Swearing is awesome and all my favourite people are c***s.

When I first learned four years ago that I was going to be a daddy I could barely sleep with excitement, anticipating the passing of my lifetime’s knowledge and wisdom to my beautiful unborn child.

Why, as a progressive parent, I think gender-neutral parenting is a load of old tosh

Such as his first guitar chords. Unusual collective nouns. The relative merits of Lennon versus McCartney. Lefty loosey, righty tighty.

Naturally, for the first year or so there wasn’t a great deal I could do apart from warming milk, mopping up sh*t and trying not to asphyxiate him.


But from around age two, when the world began to make more sense and he could string together elementary sentences, I thought ‘bingo’.



Now’s my moment, the thing I was put on this earth to do – create a smart, well-read sensitive young man from scratch.

However, instead of filling his adorable head with dinosaur nomenclature, The Beatles’ discography or South American capital cities, an unacceptable share of my (considerable) didactic prowess is being squandered on negatives.

‘Stop picking your nose, darling.’

‘Don’t touch that.’

‘Say “thank you”’

‘Why not share with the little girl?’

I won’t lie – it’s all a bit of a drag.

Partly because bad manners are hilarious.

For instance, basically everyone I love and respect (myself included) adores swearing.

Swearing is f****** amazing.

There’s no surer way of conveying passionate sentiment than an artfully-deployed volley of expletives.

But even an avid fan of profanity like myself will cringe when Toby tells a little girl at the playground to go f*** herself, or demands grandpa change channels because Rastamouse is ’sh*t’.

So reluctantly I desist, settling for feeble, milquetoast salvos along the lines of ‘blimey’, ‘golly’ or ‘yikes’, knowing he’ll copy me and (quite rightly) be bullied for cursing like a wimp.

Farting is another good one.

Ye gods, breaking wind is hilarious.

The noise, the grossness, the fact it makes a certain kind of person really, really uncomfortable.

But society tells me I should discourage him, so yet again I bow my head in shameful surrender to the bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, I have to admit I’ve had an okay time teaching him about ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

Initially I was skeptical, believing ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to be a complete waste of everybody’s time.

Swedish people don’t even have a word for ‘please’, and the Nepalese somehow muddle through without ‘thank you’.

Having tiresomely inculcated my boy with this meaningless flummery, I have found it helps when he won’t eat.

‘Please, one more bite for daddy,’ actually works.

Sucker.

The bitter irony is that even as I’m half-heartedly forcing myself to make a good citizen of him, I’m hyper aware that the day he starts big school all my hard work will be undone within hours.



If I’ve done any kind of good job as a father he’ll sit with the cool kids and swear like a sailor just to fit in.

Meanwhile I’ll look like a lameass for pulling him up on it.

Parenting is a f****** nightmare dudes.

MORE: 20 ways kids annoy the heck out of their parents

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