Swearing is when a child expresses his/her anger and rage in an unpleasant and rude way in public.Children.Children usually hear swear words either within their families or from their social environment. Using swear words to express negative feelings such as anger, sadness, resentment, anger and rage, often without knowing the meaning, is a situation that needs to be prevented and prevented before it becomes a habit in children. We talked to educator Mustafa Tütüneken about why children swear and how to prevent this situation.
Teacher, how do children learn to swear? How does it become a habit?
As you stated in your question, swearing and insults are something that is learned. Swearing can be words that target gender, personality, honor and dignity, social environment, religion, nationality. Children selectively take in whatever they see in their social environment. Our priority as parents is to develop the ability to “choose” in our children. Otherwise, it may not be possible to separate them from their social environment and eliminate the bad words in this environment.
So how do they acquire the ability to be selective?
It is not easy to make a prescription by saying, “We will do it this way, we will do it that way.” Being sensitive to foul language, making people feel that we are truly sorry when we hear it, not using swear words, but being sensitive to ordinary words that may imply these words are some of the good qualities we can give to our children.
A child who does not have any swear words in his family will at least use such words in his life by circling them. If the parent has made such words commonplace in his daily language, it is expected that the child will become accustomed to such words and internalize them.
If swearing has become a habit in a family, it is often inevitable that this situation will be passed on to future generations. Because habit is not something that can be easily abandoned. If an individual naturally leaves his/her social circle and family and settles in another environment, he/she has a chance to change his/her habit. The swear words of your grandfather’s grandfather may continue to live on in his/her grandchildren.
If swearing and insulting are not the traditions mentioned above, but rather a later development, it is easier to prevent this from becoming a habit. In other words, a child from a family where a clean language is spoken may sometimes use swear words. In this case, the best thing to do is to show zero tolerance and, if necessary, to punish.
Why Do Children Swear?
Swearing can often be a result of inadequacy or inadequacy. This can be physical, linguistic, emotional or economic. In some of the examples I encountered at school, I saw that children preferred swearing in questions they could not handle linguistically. We usually try to do something physically that we cannot do verbally, and if we are not strong enough for that, we choose to insult and humiliate. The lack of words in the language spoken by deaf and mute people, but the intensity of emotion, generally makes them appear aggressive in their dialogues. This can also occur in healthy individuals in the same way. In other words, when words are not enough, they try to get out of the situation by using the harshest words.
What Can Parents Do to Prevent Swearing?
Every behavior of parents is an example to children. This also applies to the culture of discussion. We should teach our children the etiquette of speaking and discussion in our homes. Teaching them the words they can use especially in situations of accusation, warning, and threat gives us the opportunity to show our children how to maintain control and set boundaries in a culture of discussion in our own discussions. Clinging to swear words is the easiest but worst way.
Self-confidence training is one of the ways to prevent this. We often cannot determine children’s choice of friends. If we cannot do this, we can try to take precautions against bad behaviors seen in our children’s friends by supporting our children’s selectivity. Sometimes our children may not know the meaning of swear words. We can make our children sensitive to such words by giving examples of what these words mean and how much they upset the other person.
