This morning I heard a fascinating piece on National Public Radio, about how and why children start using profanities (hint: it has a lot to do with the parents).An excerpt:
Many responses were similar to mom Julia Gordon of Silver Spring, Md. She was in her car, in a hurry and trying to park.
"The parking lot was crazy," says Gordon, a lawyer and mother of a four-year-old daughter. When someone sped into a parking space she had been waiting for, Gordon said under her breath, "He totally f***ed me."
And a few minutes later, she heard her daughter parrot back the same phrase.
"I have to admit I did laugh at first," says Gordon. "Then I immediately stopped and told her, 'We don't say that word!'"
[snip]
When it comes to choosing words, our society has a bent toward novelty. Pinker explains we're forever coming up with new ways to express that things are "good" or "bad." He says there's always a little "semantic inflation" going on.
For instance, if members of Generation X hear a song they like, they may say, "It's awesome." A teen of today may say, "It's bitchin'." If the song is lousy, they may say, "It sucks."
"When I was a kid and you said something sucks," says Pinker, "it was pretty clear what sexual act they were referring back to." But today kids have no idea. The term is just part of their common language.
Frequent use, over time, has stripped away the original connotation. Pinker says the evolution of "sucks" is similar to that of "jerk" or "sucker."
Although our children are not quite the age when they start using words that might be considered profanity, I imagine that this is one of the many challenges of parenting and raising children in our society's moral climate.
An op-ed piece in today's Los Angeles Times by Rosa Brooks talks about her challenges in getting her 6- and 3-year old daughters to expand their horizons beyond the world of Disney Princesses.
..once upon a time, the Disney princesses lived their separate lives, waiting innocuously for their princes to come. You could buy a "Cinderella" book or a "Little Mermaid" doll, but, when you did so, you were establishing an allegiance to a particular character's story, not to an abstract "Princess concept." The princesses lived separately and were marketed separately.
As Peggy Orenstein documented in a 2006 New York Times Magazine article, that changed in 2000, when Disney decided that, henceforth, the princesses would collude. They went from princesses to "Princess" -- as Disney execs call the fast-growing product line marketed collectively under just that logo. Merged into a sort of uber-princess, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine and the older members of the gang formed a vast global conspiracy to turn a bunch of aging animated films into cold, hard cash -- faster than Cinderella's fairy godmother could turn a pumpkin into a coach.
I have to admit, Disney Princess has established a firm footing in our household, despite my reservations when we received as gifts our first Disney Princess child's table and toddler bed. But I don't agree with Brooks that an interest in princess-related materials will necessarily limit girls from broadening their horizons beyond the passive, wait-to-be-rescued mentality she sees. Bruno Bettelheim's makes a powerful argument in his groundbreaking book The Uses of Enchantment that fairy tales including Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White have powerful influence on children's development, and actually help their maturation process.
Photo courtesy of Michael A. Keller/zefa/Corbis, via the NPR website.
