Happy Hump Day, awesome readers!
Lately my teens have taken to swearing when they think I’m not within hearing distance.
Common fact among mothers
One of the symptoms of motherhood is that all senses (including our sense of guilt) become bionic. It’s why many people often refer to mothers as “demi-gods”. (Or possibly that’s just me.)
So how do I react to my teens’ newly formed “behind-my-back-swearing” habit?
I’ve programmed my sense of hearing to automatically bleep out all words that begin with “f”, “sh” and “b”.
Why?
Because if my personal experience as a teenager taught me anything, it’s that the term “do the opposite” is THE preferred mantra for anyone between the ages of 13 and 19. Or 12 and 22, depending on what part of the country you live in.
Let’s face it. Teens will come home with new ideas . . . opinions . . . words . . . and they will test us. That’s what teens do and that’s why we have them – so that we can excel at being adults. Teenagers are our very own, personal INCENTIVE to grow up.
And since I have my black belt in parenting, I’ve discovered the perfect way to nip the swearing bud in the butt.
PS. You can try this at home because there’s no actual nipping involved.
The two-step process for getting your teens to stop using swear words
We all know that swear words are a healthy part of a balanced vocabulary. They help alleviate frustration and serve as triggers for eliminating stress. And since we all want our teens to grow into healthy adults, the secret is not to eliminate swear words, but to replace them. And you can do that with this simple two-step process:
Step 1
Introduce new words.
Step 2
Make new words sound really bad-ass.
To help get you started, here’s a list of swear words and terms with suggested replacements:
What the fuck? → What the what?
Jesus Christ! → Cheese n’ rice!
Stop talking shit! → Stop talking junk!
You can also use one word to replace all cuss words. Here are some examples with the word “Fish” (let’s see if you can figure out what the original terms were):
Fish off!*
Go fish yourself!*
Fish!*
Bullfish!*
Shut the fish up!*
*Use of exclamation mark is optional.
As a mother, you can imagine how proud I am when I hear my teens yelling “WHAT-THE-WHAT” and “GO FISH YOURSELF” to each other. It’s really quite heartwarming.
HAHAHHA…
When my older son was little HE used to get mad at me for swearing and gave me a list of words I could call other drivers.
Hairballs
Itty-awty-its (he thought idiots was a bad word
Jeffpesters
I used those words for years
Those are sooooo cute!!!
My son does stuff like this too, only he’s got the parental advisory standards of a Disney character. He looks shocked and calls it using the “w” word when I say “what the heck.”
lol – He has high standards!
Lol… my 8 year old used the f word at school once – because she’d heard it on the playground and she wanted to ask someone what it meant. But it seems no one would tell her.
I told her that in most cases it’s not really important what it actually means. Someone decided that it was a bad word, and enough people agreed that now it’s a word that someone uses either when they are upset or when they’re trying to upset someone else. I also told her it’s more the tone you use than the word itself, so she could pick any word she wanted to yell when she was frustrated, and I would know what she meant without being offended by it. Which is why I have an eight year old who says things like “Holy Halifax!”, “Jiminy Christmas!”, and “Flagginoodle!”
Great advice, Jessica. And LOVE your daughter’s choice of “cuss words” 🙂
What-the- what?! I say that one a lot?
My oldest (15) gets so mad at me when I slip and cuss around him (he says – “soap”)! My younger son will probably cuss occasionally but not as a way to test us since he knows that I work on it all the time!!!
I say what-the-what all the time too. And the cheese ‘n rice one, well I started saying that as a kid so that my parents would THINK I was swearing 🙂
I don’t know how I’ve gone this long but I’ve sworn perhaps 5x in front of my parents in the 30+ years I’ve been here. I think it’s disrespectful, and probably have been taught that? But I don’t know for certain – since my parents and brother swear, a lot. Lol.
It may be a girl thing 🙂
Hilarious! Funny, thinking about it, I don’t remember swearing in the presence of my parents. I catch my boys swearing with their friends playing video games and I yell up that I don’t like those words, and they yell down “sorry!” And then they usually stop, for a while anyway. My daughter inserts other words, but my husband keeps telling her people know what she means, so even the substitute is a bad word. I don’t know what the happy medium is. It’s not like I don’t ever swear. But I try not to say stuff in public.
It’s a different time from when we were kids. As a kid (and even today), I would NEVER swear in front of my father 🙂