“It’s time to wake up. Yes, you have to wake up, We are going to school… Wake up, if you don’t get moving soon, we are going to be late.
Come on now, let’s go. Dammit! We are going to be late.”
“Let’s go, get your brother/sister and get in the car. No, you cannot bring that, put it back in your room. Change your shirt and let’s go, dammit.”
I hate to say it, but this is me sometimes, and maybe more times than I want to admit. Let me say it first: I may have a bad habit of using some language I should not around my kids. So with that out of the way, I bring this up, not as a funny topic or some way of saying it doesn’t matter, but from what I learned the other day. I learned something about the inappropriate language that I had not heard or thought of before…
“It hurts my feelings when you call me a dammit,” my nine-year-old cried as tears streamed down her face.
It had never occurred to me to that it could come across as me calling her a name, which I would never do. Take a minute, scan up, and read those lines again with that in mind.
Welcome back. See what I mean? I think as parents, we move too fast, and sometimes things slip out, and we don’t think of what was said. After all, we do say that these are bad words and not to say them. If someone else said it, they are saying bad things. But did we ever stop to think that to a young child who is still learning how language is used may believe that they are being called a name every time they hear it?
So, I would say take your time and slow down. Think of the impact we have on our children. Though this may be a little funny when I tell the story to friends, it is my little girl, and it broke my heart.
Let’s think more about what we say and the unknown impact, and watch our mouths around your and my kids, dammit. ■
