When my kids were young, I was very conscious of not cursing in front of them. While I admit that I can have a “colorful” vocabulary at times, I did not want to hear it echoed back from my toddler. As years passed, I simply maintained the pattern. As a result, despite being surrounded by cursing elsewhere, my kids didn’t pick up the habit.
The difficulty is that my son internalized the message that all cursing is bad, and he should avoid people who engage in it. At one point, when he was roughly 12, he mentioned to me that he was shocked when he heard a friend curse and was wondering if it was okay to maintain the friendship. Whoa!
That seemed pretty extreme. I realized that in his decision that he did not want to curse, he had come to the conclusion that it was “bad” if people made a different choice. That was not the message I intended to teach. It was time to let him in on my secret…mom curses!
We talked about standing by our own choices AND recognizing that others could make a different choice without being wrong. Luckily, as a high-schooler, he has taken on this more moderate approach to cursing.
The idea of multiple “right” choices came up again this summer, but with my daughter. She has been spending more time at a variety of different friends’ homes. As such, she has been exposed to a lot of different “household rules.” For example, we don’t allow cell phones at the dinner table while a lot of her friends’ parents do. She also has friends with more freedoms and some with more restrictions.
On a few occasions this summer she has commented on these differences with a clear feeling of whose way was “right” and whose was “wrong.” As a DBT therapist, I spend a lot of time discussing the idea of dialectics. A dialectical approach recognizes the truth in opposing points of view. Rather than viewing differences from the mindset that one is right while the other is wrong, dialectical thinking seeks to find the truth in both positions.
On some level, I obviously think our house rules are “right.” That is why we have them. However, I recognize they aren’t right for everyone. There are often good arguments for different approaches. As much as I want my kids to obey our rules, I also want them to grow up to be dialectical thinkers. I don’t want them to judge other people as “bad” for making different choices.
Even more importantly, I want them to understand that people aren’t “good” or “bad” based on their choices. We can like people who make different choices. We can also distinguish that “good” people make ineffective choices sometimes. Global judgements based on specific behaviors lead to harsh judgements.
I do believe kids can learn to follow our rules while also keeping an open mind to why others may do things differently. I hope they will seek to understand the pros and cons in order to develop their own thoughts. I hope they will look on different decisions with validation of their own choices as well as validation of someone else’s.
I realize that as the teen years progress, this will get trickier. Cursing is one thing, but what about scarier issues like drugs. I still want my kids to follow our rules without judging those who don’t as bad people. I will encourage them to ask why others might engage in these choices. In that way, I hope they will maintain our truth while developing empathy for someone else’s.
Many of the decisions our teens face is scary. Raising a judgmental society, however, scares me just as much.
