Another F-Bomb lands with deadly accuracy

The night after the morning the photo, above, was shot, The Little Man was melting down in the front room. Something wasn’t going his way and his formerly great day had suddenly turned into, he assured us repeatedly, “a bad day!”

It wasn’t anything remarkable or out of the ordinary till he began lobbing the F-Bomb around like a longshoreman, not the wide-eyed four-year-old he actually is. There was nothing PG-13 about his delivery.

As a matter of fact, it seemed to eerily match my own pitch and cadence when I deploy that particular piece of heavy ordnance. Which I usually don’t do in front of impressionable ears, but as has been noted elsewhere, this move hasn’t consistently brought out the best in me. There have definitely been recent opportunities—we call them “slips” in Program—for him to have picked this particular turn of phrase up from me.

For the record, it was a snarled, staccato “Fuck it!” so feral it sounded like a twig snapping; he had to do it a couple times in a row for The Missus and me to believe our ears.

The Missus threw up her arms and left his fate in my hands. After all, I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing; that the idiot who introduced said precious gem into his lexicon ought to be the one to try to undo the damage.

So I took The Little Man into my office’s oversized recliner and (eventually) we had a calm, reasonable talk about more effective ways for him to get our attention than zinging red-flag words at us in the heat of an argument. We also discussed the concept of punishment, which it occurred to me then, The Missus and I had never done before. We’d punish him with timeouts and loss of TV privileges and the like, but never explained to him about what punishment specifically was, nor compromise, and how compromise beats punishment every time.

In this case, the compromise involved letting him occasionally say “crap” around the house, and in exchange he’d cool it with the other grown-up words he knew he shouldn’t be using. We also talked about better ways to get our attention when he was frustrated than getting angry and saying bad things designed to elicit a big reaction from us, and that were therefore less likely to draw punishment-oriented responses.

Only time will tell if he got it or not. For what it’s worth, I made him repeat every big idea back to me and he’s got a steel-trap memory…

Still, confidence is not high.

Right now he’s in the hallway taunting the dog by calling him “hair-crotch”—which as near as I can tell is an original creation—over and over and giggling, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that yesterday’s initial father-son talk on the appropriate-language thing may have fallen somewhat short of the mark.