Photo: @K_Weasley on Instagram
When Jody Billard?s then three-year-old daughter, Hanna, started swearing?loudly and in the middle of a store?Billard was appalled. ?I couldn?t believe it,? she says. At first Billard was baffled as to how Hanna picked up her colourful new language, but she eventually traced the offending words back to Hanna?s grandfather.
Preschool, the playground, a friend?s birthday party?your kid is picking up vocabulary anywhere he goes at this age, and swear words are simply a natural part of that development, says Timothy Jay, a swearing researcher at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. In a study lead by Jay in the American Journal of Psychology, children aged three to five had a vocabulary of 30 to 40 ?taboo? words, the most common ranging from traditional swear words to things like jerk, stupid and poop head. Kids curse for all sorts of reasons: Maybe they?re angry or have hurt themselves and have heard you use certain words in similar situations. Or they might think it?s funny and are trying to get your attention. Sometimes?at least at first?they?re simply curious about the words. ?They?re trying to figure out how words fit and where they can be used and what response they get,? says Julie Freedman Smith, a parenting coach from the Calgary company Parenting Power. The way you respond to this can have a big impact on what happens next. ?The power of the word and its ability to linger in a child?s vocabulary is usually tied to the reaction of t...