CHILDREN are precious angels, and we shouldn’t destroy their innocence by using bad language in front of them. Apart from on these occasions:
In the car
Parents are wound up so tight that even the slightest indiscretion in traffic causes a volcanic eruption. Someone just cut you up? Feel free to give them both barrels – profanity, elaborate hand signals to imply they’re wankers and hammering on the horn. Sorry, kids, Mummy’s got road rage.
Standing on one of their toys
Sadly, the period where everyone buys your newborn cuddly toys is brief. Before long they’re onto the hard stuff and the floor is littered with pointed plastic things like Lego and model dinosaurs. When you stand on a triceratops and loudly yell that you’re ‘glad the motherf**king bastards are f**king extinct’ your child starts crying inconsolably even though you’re the one with a horn stuck in the sole of your foot.
When you open their nursery bill
Despite sitting down and bracing yourself to open the email, every time you see you owe Kiddywinks Day Nursery £900 a month you can’t help some pretty colourful language slipping out. For that amount, you’d expect your toddler to be able to play the violin or speak Japanese by now, when in reality they come home covered in paint and carrying a bag with some shitty trousers inside.
At any time during a trip to the supermarket
The full horror of taking a child to the supermarket is something every parent has to bear at some stage: tantrums, running off, lying down in the bakery aisle and refusing to move. While you would never swear directly at your child after they’ve opened a jar of mayonnaise and emptied it on the floor, you don’t mind furiously berating a shelf of baked bean tins with a few choice phrases.
When telling your partner about the bad word they used
It’s perfectly acceptable to swear in front of your kid if you’re explaining to your partner that you had to go into their school today to talk to the headmistress about their language. Could you explain why your child called Miss Shaw an ‘almighty wanker’? No, you have no idea where they might’ve picked language like that up from. You’ll go straight home and check the child settings on YouTube.
