That you know what a policy of punishing swearing develops into (“don’t swear in presence of adult people or someone who would inform them”) shows that you have the ability to think forwards into the consequences, but also hints at some sort of stopping, perhaps motivated (because hey, finding better solutions is hard).
Clearly, you also have the ability to reason a bit further: What sort of microsociety does the above behavior encourage once they get into high school, where the majority of their perceivable world is a miniature scheduled wildland?
When I was six and used swear words in front of my school principal (hey, when you spend half the day in the principal’s office for the 13th time, you kinda get used to someone), he later brought it up with my parents (though I vaguely recall it wasn’t in any negative manner). My parents immediately started reprimanding me, naturally, but he stopped them, and afterwards they changed strategies based on his advice and some insight they gained from reading more research and books on related topics.
I’m certainly glad they did, in retrospect, because in the twisted social environment that high schools are, a good swearing strategy can be extremely effective. I don’t know how widely this’d work, YMMV and all that, but a “leave me alone” usually didn’t get prospective bullies off my back. If I then followed up with a steady gaze and a “leave me the fuck alone” (yes, I know, but that’s how 14-year-olds talked when I was there), now suddenly they’d grow much more cautious and start re-evaluating whether they should still try to play their little status game and get their cheap fun, when someone who rarely ever swears had just signaled to them that shit got serious.
All in all, “never swear” seems to me like it never actually works, and takes much more effort to attempt (by punishing every single instance of swearing that you can find, even though you know you can only find a small fraction of them) than other strategies like teaching “swearing gets less useful and powerful each time you use it, so if you always keep it as a reserve it’ll be that much more effective”.
Oh, I was not specific enough. What I wanted to write is that a habit of swearing is harmful to your social skills after you leave the school. Imagine a person at a job interview saying: “Yeah, I know the fucking Java, but NetBeans is gay, and if you ain’t doing unit tests like all the time, you are seriously retarded, man.” ;-)
Probably no one would do this intentionally, but the problem is, if you get a habit of swearing, then sometimes a word or two slips through, often unnoticed (by you; but your audience is shocked). At some moment this happened to me (no, not at a job interview, at least I think so), and after getting a feedback I decided to be extra careful. Which I would want to teach my children. I was very lucky to get that feedback, because most people assume that others are well aware of all the words they use.
Or you could, y’know, try to think of a better way.
That you know what a policy of punishing swearing develops into (“don’t swear in presence of adult people or someone who would inform them”) shows that you have the ability to think forwards into the consequences, but also hints at some sort of stopping, perhaps motivated (because hey, finding better solutions is hard).
Clearly, you also have the ability to reason a bit further: What sort of microsociety does the above behavior encourage once they get into high school, where the majority of their perceivable world is a miniature scheduled wildland?
When I was six and used swear words in front of my school principal (hey, when you spend half the day in the principal’s office for the 13th time, you kinda get used to someone), he later brought it up with my parents (though I vaguely recall it wasn’t in any negative manner). My parents immediately started reprimanding me, naturally, but he stopped them, and afterwards they changed strategies based on his advice and some insight they gained from reading more research and books on related topics.
I’m certainly glad they did, in retrospect, because in the twisted social environment that high schools are, a good swearing strategy can be extremely effective. I don’t know how widely this’d work, YMMV and all that, but a “leave me alone” usually didn’t get prospective bullies off my back. If I then followed up with a steady gaze and a “leave me the fuck alone” (yes, I know, but that’s how 14-year-olds talked when I was there), now suddenly they’d grow much more cautious and start re-evaluating whether they should still try to play their little status game and get their cheap fun, when someone who rarely ever swears had just signaled to them that shit got serious.
All in all, “never swear” seems to me like it never actually works, and takes much more effort to attempt (by punishing every single instance of swearing that you can find, even though you know you can only find a small fraction of them) than other strategies like teaching “swearing gets less useful and powerful each time you use it, so if you always keep it as a reserve it’ll be that much more effective”.
Oh, I was not specific enough. What I wanted to write is that a habit of swearing is harmful to your social skills after you leave the school. Imagine a person at a job interview saying: “Yeah, I know the fucking Java, but NetBeans is gay, and if you ain’t doing unit tests like all the time, you are seriously retarded, man.” ;-)
Probably no one would do this intentionally, but the problem is, if you get a habit of swearing, then sometimes a word or two slips through, often unnoticed (by you; but your audience is shocked). At some moment this happened to me (no, not at a job interview, at least I think so), and after getting a feedback I decided to be extra careful. Which I would want to teach my children. I was very lucky to get that feedback, because most people assume that others are well aware of all the words they use.