What would you do if your teenager uses obscene language at you in an argument?

If we was in a heated argument and she suddenly cursed me, I would ask her when did she start believing in voodoo? I would take her to church for a long talk with the pastor.

Warning: I do not have teenage kids yet. My kids are all under 10. So, take what I say with a grain of “this guy may have no idea what he is talking about” salt.

First, I would never hit my kids. Period.

Second, “so disrespectful to [me]”? Is swearing really so disrespectful to me? Hmmm..never thought of it that way. I have standards that I hold everyone who speaks to me to. I don’t care what type of language my kids would be using as long as they were meeting my standards. When someone violates the standards, I interrupt and tell them that I am not comfortable with the way they are speaking to me. “Let’s try again….with big boy words.”

“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.” – Deuteronomy 21:18–21

Oh ok, now that you changed it to Obscene Language instead of Curse, I know what you’re asking. I thought it was weird for a modern day teenager to go around cursing people, lol.

If she swore at me, I would tell her to go to her room and not come out til she was able to speak to me with more respect. I would not hit her, but I would definitely let her know she had crossed the line.

I don’t have kids, but I don’t think hitting someone for speaking is justified. There is also a difference between cursing and cursing at someone. Either way, they’re just words and people are entitled to be upset, due to that whole being human and all…..

It would make more sense to understand why they’re angry.

It’s a teachable moment isn’t it? Here’s a developing person who’s still learning how language influences negotiation and mitigates emotional expression. What’s their goal in using that language? Attention? Compulsion by force? To hurt? Or are they just experimenting to see what effect the words have in this situation? Or is it what they’ve learned to use via arguments with peers? Are you really so fragile that you can’t see the words don’t really have much to do with you personally? Or maybe they are the right words to use—maybe you are the kind of person who deserves the name or label. Anyway, I would make it a lesson in the effectiveness of using such language. Most cases it’s not the best first choice, but sometimes it can be the right thing to say.

As a father of two sons, if they were frustrated about something else, I might let it go. If they were being insulting or defiant then goodbye to cell phone, car keys, a few weekends, or anything else that gives them a mistaken sense of freedom from my ever present parental influence.

There are times my daughter age 11 has been cheeky to me. I take her hands hold it against her hips look her in the eyes and say STOP and if she carries on I take her outside let her stand on a tree that was sorn of by the base and shut the door until we are both calm enough to talk it over…

I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t derail the conversation. It depends. I don’t get huffy about curse words. I use them.

The one and only time my dad hit me: I was about 13 and in a heated argument with the old man (can’t remember why). I do remember he turned to walk out of my room and I screamed “gnaw on it, old man!”, while grabbing my junk and pretending to hold it out in front of me. I vaguely remember him spinning around with pure rage in his eyes and catching me with a single right hook. I spent about 15 minutes lying on the floor thinking “yeah, I probably had that coming.”

The “discussion” has to end at that point, at least temporarily. No “communication” will occur – not without more of the same or worse, anyway, which is a form of communication, after all… as are punches and bullets – so that would be the first thing. Stop the discussion / argument / fight and both sides go for a cooling-off period.

Resume the conversation later – maybe “just a few minutes later” if it was a topic of particular urgency – but start that off with apologies (probably on both sides; if I hadn’t seen my teen getting angry enough to do that in the first place, then I must have been particularly inattentive, I’d apologize for that lack of attention). At least minimal manners and mutual respect have to be in place before an argument or discussion can take place.

At least, those are my own prerequisites.

Now that I reread the question, I see that “screaming obscenities” wasn’t part of the scenario. As far as just “using bad words”, that wouldn’t stop a discussion, but it might prompt another one later on. I was thinking of a heated argument / fight in which the teen just screams and swears. Maybe not what you had in mind.

My teachers and other adults brought this up on occasion and taught us, as teens, that swearing and cussing, or getting beligerant in an argument is a sign of inadequate communication skills. I don’t know about other teens, but that made me determined to learn more effective communication skills so that I would not appear ignorant.

I would never hit my kids for language; I would like to say I would never hit my kids but I did much to my shame. I don’t have a problem with dirty words especially when used in times of high emotion. Are you asking what I would do if my kids said, “Fuck you” to me rather than just saying “fuck” in the course of the argument? I would be upset if they did that and would probably disengage for a time and then come back to the discussion at another point. I have two kids who are now 29 and 31 and they never have cursed me out, but certainly curse words have been used in our house.

I would never hit anyone. They do occasionally swear, but if it happened in an argument (which it never did), I would end the argument and make an appointment to speak of the matter at a later time, when tempers have cooled.

I would request that he uses his catastrophe scale, calm down for a few minutes, then come back and speak to me about his frustrations or anger with calm words, not shouting.

I’d be much more upset about the loss of control (volume) than I would be about any words used.

Teenagers swearing? Oh the shock, the horror.
Words don’t mean shit, but a ranting lack of control is going to put you in a world of hurt, no physical violence though, that’s simply neanderthal.

I would wait until you both calmed down and then talk to the teenager about both you needing to be respectful of each other even when arguing. Have a talk about how you both want to manage disagreements in the future.

It was a ‘heated’ argument. While you may not have used bad language, you were angry too. No point doing much until you are both in a cooler frame of mind.

Really though, I personally wouldn’t get too upset about it. I am not offended by bad language.

That would be the point I’d tell them to stop and leave my sight, not to talk to me until I figured out when.

One of the best advice I ever received was from a good Southern woman with 4 grown kids—- never react.

It happened when my son was about 13—he has a deep-rooted fear of needles but had to get a shot to play football at school. When he found out at the doctor’s office that he had to have a shot that day, he had the biggest hissy fit I’ve seen in my life. He paced the waiting room in front of an x number of people while cussing a blue streak in American Sign Language for a good 15 minutes (thankfully…nobody else around us knew ASL).

That day, I sat calmly in one of the office waiting room chairs and watched him go ballistic with a – . – expression and whenever he started screaming again, I just repeated, “It is required for football. You want football? You’ll need to figure out how to deal with it.” To this day, my son still feels like a complete fool whenever he remembers that event. Me? I didn’t react, so I didn’t participate in the entertainment for the locals.

I hope I would never hit them.

I think we’d find a way to step back and continue the conversation more calmly. There’s no need for that kind of language. It’s only used to vent anger. Venting anger doesn’t really help solve problems.

I have to say that if my kids used obscene language (I guess you mean things like “fuck,” “shit,” etc), I would be pretty shocked. We don’t use those words in my family. Well, sometimes I do, but that shocks them so much that they make me calm down before continuing. So I don’t use them.

We’re not a family to get angry in a demonstrative way. We keep our anger inside, if we have much of it at all. We try to solve problems, not make people feel bad. Making people feel bad doesn’t work. Taking a constructive approach works.

So in truth, the solution to this problem starts years ago—long before you have teens. If they use this kind of language now, it means that it is something they have decided will be effective in one way or another. Maybe they want to shock you. Maybe they want you to be angry. Maybe they think there is no way they will get what they want, so the next best thing is to piss you off and make your day a hell.

To me, that kind of problem solving strategy is evidence of a much deeper problem. Somehow, these kids don’t feel like they have any power and they have no say. They don’t feel like people with rights in the family. Maybe they feel like slaves. At that point, there’s nothing to lose by swearing. Hell, maybe they can make you lose it and try to hit them. They win, in that case, because you have lost your authority when you hit them. From there on out, they never have to listen to you again. They can appease you or attempt to appease you, but you will not be getting the truth from them again. It will only be a master-slave kind of arrangement.

Also, they would probably be running away from you as much as they could. They might hide in their rooms, or hide outside the house, or be out all the time. They might turn to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of not feeling connected to you. They might run away from home.

Hitting may gain compliance for a short period of time, and if you’re a short term future kind of person, that’s all you need. But if you are interested in the long term relationship, hitting is never helpful. It always leads to much worse problems down the road. It may gain compliance, but it loses you at least part of the kid and there’s always the danger it will lose you all of your child forever.

My mum once washed my brothers mouth out with fairy liquid!!! She had been threatening to do it for ages because he was swearing at people (we were allowed to swear in conversation but not to cause offence to others) and in an arguement with me he called me a “shit-head”. So, she frog-marched him to the kitchen and forced some washing up liquid into his mouth! Now, some would call that child abuse and they’d probably be right but my brother laughs about it now!

My parents never swore at me or around me and I would never have dreamed of swearing, cursing, using obscene language in front of them or to them. I would expect no less from children of my own. It is called respect and seems to be very scarce these days.

Respect must be earned.

I think authority figures are due respect, their position __earns__ it for them, from adults, and especially children who have not yet earned peerdom which might give an advantage in some exchanges.

If they do something that would negate that due respect then they should be reported to a higher authority who will correct. Unless that happens, r e s p e c t is the name of the game.

If you’re a kid, you need to be taught what respect is. The best way to do that is to show someone respect. Kids give you back exactly what you give them. If you are not being respected by a child, it’s because no one ever showed that child what respect is. And I don’t mean whipping them. I mean treating them like human beings. It’s the old sow/reap bit.

I believe the opposite is true. I think authority figures are due respect unless and until they abuse their authority. Telling a kid you don’t have to respect anything or anyone who doesn’t respect them is giving children a lot of leeway that their position or brainpower might not be up to. A cop says, in a disrespectful tone of voice, do not play on traintracks. Kid thinks he didn’t talk to me respectfully, I don’t have to do it, wham train hits him. Mom says in nasty tone, don’t touch the stove, the list is endless.

@rooeytoo But how does a child learn to respect someone? They are children. They are born knowing nothing. They have to learn first. This is not innate. They don’t even know what an authority figure is. They have to learn that. Knowing who a teacher is or a cop is is not something that is built into our brains.

They only know parents because they see them all the time. And if the parents are nasty, then the kids will learn to stay away from the parents, not to respect them. Parents must be nice to children in order to ear respect. They must tell the kids the truth and they must be useful to the kids, or else the kids won’t respect them, and rightfully so. Why would you respect someone who lies to you and tells you to put your finger in the mousetrap? You might think it’s funny and demand the kid respect you for toughening them up, but I assure you the kid sees it differently.

As to your examples—they are quite a stretch. That’s not how real world, respectful parents or cops behave.

You do what the cops say because they have the guns. They are not necessarily smarter or wiser. But they do have the guns. You need to watch cops, at least where I come from, because they do not treat people with respect. Or if they do, it is because the people have power. So maybe you can respect a cop if you are from a background of privilege, but not if you are poor.

In my town, if you are a poor, black crime victim, the cops are just as likely to beat you up again (after being beaten by the criminal) as they are to try to help you. If they do try to find the perp, they’ll drive you around until you see the criminal, make you step out of the cop car and point at him (surrounded by all his friends) to identify him. Is it any wonder that people in poor communities are reluctant to go to the cops for help when they have been victimized? The cops make things worse.

Now, if the cops treated you with respect, then you could respect them.

You can yell at someone and be respectful. “Stop!” I did that a couple of times with my daughter to keep her from heading out into the street. She froze instantly.

But I do not teach my kids to obey me unquestioningly. I teach them to question me, and only comply with me if I can explain it to them. The same for teachers. Cops, I tell them to comply with instantly because they have the guns. Fight another day. Do not fight the gun. We do not have guns in our house because they make people behave badly. Including cops. The power goes to their heads and they don’t think they need to be respectful any more, except to the mayor.

I think you make a lot of generalizations and probably the same could have been made when I was young but it doesn’t make them anymore factual. But it doesn’t change my mind, respect for authority should be taught to children (by whatever method you choose) from birth. Until such time as the authority figure does something to abuse that respect.