Maybe I'm naive OR maybe I just have good kids. The first thing I would do is say NO. BTW my kids are 9 and 7 and know that there is a no tolerance for swearing (and other things) in our house. Its for adults who have forgotten the words and certainly never something I want to hear from their mouths. Have you tried telling him to stop? Believe me - if they cant do as you say at 3 they will be on the road to total rebel and delinquency by the time they are 13. JUST SAY NO!!!
My 7 year old swore alot when he was younger. If you ignore it they tend to stop when the shock and laughing reaction is not given . We all thought it very cute and funny when they are small and they swear but as a parent it becomes annoying as the child gets older but they see it as a way to become centre of attention so if you ignore it they get bored of it very quick. I hope it works it did for us. Stick to you guns and ignore it not matter what the circumstances dont laugh when you are in your home and then get mad out in public .
my 3 year old daughter went through a similar phase. First both my husband and i had to quit swearing. Then I began to ignore the behavior. It seemed the more i scolded her the more she did it. Now its been a couple months, and i hear no more swearing.
Our 3 and 4 year olds both have been swearing (using childish words but it remains swearing) since they went to preschool. My husband and I, We never swear and they never heard a dirty word from our mouth. But they hear it from other children. We have been trying all possible solutions, with no result:
- first ignoring but even when we ignored them, the other sibling was laughing out laud and repeating the same word,
- we set rules "we don't use dirty words" and started saying "no" but there has been no effect, they just laughed,
- we set a rule that the person who uses a dirty word goes for a time-out, they were screaming and escaping from the room continuing shouting bad words towards us
We are desperate since we are really trying hard but for some reason our kids have very little respect for adults. They are able to shout dirty words towards a person in the street, for no reason, just for fun between themselves. I am even more desperate when I read what I read since in writting it looks really bad.
