Potty Training
“Swallow my luminous cack!” When Swindon mom Debbie Flobb heard her four-year-old son, Robert, use this phrase in conversation with a telecoms engineer on the phone one Monday morning, her first response was utter horror. “I can’t imagine where he might have picked up language like that,” said the 63-year-old mother of three from Didsbury. “My husband and I are both fully qualified Buddhists, so it wasn’t from either of us or any of our dinner-party friends. The only other alternative was our maid, but she’s a Kikuyu and doesn’t have a word of English. I confess I was completely flummoxed.”
Debbie’s experience isn’t unique (although it later transpired that Robert was the reincarnation of the 33rd Panchen Lama, a notorious coprophage). According to Elizabeth Pfister, well-known paedolingue and author of Tiny Minds: What Goes on Inside Your Child’s Head and Why You Shouldn’t Give a Damn, not only do all children harbour malevolent thoughts towards adults, but once they find out that their attitudes are shared by other children, it reinforces their beliefs in a cycle of escalating contempt until the typical crèche is a pressure cooker of barely suppressed infantile scorn and hostility, seething with the most primitive and barbaric fantasies of violence that can be conceived by incompletely formed minds. “It’s an evolutionary mechanism by means of which the children of each generation bond with one another,” Pfister explains, “and nothing to worry about in the least. It isn’t like they can lift weapons or anything. They’re just establishing their own personal identity.”
In reality, the problem is the parents’, concerned that discussions about prophylactics on the subway or questions about vaginal juices in the bus queue will give the wrong impression to strangers. Says Pfister: “I remember one time, I was giving a talk to a school assembly, and my own son shouted out that I had a chicken twat. Of course, he didn’t know what the words meant. He was just trying to impress his pupils.”
But for Pfister, the experience was like a light switch being turned on in a cupboard filled with decomposing vegetable matter and unidentifiable mammalian effluvia. It was then, and over the subsequent 30 years, that she developed her seven-point strategy for putting the lid down on toilet talk for good, a strategy that all parents can now use thanks to her extensive research. So long as they buy her book.
1: Animal Noises
Kids don’t like to be told they’re no better than animals, but point out that not even the monkeys in the zoo call one another “minge tits,” whether it’s meant to be a term of affection or not. You can reinforce this point, says Pfister, by taking them to the zoo itself and arranging with the vets there for your kids to see one or two of the animals being put down. If they still don’t get the message, try locking them in the back garden and throw fish at them.
2: Face to Faece
A well-known technique to dissuade pets from crapping in the house is to rub their nose in it. It works a treat every time. “Not that I could conceivably recommend in a public forum that parents adopt a similar approach,” says Pfister. “But I remember the time my brother Tommy was due to visit, and my daughter, Louise, said, ‘Oh no, not that vomiting shit pisser.’ Well, that was the whole trifecta. I couldn’t let that pass, could I, not unless I wanted to give the green light to a complete breakdown of discipline. Fortunately, Tommy was an incontinent bulimic, so we had all the equipment we needed to ensure Louise kept her opinions to herself after that.”
3: Behold Your Master
Children tend to think they’re really great, and modern parenting has a lot to do with that, says Pfister. “We don’t teach them often enough how much they still have to learn.” This is especially true when it comes to linguistic skills. “Take them to see Frankie Boyle perform, or Gerry Sadowitz,” she advises. The sheer range of inventive invective will intimidate them to the point of introspection. And if that doesn’t work, take them to an Ipswich match and get seats by the dug-out. Roy Keane’s florid explosions of rage will give them nightmares they won’t be rid of until the horrors of puberty overtake them.
4: Booze Blues
Every time your child swears, make them drink a treble vodka. “It isn’t illegal if you do it at home,” says Pfister. “Besides, it’s a cure that rapidly pays off, because the more they drink the more they swear.” It’ll only take a dozen or so benders before your child comes to associate swearing with hangovers. “Make sure he doesn’t stop off on the way to school for a hair of the dog, and I can guarantee you that the shame of copious retching during Story Time will mean you’ll never hear the word ’spermacist’ ever again.”
5: Fashion is Key
“Like lots of moms, I thought that 5-year-olds with pierced tongues was an outrageous caving in to pressure,” said Terri Pampers of Walthamstow, “but then it was explained to me that you can get small padlocks that pass through the tongue and attach to a bar that you can strap round your child’s head to keep them quiet during Jeremy Kyle. Apparently the idea came from a medieval device called the Scold’s Bridle, which was used by men to pacify nagging wives. It’s a good thing we’ve moved on from those days, that’s all I can say.” Pampers had all ten of her children’s tongues pierced at birth.
6: What You Say is What You Are
Leslie Arbuckle of Tranent got so fed up with her son Clive shouting the word Syphilis at the top of his voice in the supermarket that she changed his name by deed poll to the very word that had become a mantra for him. “Now, when his teacher calls the register he has to answer to Syphilis,” she says. “When he’s playing in the park and I want to call him in for tea, I get to shout it out loud, and he’s the one who feels embarrassed. It’s not so fucking funny any more. Just wait till he goes to boarding school.”
7: God is Watching
The fact that children are using bad language to bond with one another doesn’t mean they are immune to social disapproval. “In the school where I teach,” says Neil Fringe, “any child caught swearing is forced to repeat what they said in front of a nun. She’s employed full-time purely for this purpose.” Some schools that can’t afford nuns use volunteer sour-faced old women from the local old people’s home who come in just to hear the filth that kids come out with these days. “It suits some of them to be appalled and have their worst prejudices confirmed,” says Pfister. “Of course, I am concerned that ten years down the road some adolescent boys will only be able to become sexually aroused if there’s a disapproving nun present, but if it stops them cursing in their formative years, well then I think it’s a small price for society to pay.”
From the December 2009 issue of Nurture magazine.
Discussion
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Comment by: michele shane
Feb 19th 2010 at 18:02
nice training methods, i want to use it for my kids