Go ahead, curse in front of your kids
Oct. 24th, 2016 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athousanderrorsvia http://ift.tt/2ehfL3i:Go ahead, curse in front of your kids:
allthingslinguistic:
A nice summary of the important difference between swearing and slurs:
As far as I know, scientists have never conducted a controlled experiment aimed at uncovering the consequences of swearing in front of children; you can’t ethically justify exposing 5-year-olds to heavy cussing if there’s even the slightest risk of harm. But college students are another story. And we can extrapolate to children from experimental research conducted with adults.
The only profane words that demonstrably cause trouble are slurs. A 2014 study exposed 52 university students (average age: 21 years) to either a slur for homosexuals or a neutral term. Those who saw the slur subsequently thought that less money should go towards AIDS-HIV prevention efforts for “high risk groups.” In another, 61 participants (average age: 23) saw either a homosexual slur or a neutral label. The ones who saw the slur positioned their chairs physically farther away from a person they believed to be homosexual by an average of more than 10 centimeters.
Slurs may have similar or greater effects in children, who are less developed socially and cognitively. Indeed, correlational studies suggest as much. For instance, a study that followed 143 middle school students found that those who reported more exposure to homophobic slurs tended to report feeling less connected to their school lives. They also exhibited symptoms of anxiety and depression.
But there’s no similar proof that exposure to ordinary profanity — four-letter words — causes any sort of direct harm: no increased aggression, stunted vocabulary, numbed emotions or anything else.
Of course, parents aren’t holding their tongues solely because they think hearing a bad word will turn their kid into a criminal. They also worry that the kid will turn around and use it. And yet the largest observational study — again we don’t have controlled experiments — found that childhood swearing is largely innocuous. Scientists documented children ages 1 to 12 naturally producing thousands of taboo utterances, and only rarely witnessed negative repercussions. On no occasion did swearing lead to physical violence. Instead, taboo words were used mostly for positive reasons, for instance humor, and mostly were not produced out of anger. […]
I’ve come up with a compromise solution. I don’t censor myself because I know my child won’t suffer cognitive or emotional damage; and I don’t try to stop him from parroting me, in large part because I’m not delusional enough to think that would work. But when I happen to swear around my kid, I provide some coaching. I engage him in an honest dialogue about why some words are OK in some places, but not others. Even a 2-year-old can understand that the f-word can be muttered consequence-free at home but might lead to a negative reaction when screamed in the supermarket.
Read the whole thing.
allthingslinguistic:
A nice summary of the important difference between swearing and slurs:
As far as I know, scientists have never conducted a controlled experiment aimed at uncovering the consequences of swearing in front of children; you can’t ethically justify exposing 5-year-olds to heavy cussing if there’s even the slightest risk of harm. But college students are another story. And we can extrapolate to children from experimental research conducted with adults.
The only profane words that demonstrably cause trouble are slurs. A 2014 study exposed 52 university students (average age: 21 years) to either a slur for homosexuals or a neutral term. Those who saw the slur subsequently thought that less money should go towards AIDS-HIV prevention efforts for “high risk groups.” In another, 61 participants (average age: 23) saw either a homosexual slur or a neutral label. The ones who saw the slur positioned their chairs physically farther away from a person they believed to be homosexual by an average of more than 10 centimeters.
Slurs may have similar or greater effects in children, who are less developed socially and cognitively. Indeed, correlational studies suggest as much. For instance, a study that followed 143 middle school students found that those who reported more exposure to homophobic slurs tended to report feeling less connected to their school lives. They also exhibited symptoms of anxiety and depression.
But there’s no similar proof that exposure to ordinary profanity — four-letter words — causes any sort of direct harm: no increased aggression, stunted vocabulary, numbed emotions or anything else.
Of course, parents aren’t holding their tongues solely because they think hearing a bad word will turn their kid into a criminal. They also worry that the kid will turn around and use it. And yet the largest observational study — again we don’t have controlled experiments — found that childhood swearing is largely innocuous. Scientists documented children ages 1 to 12 naturally producing thousands of taboo utterances, and only rarely witnessed negative repercussions. On no occasion did swearing lead to physical violence. Instead, taboo words were used mostly for positive reasons, for instance humor, and mostly were not produced out of anger. […]
I’ve come up with a compromise solution. I don’t censor myself because I know my child won’t suffer cognitive or emotional damage; and I don’t try to stop him from parroting me, in large part because I’m not delusional enough to think that would work. But when I happen to swear around my kid, I provide some coaching. I engage him in an honest dialogue about why some words are OK in some places, but not others. Even a 2-year-old can understand that the f-word can be muttered consequence-free at home but might lead to a negative reaction when screamed in the supermarket.
Read the whole thing.
