Parenting Fail or Parenting Win?!

If becoming a parent made one thing abundantly clear to me, it was the fact that both my husband and I have dirty trucker mouths and drop f-bombs like they’re verbs, nouns, adverbs and quite frankly commas. I joked while I was pregnant that my greatest goal as a parent was really just to ensure my child would swear in the correct context. I will never forget Gunner dropping his sippy cup on the floor and saying “Shit.” His daycare lady says it was one of the funniest things she’s ever heard when Gunner was struggling to make a toy work and she heard him say “Oh my fucking god.” He was promptly corrected by another child who told him “No Gunner, it’s: oh my goodness!”

In my mind this is both a parenting win, and a parenting fail. He shouldn’t be fucking cussing but at least he’s not randomly toddling around repeating “Shit fuck fuck shit fuck.” Unless there’s a truck around of course- and then it’s all kinds of fucks (see previous blog post “Dump Truck”).

Now, that’s not to say we haven’t made strides to reduce our swearing, or use other words but honestly when your toddler goes parrot on your ass and starts saying “what the funk” the truth is that they aren’t pronouncing it correctly anyways and it’s coming out as “what the fuck” regardless.

Enter new strategy…We’ve now taken the approach to tell G-man that these are adult words and he’s not big enough to be saying them – we acknowledge and apologize when we’ve used excessive ‘Adult’ words in his presence and let him know that he is not allowed to use those words (we obviously try not to do this, but shit happens). The little smart-ass has even started to point out when we’ve used ‘adult words’ which is a blessing and a curse because while I knew I swore a lot I didn’t realize quite how freely ‘fuck’ slipped off my tongue. So far it’s worked, my -ahem- three year old has not cussed (intentionally) in a long while. Parenting win? I fucking think so.

xo Guest Blogger Steph

Photo courtesy of: DaveBrockett.com

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