stranger danger

This is being overthought.

Little kids have extremely undeveloped frontal cortexes. They make bad decisions. They're kids. It's why you don't let them choose to eat nothing but candy bars, you don't let them watch TV for 7 hours straight until they pass out at 10pm in front of the TV, and you don't let them pick and choose when they can cuss someone out.

It's not about being dishonest or lying to your kid or forcing them to lie or any of this over overly complicated pearl clutching in this thread, it's about allowing kids an age appropriate amount of discretion.

Now on one hand you have a need to allow your child to push their boundaries, make mistakes, and exercise/develop/practice their executive functions. For a, say, 6 year old this may involve things like 1) giving them money to spend as they see fit at a gift shop 2) pick what to wear for school (as long as it is weather and activity appropriate) 3) plan a meal out every week within basic parameters

But those are controlled exercises. Arming a kid with words they simply do not and for a few years will not understand how to use appropriately is probably signing up to do an awful lot of "parenting" for little gain. If her being able to say "Fuck" is really important to you, then you can put in the effort of dealing with the fall out from her using it inappropriately I guess.

But while simply saying "you know what, don't use that word, it's an adult word", at least until they get to be pre-teens and become deeply motivated to say it, may strike some as taking the easy way out, the fact is that it's just not an important word for a little kid to have access to. Any more than a little kid needs to be know how to start a car and engage it into drive even though they're a decade away from being trusted to actually do anything with that information.

It's okay to just be like "don't drink this beer, it's an adult drink" for a little while.

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