Children Should Do As We Say, Not As We Do

I was in the park on Sunday playing soccer with my kids when, in a typical moment of fatherly football ineptitude, I kicked the ball high into the air - only to see it settle 60ft up a tree. My nine-year-old son's instantaneous reaction was: "Fucking hell!"

I was stunned. Admittedly, this was partly because the occupation of the moral high ground necessary for a swift reprimand had been made difficult since it was so conspicuously my fault that the ball was stuck up a tree. But I was also stumped because I couldn't have put it better myself. This was totally a "fucking hell" moment.

It was an episode that highlighted a universal parental dilemma about bad language. Even the former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, better known, for sticking two fingers up to the British establishment, has told a Channel 4 interviewer that he hates his children hearing bad language on radio or TV. "It's pathetic when people just swear for the sake of it," he says.

We know how he feels - Lord knows, civilisation has gone to the dogs since Anarchy in the UK was a hit - but this seems a little disingenuous. Can chez Matlock really be a swear-free zone? Most children acquire a pretty extensive lexicon of obscenities, not from the telly, or even the playground, but from their own parents.

And what hypocrites we are. Whatever foul-mouthed expletives we gratuitously utter as adults, we adopt a tut-tutting attitude of disgust if we hear the same words from the mouths of our kids.

We act as though swearing is simply one of those adult vices - a bit like drinking, smoking, taking drugs and staying up late - where the rule for kids is "Do as I say, not as I do". It's as though the right to use abusive language were a privilege granted on reaching the age of majority.

Stop kids (let alone teenagers) swearing until they're 18? It's not going to happen, and we might as well face it. Kids can scent humbug at a hundred paces and will call us on it.

Parents generally allow their children to have a sip of beer or wine, as a conscious way of encouraging sensible social drinking. Perhaps we are accomplishing something similar with bad language, even though we are probably more confused about that and feel as though we veer between being too permissive and (hypocritically) too punitive.

When our children witness our vain attempts at self-restraint and occasional lapses into effing and blinding, we demonstrate the subtle cultural rules about when swearing is socially acceptable. My son already knows that all bets are off inside a football ground. A measure of his sophistication is that we both pretend not to hear the more hair-raising stuff about the referee's ancestry.

As Glen Matlock must know, the irony for parents is that we find ourselves echoing what was finger-waggingly said to us when we were young. Now it's our turn to hold the line: we just have to do our best to be shocked by this outrageous youth.