Out of the mouths of babes

“Oh s---.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

My 2-year-old stared at me for a solid 10 seconds before glancing around the room, his eyes finally resting on a far-away wall.

“Pictures!” he said, pointing at a collage of images documenting his first year of life.

I wasn’t buying it.

“Buddy, what did you say?” I asked.

He hesitated, then repeated what I had feared he said.

I sighed, knowing this day would come sooner than I wanted. I would love to claim that I have never uttered that phrase in front of my son, but sadly, I am no innocent. What’s worse is his father doesn’t seem to have the self awareness that he often swears like a sailor.

So now it was time to face the music.

“Buddy, that’s a bad word and you’re not supposed to say that word. It hurts people’s feelings,” I said.

He looked at me intently for several moments. Then … tears, lots of them. After all, I had shamed him for saying something, for the first time in his little life. I felt terrible, too, because we were directly responsible for him ever hearing that word in the first place.

“It’s OK,” I said softly, letting him climb into my lap and giving him hugs and kisses. “I’m sorry because Mama and Papa shouldn’t say that word either.”

Later that day, I recounted the story. What I found as a harrowing parental moment, my husband found hilarious.

“Come on,” he said, “you’ve got to admit it’s pretty funny.”

“No,” I said, seething. “I don’t want to have ‘that kid’ who says whatever he wants. We have to have limits and rules and I wish you would take this more seriously.”

He brushed it off, saying I was taking the situation too seriously.

Until a week later when our son came home from daycare with a note from the staff. It said our son had a “bad day” and was pushing the other children in his class. I suspected that all the roughhouse play my husband instigated with our toddler might have had far-reaching influence.

“You have to understand that what you say and do with a kid matters,” I said. “He takes what he learns from us and re-enacts things with the other children.”

My husband seemed a bit more contrite this time. He put his arm around our tot and gave him a big hug and said, “Buddy, we have to not roughhouse as much, OK?”

Our son gave his best wide-eyed look at his dad, thought considerably for a few moments, then jumped on him for a tickle fight.

— Sarah Leach is editor of The Holland Sentinel. Contact her at (616) 546-4278 or sarah.leach@hollandsentinel.com.