Why in the world does your child use profanity? The answer is a lot bigger than “he is angry”.
Profanity has great power:
· The power to push you away by insulting you
· The power to “disprove” your unconditional love for this destructive kid by getting you to react out of anger
You see, profanity is not about anger but about separation. When your child uses profanity he is trying to separate himself from something.
Children with RAD are usually trying to separate themselves from the healthy relationships and identity they’re nervous about stepping into or even from the negative identity formed by past unhealthy relationships.
Profanity’s great power is its power to DIVIDE relationships.
Take any profane phrase, and think about it. The point of profanity is almost always to separate the speaker from something – usually from another person but sometimes from a situation or even something in oneself.
This means that even if your child’s cussing isn’t dividing her from you, the child may keep cussing and all the more because the child is trying to separate herself from the truth that she is loved and has a bright future – something internal. It’s easy to keep that new identity at bay when you’re cussing night and day at your family.
The child is in essence insisting by way of profanity:
“You can’t love me! I’m not loveable! I’ll prove it by cussing you out night after night! See how bad I am!!! You are wrong about me; I’m a hopeless case!”
Palm to forehead. Oh, child.
If you’re in this sort of verbal Blitzkrieg night after night, I’m so sorry. Put on your headphones and find a way to dance.
If you as an adult use profanity, stop. Break your habit; get some new vocabulary.
3 Reasons to Stop Cussing As a RAD Parent
1. Cussing makes you look rejecting, angry, and unsafe, which is the opposite of what you’re trying to present to your child.
2. If you cuss but not around your child, your child may find out and question your integrity – another character trait you’re trying to instill in your child.
3. If you cuss, your child will feel they have the right to cuss too. If they cuss at school, they will get in trouble and have fewer healthy, positive friends because they’ll appear rejecting, angry, and unsafe.
Your child’s profanity is about inciting rejection.
When your child starts calling you a *&^%* *#$@#, does fiery defensiveness rise up within you? That’s understandable seeing as getting you to be angry and reject him is probably the reason your child is using profanity in the first place.
The question is do you want this power move to work?
Do you want your child to be able to successful get you riled up over some bad words? Do you want her to be able to successfully divide herself from you or get you to reject her? Of course not. You want to be tougher than some dumb insults from a kid.
Don’t get me wrong. When you’re child is egregiously hurling profanities at you (with or without physical violence), it can cut deep. It can hurt SO.VERY.MUCH. I’m not suggesting you become hard-skinned as much as learn to live above the fly zone of your child’s insults and to overcome the pain of those negative actions with good. That’s the goal.
So here’s what I do.
Treat the profanity as utterly ridiculous.
A child with RAD once hurled this insult at its mother: “Oh ya! Well, Jesus has poop on His face!” Seriously? That's the best you could come up with? I'm still laughing about it years later.
It was really easy to not take that one seriously, even as a Christian, because it was just utterly ridiculous. One way to live above the fly zone of offense is to hear all of your child's cursing and slurs that way, and I’ve got a trick for doing so.
But first let's be clear. I’m not talking about laughing at your child. Do not laugh at or ridicule your child as this would simply be another form of divisive behavior! What I am saying is that when your child is adding profanity to the situation, you add humor. When you insert something humorous into the situation, it sucks the power right out of those profane words.
Here’s how you do it:
1. Your child cusses.
2. You say a silly expletive in a jovial tone in response.
Here’s a list of substitutive phrases compiled by comedian Tim Hawkins.
Source: www.timhawkins.net
(You can buy a $4 magnet of this from Tim Hawkins' website. How great is that?)
So, your child says, “&^%* *#$@#”, and you exclaim, “Flibberty Gibbet!” Perhaps you even stomp your feet angrily as you shout it. Your child cusses again. You retort dramatically: “Crimeny! For the love of Pete!”
If your child ends up laughing, that’s a bonus, but really the goal here is simply for you to stay unoffended and able to look your kid in the eye with compassion instead of anger. It’s a whole lot easier for me to look at a child with compassion in my eyes while screaming, “Flibberty Gibbet!” than standing powerlessly under a hailstorm of verbal insults.
Perhaps you are an admirer of higher education, the BBC, or simply a lover of rhyme?
If this is you, consider taking a more poetic approach to your diction by way of this beautiful collection of ridiculous Shakespearean exclamations!
Source: www.nosweatshakespeare.com or www.shakesperan-insult-infographic.png
The only caveat here is that many of these are actually insulting and divisive (i.e. any in which you call the other person a fool), so avoid those and stick with purely silly ones such as...
“You Banbury cheese!”
If I had a nickel for each time I was called a Banbury cheese! I tell ya. Ok, just kidding. That definitely hasn’t happened yet, but there’s still time.