Is It Ok To Curse Infront Of Your Children?
Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego wrote an op-ed article for the L.A. Times that argues it should be okay to curse in front of your kids.
He says he always seasoned his vocabulary with four-letter words until he became a dad two years ago and started “watching his language.” He says that he decided to investigate whether cursing parents really hurt a child in some way, and says he found it really doesn’t.
He says his concern about using profanity came from the social conditioning of being taught that certain words are bad, and then being punished for using them. The American Academy of Pediatrics claims that exposure to profanity is actually dangerous because it encourages aggression or will numb a child’s normal emotional reactions, but Ben says he could find no proof of any experiment that proved this.
He did find a 2014 study that found exposed 52 university students to a homophobic slur affected how they felt about homosexuals. Another study found that slurs also affected children, who reported feeling less connected to their school lives and suffering from symptoms of anxiety and depression.
He says another study found that it’s pretty harmless for children to swear. It found that the swearing did not lead to physical violence, and that the “bad” words were mostly used for positive reasons like humor, not anger.
Now, Ben says he has compromised to keep cursing from harming his son’s reputation in social settings. He doesn’t stop himself from swearing around his son, but talks to him about how some words are okay in certain places and not okay in others.