what you want your kids listening to/can you escape bad/questionable language in modern pop?

kind of a random riff on something thats been bugging me, but i have some relatives from the states visiting at the moment. their two kids are 10 and 12. the girl likes all top 40 pop music, the boy likes hip hop, stuff like lil wayne, drake, eminem, and well i find myself a bit worried about how much bad language is in what they, he especially, listen to. or if its not even 'bad' language, its just questionable. i dunno if kids should be listening to half the shit that gets into mainstream hip hop. i know ilx is just far too cool for school and detached and oh so rational for this sort of tipper gore-ish reaction, but i dunno, i dunno if its good for kids to be listening to this stuff. even if they dont totally know what its about, it seems too mainstream, too accessible, and too accepted. i want them to listen to the jonas brothers lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJmLd2QPmkY

well, if you have kids you can try and monitor what they listen to. kinda hard to do that by the time a kid is 12 though. as far as other people's kids go, i don't know, talk to the parents.

i agree with you, with some reservations. i don't want my 9-year old daughter listening to stuff like lil wayne. i much prefer that she listens to, say, the jonas bros., but i don't want her listening (exclusively, at least) to them, either. as i said elsewhere, her favorite act -- for the moment, at least -- is blondie, and i'm fine with that.

happy father's day, by the way!

I gained a little understanding for Tipper Gore when I learned that her quest started when she heard her 11-year-old daughter listening to Darling Nikki. If I heard my (fictional) 11-year-old daughter listening to that I'd lock her in an isolation chamber till age 25.

My two kids are just a little too young to understand the lyrics to things, and certainly too young to even understand that "bad words" means more than "I hate you" or "shut up." I'm not quite sure how to handle it later, but currently sorta boundary pushing stuff like Lady Gaga (which ALL lil' kids seem to like) is almost a borderline gateway drug. Then again, as long as we keep her from the videos, she won't get(or understand) worse than a scattered "bitch" here and there. I figure, ten years down the line, she can listen/read/watch whatever she wants, as long as she recognizes what she's watching, etc. is not for everyone, and that her own actions and behavior are what we'll judge her by, not her tastes.

One challenge, btw, is kid friendly stuff that's censored on top 40 (from Gaga to Green Day) but not censored on the CDs. My pals who listen to Green Day with their five-year old just sing different words over the profanity so that he doesn't understand.

http://www.atlantachristianweb.com/Fish_Safe_JPEG.jpg

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sorry, go on.

well my nephew and niece, they said they get lots of radio edits of stuff, but if youre downloading, a lot of that wont be clean. i mean, the boy asked me if he could hear lil waynes carter 3 and the first song had 'fuck' in it, so i turned it off. and even the 'clean' edit of missys get your freak on (somehow) had the n word on it (strange).

My pals who listen to Green Day with their five-year old just sing different words over the profanity so that he doesn't understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kf4kyQabwQ

I find Christian radio more offensive than Lil Wayne.

"Clean" versions are often slapped together with no rhyme or reason, or regulation. Not that there should be, but they're so inconsistent I'd just as soon learn how to deal with the real thing.

well you say that but then i suppose it comes down to whether youd prefer a 10 year old singing along to lollipop, word for word, or a religious song.

My pals who listen to Green Day with their five-year old just sing different words over the profanity so that he doesn't understand.

yeah, i do this too. clearing of the throat -- or faux coughing -- also works well.

Well, yeah, of course I was exaggerating about Christian radio. I can just not listen to religious radio and literally never hear any of those songs ever. Which I can't say about Wayne or any number of things I hear coming from cars driving by the house. I guess I have one advantage with two girls, in that the odds the'll want to hear anything nasty is slim. They'll be listening to Taylor Swift and her like for years.

(Of course, I'll have to then deal with the hormone-explosion boys sniffing around, but hey, you can't win 'em all.)

listening to a steady stream of taylor swift can be a very trying experience for parents, iirc.

i remember once hearing a clean Ludacris CD and all the curses were replaced with dick-sucking noises

i mean, the important thing is context. i wouldn't mind my fictional kids hearing Xtina dropping a "and if you don't like it fuck you" but i think i'd mind them hearing Drake make a pussy whistle the andy griffith song.

I wouldn't mind explaining to a 6 year old that "fuck" is a word Green Day but you can't, but I WOULD mind explaining why Petey Pablo likes his gf to have her pussy licked by another bitch because he isn't drunk enough to do that shit.

...FREEK-A_LEEK

I wouldn't mind explaining to a 6 year old that "fuck" is a word Green Day (used in a song)

that may be, whiney, but i think you have to leave some wiggleroom open for yourself in the event you do have kids. you may feel differently then.

I'm feeling what Whiney's saying. Knowing when it is / is not ok to cuss is a matter of learning politeness, just like knowing when it is / is not ok to fart. This is teachable, for instance by imitation.

But freaky shit is a different story---I want say over what my kid thinks is normal, and it's not like they can learn that by imitating you (I hope?).

at what age would you say it's appropriate to teach that to a child?

(the cursing part)

I just do not want my 6 year old to hear the word "fuck", no matter what the context. period.

haha if I were a kid I'm not sure I'd buy the logic "green day has the right to do things that other people don't"

re. cussing? My kids don't cuss but they know the words of course (they have friends whose parents say "fuck" all the time in kids' presence; we decided we're cool with that). We try not to cuss much in front of them & if they drop one occasionally, as happens, we make sure we tell them to watch it, since not everyone is cool with that.

i'm not sure how many cuss words my 9-year old daughter knows. i don't think she's heard the "f" or "s" words, to be honest. we don't curse in front of her. i normally won't cause an uncomfortable scene if a friend says f--k in our daughter's presence, but that's a tough call.

and yeah, i don't want my 9-year old to hear f--k, period.

(or any other similar word, for that matter)

i don't know if you guys have seen my posting style, but i'm pretty sure if i have kids, they're gonna hear the word "fuck"

lol your posting style mirrors your conversational style?

I say "iirc" sometimes :/

Also, daniel, unless you live in some amish neighborhood or on the moon or are strictly home-school, i'm pretty sure your 9-year-old has heard someone say fuck before

actually, my posting style mirrors my legal writing style.

I. STANDARDS.

Florida law in this area is unremarkable and, iirc, longstanding.

oops! i meant: STANDARDS.

you're making a good point, chris. but yeah, our girl is pretty sheltered (at home and in her private school), and if she's heard the word "f--k," it isn't often at all.

sorry: whiney.

i still remember the first time i said it.

I think I was like 5 or 6 and at the dinner table, I said "Mom? Is fuck a bad word?" and my dad just instinctually slapped me and that was that.

not wanting to get all PMRC-y here but one of the reasons I love my 6 year old so much is his essential naivety and innocence – the fact that his whole life exists outside of the world of adulthood. for me to introduce swearing into that would spoil the whole thing. he'll hear those words himself soon enough, no reason for me to hasten the process.

i want my kid to be the one teaching swears to the other kids

my idea is that by age 8 he'll be so bored with cursing that he'll rebel and just start talking very lucid and eloquent to piss me off.

i know that, someday, i will hear my girl cuss. and it will break my heart, a little.

not joking at all.

yes. yesterday my son said that in his opinion something "sucked" and I felt the same way.

did it actually suck though?

I can't actually remember what he said it in regards to. It may have been England's World Cup performance, in which case – yes it does.

"sucked" seems to be gradually shifting from unacceptable to tolerated but not approved.

I keep telling my 16-year-old rap loving son how lazy and uneffective I think most cussing is. He has not cursed back a response yet.

anyway I'm a prude in a different way: I try to limit their exposure to crass materialism---that matters a lot more to me than whether they know how to be polite amongst the right people.

this is why pop music needs more songs about "milkshakes" and the like.

Also reminds me of a story I once heard about this dude and his friend who were listening to a newly acquired copy of "Home Invasion", only for his mom, at one point, to walk into the room, eject the cassette, tear the tape out, and walk back out without saying a single word.

"But I wonder how to convey the concept of artistic license to a kid?"
no one's ever properly explained it to me yet. ha! I don't think this is something most adults have ever reconciled.

Has anyone tried "indoctrinating" their kids via stuff like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhNbaMJNA50

You can't really escape "bad" language in music. Then again, I think mere exposure to questionable language may be over-rated in terms of its negative effects. Exposure to stuff can lead to teachable moments re. times when you can do/say that v. times you absolutely CANNOT do/say that. If you think children are not aware of naughty words and/or aren't going to use them, you may be fooling yourself, so its best for them to know how to handle the knowledge appropriately.

Ideally I'd like to teach the difference between words that are arbitrarily designated as "bad" (like saying "shit" if you stub your toe) and language that is actually bad because it is used to hurt someone, but I guess this is probably not going to be easily understood by a kid until they're like 9-10 years old unfortunately.

i tell my kids they can say whatever they want around me as long as they don't use "bad" words around teachers/other adults/etc.

I think most kids understand by a certain age without having to be explicitly taught that there are certain venues where it's "OK" to be crass, but there's a lot of mental gymnastics by adults trying to justify why it's OK there but not OK here and they've never managed to do that much better than "it just isn't!"

I think most kids understand by a certain age without having to be explicitly taught that there are certain venues where it's "OK" to be crass

I haven't spent much time around kids but that seems like it's so untrue that I'm surprised your nose isn't bursting out of my computer screen.

We told Sarah she could say anything she heard us say, and tried to keep it pretty clean around her until she was off to college.

xp lol Dan

I was once driving this woman and her two sub-10 yr. old kids around while working some job and a nirvana song came on the radio. She patiently began to explain what heroin addiction was to her 6 year old kid, and I was just reminded how many decisions I don't have to make by not being a parent.

We had to explain drug addiction to our kid this weekend, due to what we suspect is a problem with his friend's dad. :(

Really weird: Car-pooling little kids to grade school in the mid '00s, and "Pepper" by the Butthole Surfers frequently showing up on the radio. I usually didn't change the station; just hoped the kids didn't hear the band's name. Maybe I turned the volume down, or something.

(Mid '90s, I meant.) Pretty sure the kids thought that was a catchy song, btw.

Actually, I felt most awkward when we were driving around listening to "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath this weekend and the last verse came on with all those God references. I was thinking: "shit, shit, shit, his mother's gonna kill me!"

maybe the most pleased I have ever seen my dad was after he asked 5/6 yr old me if I knew what the f word was, which I duly whispered into his ear. it felt like a great secret we shared that I could never possibly spoil by telling my little brother.

"I think most kids understand by a certain age without having to be explicitly taught that there are certain venues where it's "OK" to be crass
..
I haven't spent much time around kids but that seems like it's so untrue"

I was reading a book on football hooliganism and was thinking how weird it would be for a parent to sit a kid down and say, "remember what mum and dad told you about not cursing and punching people and destroying things? well, here's an exception..."

We don't play commercial radio in my house or car - it's either my MP3 player, my wife's classic rock tapes or classical radio. They don't watch much TV and we don't have any video games in the house. My oldest is in elementary school and I'm sure he has no idea who Lady Gaga and her ilk are. Having said that, I don't keep track of which songs have swearing in them and when it comes up, I don't bother to highlight it. I know he's learned some swears but he hasn't blurted them out* and we very rarely curse in front of the kids. But my middle son likes to push the boundaries and he'll be joining his older brother at school next fall - I expect to hear the first kid-swear from him.

(*Not counting the time my oldest was 2, repeating everything he heard, and my wife cursed at another driver - and my son was saying "Shit" for a few hours.)

Parents who don't like to curse in front of their kids: why? how?

my friend used to keep a swear jar in the house with her 8-year-old, any friends who came over had to put a nickel in for each cuss word. the kid got the money. it seemed like a good way to teach the nuances of when to cuss. one guy who used to come over would just throw a dollar in first thing.

I mean, did you not swear much already, or is it a concerted effort? Is there a general recommendation out there against kids learning to curse (like in a reputable book or something)? Do you use soft-pedal curses like darn and shoot, or do you just avoid swearing altogether?

I cussed at work when I was in a cussing workplace, kept it clean at home. It didn't seem like something that required a lot of effort, but I'm (too) prideful about being hyper-aware of my surroundings and taking care of that level of detail.

i mean, i tone down my language sometimes too, but some people on this thread have said that their kids don't swear or even know what cusses are and I can't imagine that.

My oldest is in elementary school and I'm sure he has no idea who Lady Gaga and her ilk are.

Man, I really doubt this so much. Especially after spending time with some first and second graders this weekend.

if your kid is in school with other children, he already knows that Lady Gaga is actually a man.

just kiddin, i don't know :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooarT3cn8_o

lol i know a dude who downloaded a shitload of "clean version" albums bc he had to drive his grandmother around for two weeks & he wasn't gonna do it without rap. he got a kick out of finding some anomalies like different musical mixes or entirely new beats from artists he thought he had everything by.

I went home last night consciously listening to what my wife and I were saying, just to try to get a gauge on how much we were cussing in front of the boy, and neither of us said anything inappropriate all night. Later though, we were all watching Avatar: the Last Airbender and there was some cool action sequence that made my son go "Oh, shit!" I thought it was cute as all hell.

Lady Gaga is actually a man.

i suspected as much!

I'm only basing their access to that information on the age that I learned George Michael had a sex change.

I love profanity, at least in theory but more or less don't curse around the house .... or anywhere these days. I know I've let one fly now and then at home, and I think all the kids get is that I'm angry. And speaking of which, you truly realize how observant those little monkeys are when you hear the older one chastising the younger one the exact way you would have. It makes you feel a little bad when you then have to chastise the older one for essentially doing what you do. Personally, I'm just happy the two in their back seat occasionally ask me to put on "something funky" or "rock and roll," and then boogie down to Zeppelin or Prince or whatever.

you truly realize how observant those little monkeys are when you hear the older one chastising the younger one the exact way you would have. It makes you feel a little bad when you then have to chastise the older one for essentially doing what you do.

Arg, this has been happening with our boy. What's the worst is that he's been chastising his friends or playmates, and gets really insufferable.

isn't the environment kids are raised in far more important than what they listen to? i first discovered curse words in the (primary school) playground, not in pop music, but from about 12 was certainly listening to lots of songs w/profanities, and using them myself when with friends. but i always KNEW i'd never get away with using them at home (or letting on what lyrics i was listening to), and thus there was no real danger of me using them in an inappropriate context. i don't think this even needed much explaining, either. i'm still astonished whenever i hear people (even as adults) curse in front of their parents.

w/r/t dodgy attitudes/stances in pop that go beyond just cursing, i'd definitely be less easy about that, but again i think it ultimately comes down to the parent teaching the child to distinguish between real life and pop fantasy.

My parents only let me curse in front of them during the Bush administration.

My parents rarely cursed, but they had no problem letting me buy/listen to whatever I wanted, sometimes in their presence. The only time I can remember my dad saying anything was when I bought Run DMC's "Raising Hell" and had it playing on a boom box at the dinner table.

To be honest, the conflict it instills in me is the hyper-awareness that profanity (and most of this "objectionable" stuff) in music is pretty silly, lazy and immature - designed for kids, basically - because how could any self-respecting adult listen to shit like, say, Eminem (just for example) and take it the least bit seriously as anything more than an exercise in style and weak boundary pushing? Which is weird, because similar stuff in movies and books and art and whatnot does not necessarily raise those same internal conflicts, bar, like, watching stupid slasher films. Then again, the very nature of the mediums allows film, books and whatnot to push boundaries a lot farther than music, which I suppose in turn requires a more sophisticated, or at least "adult," approach.

The only time I can remember my dad saying anything was when I bought Run DMC's "Raising Hell" and had it playing on a boom box at the dinner table.

OMG XD

I'm still astonished whenever I hear either one of my parents curse in front of me, to be honest. It's only ever happened twice though -- first time happened when I was thirty or so.

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

A couple of weeks ago my parents were visiting and my mother described someone as a "pain in the ass". It was the second time I remember her cursing in my lifetime.

Mom's late middle-age has been a joy: discovering obscenities and gin and tonics.

Parents who don't like to curse in front of their kids: why? how?

- because they might think it commonplace and ok to swear at school/other adults, and it isn't
- self control

re the original question I want my kids to be able to listen to whatever they like but I don't think they're old enough yet to understand how and when it's appropriate/wrong/funny to swear and also because again I don't want them developing swearing habits at too young an age when it will get them into trouble.

They know how to use youtube & winamp & spotify & grooveshark and can pretty much hear what they like. They usually look for censored versions of songs they think might be a bit iffy and I mostly trust their judgement. If they stumble across a stream of f words they'll switch it off (and probably make a mental note to play it at a friend's house :) ). They spend a lot of time typing "clean ... " on youtube. Sometimes they'll make me listen to something or google the lyrics to make sure it's ok.

They're 8 and 10 and haven't yet settled on a genre they most like and currently listen to Eminem, Dizzee Rascal, Gorillaz, Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, Andrew WK (I blame me for that one), Guns n' Roses (?), Lady Sov, Michael Jackson and a bunch of emo bands.

"Sometimes they'll make me listen to something or google the lyrics to make sure it's ok."

what's the weirdest thing that's come out of this?

Can't think of any specifics though I've struggled a few time to explain why a song with no explicit swearwords might still be a bad idea for an 8-year-old (usually something involving some guy detailing exactly what kind of night he'd like to have with his lady friend).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/15/the-debate-pop-sexualising-children

Mom said "Fuck" last week!

i remember once hearing a clean Ludacris CD and all the curses were replaced with dick-sucking noises

― ke$ha in the rye (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, June 20, 2010 2:01 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm imagining whiney listening to this either with his mom or with the volume turned down low at the concierge desk and this girl comes up to ask for her keys and she leans on the counter and is about to say "excuse me!" but then she hears luda go "gonna SUCK that *slurp* til THREE in the MORNIN" and whiny immediately switches it off and is like "yes can i help you?"

How do parents explain the lyrics of "Rudeboy" to their children who love Rihanna?

i've seen "rude boy" specifically cited more than any other pop single in YEARS w/r/t "think of the CHILDREN" - i suspect that this is at least partly because she's explicitly objectifying the male body, given the slew of pop songs about tits and ass that don't get called out.

it's funny cuz i thought it was pretty tame when i first heard it!

although it was funny when (dancehall mc) lady chann praised it on twitter, did a remix of it, and then a week later was like HOLD UP MY SIX-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER IS SINGING IT

wrt "Rude Boy", if you don't know what it means, it's not a "What does that mean mum" song, as all the words are innocuous enough in isolation, and put them together it's more 'probably about dancing or something'.

.. whereas a strange word or a bunch of words together that paints a picture (or doesn't quite do it for someone) is more likely to pique the interest...

if i had kids i would force my own musical tastes on them until they're old enough to be discerning, at which point i don't care.