution: the substitute swear word. Some of them truly sound absurd ("fudge brownies" in lieu of "f***", "mother of pearl" in lieu of "mother f*****" and so on), but fortunately I think I'm getting the hang of it, and it helps to have shows like Spongebob which introduce a whole new vernacular of swear words that kids are familiar with.

What I find funny is how my kids have gotten pretty good at playing the Cuss Police to the extent that they are able to detect when their grandparents (my parents), some of the worst "offenders" around, are in violation of the rules, and admonish them accordingly.

My daughter is now getting into the "Cuss Police" thing too, although, like her brother before her, she thinks that any exclamation is a cuss, and so it takes a little effort to distinguish for her which words are okay and which aren't. I just love hearing her tiny little two-year-old voice saying "don't say that, papa," even if all I said was "my gosh."

It's not like I'm raising future chairpersons of a board of censors here, and someday they will adopt profanity as a (hopefully occasional) part of their conversation when they get (hopefully much, much) older, but at least I'll be spared the annoyance of hearing my kids, at the age of ten or so, spouting out obscenities that would make sailors blush.