Hear No Evil
By Glinda
Scene: Upscale Family Restaurant, waiting area. Glinda and her family sit patiently listening for their name.
Three twentysomethings enter stage left. They plop themselves down on a bench less than a foot away from my five year old son.
Twentysomething1: Hey man, what’s with that sh!t?
Twentysomething2: I dunno, but that is totally f*cked up, dude.
Twentysomething3: I cannot believe that guy would be such a f*ckin’ a$$hole….
They continued on in a similar vein, oblivious to the laser beams emanating from my eyes. Apparently, I need to re-charge the batteries or something. For a second, I seriously considered clapping both hands over my son’s ears.
Luckily for the three men, we are summoned to our table. Disaster is averted. Disaster for them, because I was about to do more than just a little bit of looking.
My ears have heard worse than the above conversation, if indeed it could be considered a conversation, what with all the “dudes” and unnecessary adjectives being tossed around. But I don’t want anyone to think that I have a holier-than-thou attitude about cussing. I might say a few of those words myself, but when I do, children are nowhere near hearing distance.
Sigh.
This is a sure sign that I must be getting old.
November 6th, 2007 at 9:29 am
I’ve actually asked teens and twentysomethings to cut with the trucker mouth in front of my kids. Usually, the guys are cool with it and apologetic about it but the girls are defiant and eye-rolly and all, “whut-ever.”
November 6th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Well, once I almost worked up the nerve to ask two teenagers to watch their language. And then they walked away from my kids. Maybe next time I’ll be able to close the deal.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Holy cow, Glinda, how have you been able to maintain that separation of adult-and-childhood? All I had to do is say, “Do this” when I was doing else, and I was immediately caught, be it seat belts/car seats or language or movies or whatever. Now I am the best seat-belt wearer ever, and my language could slip unedited into a “G” movie.
Such is the power of parenting.
November 6th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I risked the wrath of a coup of foulmouthed kids that were standing in front of my house swearing when we had the windows open. I chewed them out big time especially since they had no business being in front of my house anyway (I hate that we live cheek to jowl with our neighbors). It frustrates me to hear stuff like that.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Swearing isn’t the only problem! I took my baby for a walk and a lady was smoking on the sidewalk. She glanced our way and didn’t move. When I did a little off-roading to get away from her cloud, she rolled her eyes at me and made a “tsk” sound. Nice, huh?
November 6th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Yes, the problem with public spaces is that there are so many of the public there.
My take is: if you’re out in public, you take what you can get. Unacceptable behaviour is defined by law and etiquette, and there is no rule about not swearing in front of children. If you don’t want your children to hear it, you can keep them in private spaces their whole lives, provided you have the money, or you can say, “some people don’t behave the way we do, and those people are inferior. If you behave that way too, you’ll become inferior like them,” which is how all right-thinking snobs such as myself are brought up.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Generally, my experience has matched dgm’s. Most guys are pretty cool about it, and it’s the teenage girls who have the worst attitude. Usually, though, if I phrase it right (Hey, guys, my son’s at that age where he repeats EVERYTHING he hears! Would you mind keeping it PG?) most young people don’t have a problem.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:05 am
RE: the lady smoking on the sidewalk, I would be annoyed if she didn’t move because I was trying to get past her with an unwieldy baby carriage, but I am not a big fan of telling people they cannot smoke in a public place. It would be different if she walked into my home and lit up. My property, my rules.
November 7th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
I’m both a twentysomething AND the parent of an 8-year-old, so I try to be sympathetic when my peers get a little inappropriate with the language… but even I was a little taken aback when my neighbors (a rental house with half-a-dozen twentysomethings living in it) carved an obscene hand gesture into their Halloween pumpkin, and had it gracing their porch for, like, two weeks. I gearing up to politely ask if they would mind moving it, but then I realized the neighborhood kids were totally oblivious–to the various 5-to-10-year-olds on our street, the antics of unknown twentysomethings are of no interest whatsoever.
November 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I’m a twenty-something without kids. Sometimes I’ve notice foul-mouthed people and children present, I gently say “Hey, there are kids present.” Usually the people are so shocked to be chastized (but not lectured) that they mumble an appology and do change their language. I’ve even done that to customers when I worked retail.
I don’t try the ‘holier than thou’ attitude. I think the key is just pitch like you’d know they’d do the right thing and just didn’t notice the near-by kid.
November 8th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Well I have to say that every kid I know who has a potty mouth has one because their parents set the example, not strangers. And for every smoker blowing toxins towards my kids there is also a parent using their gigantic stroller as a Humvee to hog the sidewalk and push people into the street.