Previous entry: 
Next entry:
You are not stupid
“I’m stupid.”
What?
My 3-year-old son said this yesterday.
I said he is absolutely not stupid.
He said it again. Then just “stupid.”
Please stop saying that word, I said. Then I queried some. It seemed that a friend at school had called someone stupid, and it appeared the friend had said it to Alexander’s friend. It bothered him, clearly.
School can be tough, as we all know. I shudder to think of my kids hearing all the mean things that get tossed around schools every day.
But the word “stupid” isn’t confined to bullies in the lunchroom. We say it at work all the time.
It’s on TV (watch a few minutes of the AIG coverage today and you’ll hear it countless times, I’m sure). Questions are stupid, ideas are stupid, politicians are stupid. Really, can we escape this word? Is it realistic to tell a kid it’s a bad word not to be used?
So while it’s easy to tell my son that he’s not stupid, he’s smart, I found it much harder to explain “stupid.” I said it was a “bad word” because I knew that would make sense to him, but that wasn’t really accurate. Bad words are a different category. This word has value in certain contexts, but is just mean in others. It’s a difficult distinction to make to a kid.
It’s like the semantic equivalent of explaining that we bounce soccer balls outside, not in the house.
What’s terrible is hearing your kid says he’s stupid.
Gretchen Day-Bryant has a son in high school and a daughter in middle school. She’s lived to tell about the struggles of juggling little kids and work...
Joy Oglesby has an infant daughter and a sister 13 years her junior, whom she babies to the now-adult...
Cindy Kent Fort Lauderdale mother of three. Her kids span in ages from teenager to 20s...
Rafael Olmeda and his wife welcomed their first son in Feb. 2009, and he's helping raise two teenage stepdaughters...
Lois Solomon lives in Boca Raton with her husband and three daughters...
Anne Vasquez is the Online Editor in charge of overseeing SunSentinel.com. She is the mother of a 5-year-old boy and a newborn daughter.
Georgia East is the parent of a five-year-old girl, who came into the world weighing 1 pound, 13 ounces...
Brittany Wallman is the mother of Creed, 13, and Lily, 6, and is married...
Chris Tiedje is the Social Media Coordinator, and father of two boys and a girl all under the age of seven.
Comments
I have a 4, soon to be 5-yo daughter, and how I handle it normally would be to say: "'Stupid' is not a word we say in our house/family" and when asked why "because it hurts other people's feelings and is mean spirited."
Just because I don't believe there are "bad" words, it's the connotation and feeling that people get from them. So I just avoid the whole "bad" term all together.
My daughter is usually content with the explanation that we don't don't use the words as a family. It also gives me a free pass when others say it, because I can just say, well they are not in our family.
Posted by: Erin | March 18, 2009 4:49 PM
My kids were pretty old before they realized that the S word was not "stupid" and the F word was not "fat". I taught them that these were bad words they should never use to describe a person. Sadly now that they are 11 and 13, they know the real S and F words, but happily I have never heard them use them.
Erin, I'm not sure why you don't believe there are "bad" words. At the worst extreme, the N word is one that springs to mind as bad with no redeeming value.
Posted by: just me | March 19, 2009 10:16 AM
Words are just letters rearranged in different combination. Words are just tools, Just like a gun is not inherently bad until it is used to harm another.
Actually I have heard african americans use the "n" in a context were it is not intended to be "bad" or mean spirited towards the other person.
In fact, early last century, it was considered slang for African-Americans, and an insult if applied to non-African-Americans, according to the 1926 edition of H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage.
It's the context/intention that the word is used in that makes it "bad" in my eyes. A word cannot be bad alone - it is the 'bad" intention in how the word is used.
Swear words and certain gestures are considered "bad" because it is something our culture has agreed upon. Go to another country and the words/gestures are meaningless for the most part.
Posted by: Erin | March 20, 2009 9:12 AM