(Bumped for the excellent dialogue. Later posts below…)
Adorable Child (AC) is growing up; Polimom is no longer the center of her universe… which means that via her friends, other parenting styles and value-systems are making their way into our lives.
Some of these differences manifest superficially (but Mom, Janie has a cell-phone!), some show up in privileges (but Mom, Janie gets to stay up ’til 10!), and others — far more subtle — pop up in her language:
Polimom: AC, you will not be able to go to Janie’s house until you finish cleaning your room and bathroom.
AC: But I can finish it tonight when I get back! It’s almost done!
Polimom: No, AC. You’ve had all morning to finish this, and you chose instead to draw / play on the computer / watch tv (pick your favorite).
AC: But Mom! I told her I’d be there. This is so gay!!!
Polimom: Do you mean gay… happy? or gay…. homosexual?
AC: (long pause…) I mean gay… stupid.
Ah.
Lest ye think a turnip truck dropped Polimom off at the corner near our house yesterday, let me assure you that I knew exactly what she meant. Furthermore, she knows that while the word “gay” has multiple meanings in our Webster’s unabridged, “stupid” is not one of them.
Evidently we’re working out of different dictionaries these days.
Polimom’s coming up against some external cultural influences — or rather, AC is. While the socialization process (particularly for girls) includes painful internal sorting and pecking, I’m a tad confused about where those other nine- and ten-year-olds are coming up with some of this…. because no matter how hard I try, I can’t visualize a dinner-table conversation at anyone’s house that covers the subject.
Janie’s Mom: Janie, you’ll need to stay home tomorrow afternoon to work on your project. It’s due at the end of the week.
Janie: But Mom, that’s not fair! I made plans with my friends for tomorrow!
Janie’s Mom: Janie, I’m sorry to be so gay about this, but school comes first.
Hmmm…. that just doesn’t flow, somehow.
So how does this type of attitudinal influence creep into the lives of our children? I’d go for the “they got it from their older siblings” possibility, except that doesn’t explain where they came up with it. Is it the media? School? Church? The water?
Polimom has tried hard to raise a non-judgmental child, and we’ve worked the various “us v. them” spectrum fairly widely all her life — from religion, to ethnicity, to sexuality. On the whole, I feel pretty good about how she’s doing, but this type of language usage is extremely subtle, and it carries implications that bother me.
Thus far, I’ve been able to rely on Webster’s to correct some of these oddities; AC and every one of her friends know where we keep the dictionary, and they use it regularly. No doubt they think I’m a bit nuts, but they’d have thought so anyway…
However — speaking purely as a parent to others… would you please give me a hand here? You need to be listening to how your kids are using words, so I can stop lugging my unabridged dictionary around everywhere I go. The thing weighs over ten pounds, and I’m getting worried about my back… and about the societal undercurrents.
There’s more going on here than pre-teen oddness.
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