Junior’s sitting in front of the TV, playing a video game, and out it comes, swearing at the characters or other players. You don’t know where he learnt those words, and his father’s no help, he’s mysteriously disappeared, so you know he didn’t teach him. Must have got it from all those youtube videos he’s been watching, right? At least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Okay, I admit it, I have on occasion sworn in front of Jay, my son (that didn’t last long, did it?). And he’s picked some of it up from me. Some are from youtube videos that we haven’t caught, but I do take the main responsibility. He’s heard me do it, and by consequence it’s become normal for him. The problem now, though, is what to do about it.
In steps SO, my wife, with what I have to admit is a pretty good solution. Especially since it doesn’t involve punishing or harming me in any way. Other than the more than frequent admonitions and dirty looks.
Hey, it’s not really my fault, I’m Australian, and a lot of these words have been part of my vocabulary since I was Jay’s age (he’s eight, by the way).
So, what did SO come up with? A game. Something so simple, I feel there’s probably tons of other people doing the same, yet I haven’t seen any other websites talking about it.
Basically what she did is to give him situations where the common reaction would be to swear. For example, “you kick your toe on something and you’re in a lot of pain, what do you say?” Then Jay will give an answer, and if he doesn’t use any swear words, he gets points for his answer. If he does swear, and SO is very strict on her definition of swearing, he loses a point.
Once he’s gotten a certain number of points, then he moves onto the final rounds, where he will compete directly with me, his Daddy and source of most of his swearing knowledge (yes, SO is holding a gun to my head to admit this, why do you ask? ;-)). First we have three scenarios each, worth one point each, where we give each other situations that we make up. The last time we did this, he ended up with 3 points to my 1.
Then we have the ultimate round, where we have to buzz in first and then give our answer to another 3 situations. Each answer this time is worth 2 points, and the last time we did it, I managed to close the gap so that we had 5 points each. This lead to a sudden death, also worth 2 points, which Jay managed to get, thus becoming the grand champion.
In general, I think the winner could have some sort of reward for winning, but so far we have only given a title of Champion, and that’s been enough. We’ve only just started, so we’ll have to see if we need to give other, more tangible rewards or not.
And, just for the record, I want to say that I think I would’ve won if he hadn’t been making me laugh so much. Also, is damn really considered that bad? Or was SO being unfair? Cause I definitely would’ve won if it had been allowed.
As I said, though, it’s something that we’ve only recently started doing, so I will probably have to come back later and update how it’s working, but so far it seems to be having the desired effect.
What are some other options we can try? What have you done with your kids to get them out of the habit of swearing? Or maybe just stopping it from ever beginning. Let us know in the comments below.