Jamie and I have a long game parenting joke going on, and I think it's working.
Here's the gist of it: We don't believe in “bad” words. There's awareness of your audience and using the right words for who you're talking to or who might hear you, but generally speaking, we don't have “bad” words. The workaround for this with Max has been to assign ages to words.
It isn't that he isn't allowed to say certain words, it's just that he isn't old enough.
“Fart” is an 8 year old word.
“Crap” is for 12 year olds.
“The F bomb” is like a 16 year old word,
and the list goes on.
Walking home from school one day, as Max recounted a classmate saying “the S word” on the playground, we had yet another conversation about words and acceptable ages.
And then, about a month ago, we invented “The Q Word”
Worse than the F bomb, it's the worst word in the world, so terrible that even Jamie and I don't say it. Because it's The Q Word and we wouldn't dare.
Fast forward to today. If you haven't heard, Shia LaBeouf is doing a performance art piece, #AllMyMovies. It is literally him, sitting in a theater in NYC, watching all of his own movies, in reverse chronological order, over 72 hours. And live streaming a feed of himself. Watching his own movies.
Yup.
As I recounted this to Jamie, his response was “That's terrible. So douchey. OMG, he's totally a Q word.”
And the look on Max's face told us all we need to know.
The Q Word is worse than Voldemort, worse than the F bomb. It's the worst thing you can say.
We can't wait to tell Max the truth, some day faaaar in the future.
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