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.
