A few weeks ago, my six-year-old son came home from school and asked me, “Daddy, what does ‘shit’ mean?” 

My wife and I don’t curse around him, don’t even slip once in a while. Maybe ’crap’ is the worst he’s heard from us. It isn’t that we’re language prudes. (Hell, my novel Mean Martin Manning is full of ‘fucks’ and lots more good stuff.) It’s just that my wife and I think that kids grow up and lose their innocence fast enough as it is. We don’t want to make it any faster. So while we don’t want to shelter the kid, either — and we don’t — we remember that he’s a young child and don’t launch into Chris Rock routines around him. There’s plenty of time for him to be exposed to all the unavoidable crudeness in the world. We think it’s reasonable not to rush it.

But other people have different ideas of what reasonable is, or are less aware of what they’re saying when there are children around. We know parents who curse around their kids like they’re at a bar. Worse, since some bars would kick you out for that kind of talk. And some people aren’t parents, or are parents of older children and no longer watch what they say at all, if they ever did. I had to bring my son to a meeting last summer with a couple of colleagues, one of whom managed to say ‘fuck’ three times. Each time, she was like, “oops, sorry.” Fortunately, my son, then five, was absorbed with his coloring or was wearing headphones and watching a DVD. My sister-in-law blurted out ’shit’ once or twice in front of my son. “What did she say?” he asked.

“A bad word you don’t need to know.” I think dessert was being served, so he didn’t argue and ate some cake.

Then, as I said, a few weeks ago he came home and asked, “Daddy, what does ‘shit’ mean?” Obviously, you can’t shield kids from curse words forever. Nor is that even desirable. I like to curse when I think it’s called for. Like, right now: Fuck. Didn’t that feel good? So it isn’t that I freaked out that he’d heard ‘shit’ or wanted to know what it meant. Of course he’d heard it, and would be hearing a lot more than that now that he was going to elementary school and taking a school bus with kids as old as ten or eleven. It wasn’t difficult to answer him. “That’s a bad word for poop. We don’t use that word. It isn’t nice.”

That was all he needed to know. My son is a really good kid. He didn’t want to live in ignorance. If other kids knew the word, he should know it, too. But he wasn’t going to say it, because he wasn’t supposed to. And though I don’t know what kids say among themselves, I believe he hasn’t said it since.

“Daddy,” he asked, right after I explained what ‘shit’ means, “What other bad words are there?” He wanted a list, with definitions. I admired his intellectual curiosity, but I wasn’t going to stand there listing every curse word, like some George Carlin bit. I told him there are bad words that we, his parents, did not think he needed to know, and that was that. Not exactly, since he got very upset and pleaded and then demanded to know the words. He promised, “I won’t say them. I just want to know what they are.” I believed him. I really did. That’s the kind of kid he is. But I figured he would learn them soon enough. No need to rush things. So I let him be upset for a while. He got over it and moved on to playing with his toys.

A couple of days ago he came home from school with a different kind of question: “Daddy, what does ‘gay’ mean?” I was checking my e-mail and pretended not to hear and I changed the subject, asked him how his day was or something. That didn’t throw him. “Daddy, what does ‘gay’ mean?”

Now, of course, ‘gay’ is not a bad word, even though some use it as one. It has no relation to ‘shit.’ I only include these very different words in the same post because in both cases I was unprepared for the question, and both are cases of my son hearing a word at school and coming to me for an answer. I want my son to be able to come to me for answers and to trust those answers. And I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea and think that ‘gay’ is a bad word.

At first, just to buy time, I said about the lamest thing I could say: “Well, ‘gay’ used to mean ‘happy.’” That bought me all of four seconds.

“What does it mean now?” he asked.

It was my big Heather-Has-Two-Mommies moment. We happen to have gay friends and relatives who are parents, so answering wasn’t difficult. I wanted my son to know what he needed to know, but there was no reason to go beyond that and get into the issue of sexuality. He almost sort of asked a few weeks ago how babies get into mommies’ bellies — he said that he knew the daddy must be involved because the child takes after the mommy and the daddy. But he didn’t press it, was mostly just thinking aloud. We’ll have to have that talk eventually. As for what ‘gay’ means, I wanted to answer him on his level and with what he knows.

“Well,” I said, “You know how our friend Nicolas doesn’t have a daddy and mommy but has two daddies? When a family has two daddies, the daddies are ‘gay.’ It just means that instead of a mommy and a daddy, there are two daddies. Or two mommies. Not everyone is the same.”

“Oh,” he said. “Daniel doesn’t know what it means.”

“Who’s Daniel?”

“Daniel from my class. He said ‘gay’ means ‘yucky.’”

“You’re right,” I told him. “Daniel doesn’t know what it means. We don’t think our friends are yucky, so we wouldn’t use the word that way.”

That was all he wanted to know, and he went to go play, happy that he knew something that punk Daniel didn’t.

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