Kids Clinic: How to stop your child from cursing

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk, with Ciara.

Ciara Kelly (0:10)

This week on The Kids Clinic, we are joined by clinical psychologist, Tara Logan Buckley, to discuss how to stop your kids from cursing and swearing. Good evening to you, Tara. This is a tricky one, isn't it?

Tara Logan Buckley (0:24)

Yeah, it certainly is. And I think it's because we pay way too much focus on actually the word itself. And actually, we don't think about the learning process behind it. And that's actually the whole psychology behind children swearing.

It's actually adults who actually inadvertently teach the children these words as well. And if we think about it, let's pretend you have a three year old around a table and they say a curse word at dinner, you know, everyone starts laughing. And the child doesn't necessarily understand what that word, but they've learned something really important from that, that they've learned, when I say this, someone and everybody pays attention to me. And then let's pretend two days later, you know, there isn't people at the dinner table, but the child says the exact same word, and then suddenly they're being reprimanded. From the child's perspective, that's actually really, really confusing because the behaviour once had laughter and now it's getting disapproval as well. So for me, yeah, go ahead.

Ciara Kelly (1:16)

So laughter and I suppose you might laugh and surprise at some expletive coming out of a toddler's mouth. You might be like, oh.

But let's say, park that, your surprise is over because your toddler is now cursing like a, you know, I don't know what you say, who curses a lot, but they're cursing like with gay abandon. How do you deal with it in a way that isn't confusing, but that doesn't maybe encourage them inadvertently to do it because we're giving them power or we're giving the word of power?

Tara Logan Buckley (1:50)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that all depends on the age of the child as well. There's very different ways to approach it for that. But for a young child, we might use a very calm response.

We might say, you've probably heard that somewhere else before. It's not a word we can use when we're talking to people. If you're cross, you can tell me you're angry instead. And then we move on. What happens is we give an awful lot of power to the words and we might end up actually getting into lectures with the children. And we also might tell them, actually, this is a bad word and you are bad for using that word. But what we don't actually do is, we don't actually tell the child, well, actually, this is a more appropriate word for you to use. And what we don't do as well is we don't teach the child that actually being angry and frustrated and annoyed or even maybe resentful is an OK emotion to have. What we're simply teaching is it's not OK because you use this word with it, but we're actually not modelling and teaching children actually the right words to be able to use. So they can still express their anger or frustration, because for some kids, they listen to adults doing it. It's how they, I suppose, experience the world when we're angry, upset. We use these curse words in order to express ourselves, but they don't understand why. So it's actually teaching the child all of those different things. And there's so many different things that parents can do with that as well.

One is a family rule around language and not a lot of families actually do this. So it's very easy to say, you know, in our family, it's absolutely OK to feel angry, upset or frustrated, but we don't use words to hurt one another. And this applies to adults as well. And I think that's the most important thing, that because, you know, for adults, we can feel it's a rule for them to feel for us.

Ciara Kelly (3:23)

And this is a bit like, don't do what I do with my phone, do what I say with your phone kind of thing.

If the adults in a child's life are cursing away all the time, is it unlikely that the child won't curse? Do you know what I mean?

Tara Logan Buckley (3:39)

Yeah, because literally they're learning. So we're social creatures. And for children, they learn by imitation. And also, they're very inquisitive and they're very, very curious. And they see that these words have a lot of power, even with adults. If we think about if someone came and cursed at me and you, we'd have a very powerful response. That would either be, we might curse back, we might go shy, we might cry. And that's what children are learning. So if you're adults, and also, let's say if you've one adult who's trying to, I suppose, disapprove of the behaviour, where you have another adult in the family who thinks it's extremely funny, the child is receiving conflicting messages. So you have to have rules about how you parent and basically the way that it goes for both parents within the family. But also you have to model the behaviour yourself. Because as you said, if you're a family who curse and you're teaching the child, that's not okay. The child is never going to learn from that because it's going to follow what it sees you do.