Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hi, welcome back. I’ve got Dr. Rebecca Hershberg. Dr. Emily Upshur. You guys ready for a listener question?

Dr. Rebecca (00:51):

Absolutely.

Dr. Emily (00:51):

Let’s do it.

Dr. Sarah (00:53):

Okay. So this is written in by the mom of a 7-year-old. She says, hi. I am a huge fan of the podcast and hoping you might do an episode answering my question. I have a 7-year-old son who loves rap music. He knows he’s supposed to tell Alexa to play the radio edit version of songs, but that doesn’t always happen. I know he’s heard the N word in some of these songs. I’m not sure if he picked up on it or not, and I don’t want to call his attention to it, but I’m also afraid he’s going to use it at school or out in public without knowing what it means if we don’t address it with him first. I’ve talked to him about swear words, but the n word feels different. And as a white family, I’ve just been avoiding it all together. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to handle this.

Dr. Rebecca (01:37):

Such a good question. I mean, we went through this fairly recently, so I can jump in unless someone else is itching.

Dr. Sarah (01:44):

Yeah, no, I would love to hear what you went through.

Dr. Rebecca (01:52):

So the first thing that happened, so my kids are now nine and 11, but a few years ago one of them had heard about the N word, not the actual word, but had heard the phrase, “the N word” from someone at school and came home and was like, what is the N word? And so we started to explain what it was in the sense of the N word stands for a word that’s a slur. We explained what it was, but they were like, but no, but what’s the actual word? And we ended up telling them what it was. And it’s interesting because I actually think it sort of dovetails with the understanding of how you handle curses and swear words in your family. Because for us, those are actually not that big a deal. And so we were able to speak with very serious facial expressions and tones around this word and other racial or ethnic slurs and just say they are a big deal. They are 100% not okay. They are bullying based on skin color or where your family is from. There’s never a circumstance in which it’s okay. Do you know what I mean? And that’s just not at all.

Dr. Sarah (03:04):

It’s very different than how you might because I too am like my kids. I have felt strongly. We’ve done episodes on swearing before. I have a strong opinion on helping my kids understand context and appropriateness and making good choices and understanding at our house. I swear a lot, you’re going to hear it, you’re going to do it. I don’t have a problem with it. And I need you to understand that if you say these things at school, it’s a big problem. Also the difference between how you use a word. So if you use a swear word as an exclamation, like oh, FI stub my toe, versus saying it at someone to hurt them, those are distinctions that I make and I’m really clear. You could say, oh F, but you can’t say f you. And those are different things. And so I like that there’s this whole other category and helping a kid who might have these more nuanced permission to use certain words really understand. There’s another category which is harmful slurs that are never acceptable in any situation. You’ll never hear them in our home and…

Dr. Rebecca (04:14):

But let me be clear, what never acceptable for us to say. And we also at the time talked about how there was other slurs about Jewish people that would be about us. Anyway, that was a couple years ago and I think they really heard it. And even though they’re both in their different ways, kind of provocative kids, neither of them have ever messed with that. They just heard that very clearly. Then enter Kendrick Lamar and they love Kendrick Lamar and they both love to sing or rap or whatever it is to wrap along. And that ended up with, so that was sort of part two of the conversation of this is a word that’s often used. And again, Emily, you can speak to this as someone in the black community, we just spoke of the black community, this is a word that’s used in some ways to take back this word, to have power for this word that’s been so damaging.

(05:09):

Whatever it is, we don’t use it. He does. And when you’re singing, this was my husband’s idea, my husband just on the fly was like, just say nugget. Just say nugget. If you think about it rhythmically, you need a word there if you’re actually singing all the words. And so now in the back of the car, if they are singing Kendrick Lamar, even if we’re the only ones there, that is the word that they use, I’ve never heard them sing Kendrick Lamar in public. If they did, my hope would be that they would use the word nugget. It’s about the word. I don’t know that that’s the right thing, the wrong thing. But those two conversations are the ones that jump out in thinking about the approach that we used with our kids and families.

Dr. Emily (05:54):

I think the thing you’re speaking to Rebecca is actually an overarching more important thing than exactly the words you use, which is essentially not avoiding the topic and using intentionality. And whether that’s based on your family values, it’s going to be different and individualistic for each family. But I think really approaching it with curiosity, trying to have your child understand if they know what they’re saying. We talk a lot in our family about if you don’t know what a term is, it’s probably not good to use it. We talk a lot about those things. But I did want to circle back to one other thing. I think my kids are older and we’re not a low swear household. And so one thing though that I think is really difficult for kids, even ones that are good at sort of that code switching, knowing not to say things at school or that type of thing, is it really is a mindful practice If you’re not practicing positive language, if you’re casually saying a lot of bad language or exposed to a lot of bad, it just becomes a little bit of the milieu.

Dr. Sarah (07:03):

You get desensitized to it.

Dr. Emily (07:06):

Yeah. And so I think in my house, that’s how my approach was when my kids were a little bit littler, but now that my kids are a little bit older, I’m actually a little bit more intentional of not having that be something that they sort of get used to as much so that it doesn’t have as much.

Dr. Sarah (07:21):

Interesting. So you swo more when your kids were little and less when your kids are older basically.

Dr. Emily (07:24):

I shouldn’t do it less, but I’m trying. I guess that’s my point.

Dr. Sarah (07:27):

But I think I get what you’re saying. I actually think you’re onto something. I just think it’s counterintuitive. I think a lot of people would think the opposite.

Dr. Emily (07:35):

I think what I like about Rebecca’s point and revisiting it and having these conversations is that it changes. And as a family of color, my son’s relationship with the word has had a lot of complexity as his own emotional experience. So does he feel empowered? Does he feel provocative? Does he feel entitled? There’s a lot to it, but it still has a lot about me speaking to him about what it means and what it means to him and what it means in the world and what it means to different people. And those different environments are really moving targets based on your child’s age and developmental stage.

Dr. Rebecca (08:13):

That’s what I was going to say, that the person in the question is seven, if I’m remembering correctly. And that was around the age that we had number one of our conversations, which was less sophisticated than that. It still kind of got at the big points, but in a very different way based on developmental stage.

Dr. Emily (08:32):

But what I like about even your first conversation, Rebecca, was not just saying don’t say it. Right. Yeah, no, that’s super critical to me. I think even younger kids should be presented, I believe with a little bit of the reasoning behind that so that they can sort of hang on to that a little bit more than, I’m also not supposed to touch my poop. I want to elevate this into a way that they can contextualize it.

Dr. Rebecca (09:03):

And they could tell how serious it was. And I understand this mom’s point as a white mother in a white family, when my kid came home asking about the N word, all I wanted to do was be like, eh, don’t worry about it right now. We’ll deal with it when you’re older. And to be fair, I can’t promise that we dealt with it in that immediate moment, but we certainly didn’t avoid it because that’s sort of my general parenting mantra. And so even in the moments that are hard and uncomfortable and also naming that piece, this is kind of a tough conversation to have never actually yet. This is the first of these conversations where now we had certainly spoken about let’s say racism before. I think it’s another argument for why having some of those conversations just naturally as kids grow up, make these other conversations easier because you’ve already laid the groundwork.

(10:02):

But it was interesting and it was interesting how much they wanted to know the actual word, which gets at the other thing I’m always talking to parents about. And then it is just a word only has as much power as you give it. And that word, the N word doesn’t belong to our community. So it’s not sort of up to us to sort of play with that one. But something like the F word, one of the first things my kids said were like, why is that a bad word? But doc and luck and mock and talk. And it’s like, you are a hundred percent right. This is why language is so fascinating and is all about meaning and history, and those are really complicated points for little kids to know. But it’s also okay to point out sometimes the arbitrariness of the actual kind of phonetic part of it.

Dr. Sarah (10:54):

And I think sometimes though that could get really, that’s a really complex nuanced thing of how certain words in the history of language take on certain power and certain meaning. And if your kids can follow you there, fantastic. But I also think you didn’t just go to that intellectual place. You made it really very clear and concrete too. This is what this word means. This is why it’s a problem for you to use it. And I just want to be unequivocally clear. It’s just no in our family in any context that’s pretty simple and concrete so that even a very young kid can follow that. Of course your kids and if you want to go deeper and they can follow you go as deep you want. You also said something else that I think is worth not glancing over and coming back to, which is that you were like, I might not have had this conversation in the moment that it was presented to me.

(12:03):

I actually think that’s almost better. Even I think a lot of times as parents, we really, we feel a lot of pressure to have the right answer in the moment, but there is so much utility to saying that is a really important thing. Let me think about how I want to answer that for you and I will get back to you on this. And then really just that way you can actually go listen to this episode or do some of your own processing and think about it so you can actually have a really coherent answer for them. I think we do not have to always parent on the fly. Sometimes that’s just not we have permission to say great question or if they’re not asking the question, but we see it as an issue to be noted, I need to think about this and come up with a response.

Dr. Emily (12:51):

Or something we always talk about is how can you circle back on a calm connected moment. So if you’ve heard them listening to that song and you could circle back hours later and say, Hey, how we were playing music earlier? And you can talk about it in that context when it’s not reactive.

Dr. Sarah (13:11):

And I think this mom brings up a very fair worry point that I think we sort of a little bit addressed, but I think I’d like to highlight and underline a bit more and get your guys’ take on it, which is that this worry that I don’t know if he’s picked up on it or not, and so I’m afraid to call attention to it unnecessarily. And I’m curious what your guys’ take on that predicament or that perceived predicament is.

Dr. Rebecca (13:39):

I think that comes up again and again in parenting and all the research in all the areas shows that you’re better off naming the thing rather than unintentionally sending the message that the thing cannot be named. It comes up in research about suicide, it comes up in research about sex. Obviously these are for when kids way older, but there’s always the same rationale of, I don’t want to mention it because I don’t want to draw attention to it if my child hasn’t already thought of it. And there’s no data suggesting that if you mention sex at age 11, your kid’s going to run out and do it. And so to me, this is in this category of you as the parent are in charge of having the hard conversations. I understand the instinct, especially if you’ve got a kid where if you’re like, don’t touch this, they’re immediately running to touch it.

(14:37):

But that’s where I think tone is so important because you can draw attention to something and bring it up in a really different way as we talked about with this. And so my feeling on this is whenever you’re sort of as a parent like, oh, I don’t know quite how to deal with this, so I’m just not going to do it. I don’t want to draw attention to it. Usually I would never say a hundred percent, but usually to me, no matter what the content of that is, the answer is usually like, no, we got to name it. We got to say it. We got to bring it into the room. The other thing I wanted to say about the question too is when she said he knows to listen to the radio edits, that’s temporary to the extent it’s happening at all, and that’s a lot of responsibility to put on a kid too.

(15:29):

So in some ways you’re better off saying, let’s listen to the not radio edits and let me tell you what these things mean, or let me tell you why I don’t want, there is one again, we’ve let our kids listen to music that have curse words in it. We’ve let our kids listen to music that have the N word in it when we talk about it. There was a particular song that was like, it’s very easy also not to listen to lyrics. As parents, you just sort of are doing your thing. But I was in the car and I suddenly paid attention to the lyrics of a particular song and it was so demeaning to women, and that was one that I said, I don’t want to listen to this, but I didn’t say, again, knowing my own kids and knowing how these things were, I didn’t say, and you are never ever allowed to listen to it either. I said, here’s why I don’t want to listen to it. Here’s why it’s not really in keeping with our family. Here’s why. And then I didn’t say, I mean, if they want to listen to it kind of on their own time, I tend to feel like I’m better off not forbidding that. But the content of the song was way more concerning to me than the particular words being used, which is why context is so important.

Dr. Emily (16:46):

And I think you bring up a good point, which is the research doesn’t support it. But also the thing I ask myself is do I want to talk to my kid about this or do I want their seven year-old buddy to talk to ’em about it? Who is the better source of information here? And even if I mess it up, or even if it’s not perfect, I know that I’ve thought about it, that I’m a fully developed grownup. I think if we don’t…

Dr. Sarah (17:14):

You know your own family’s values, you can articulate them much better.

Dr. Emily (17:17):

And if you don’t, you’re sort of relying or trusting or gambling, rolling the dice if someone else is going to address it in a way that feels or not address it in a way. So I think it’s like you’re better to just name a spade of spade and confront it. I think it’s especially about these types of things that if it’s a really hot button item for you, hopefully something like this is, then you really should be not avoiding it.

Dr. Sarah (17:46):

And I have one other thought about what we were saying, Rebecca, that felt kind of important, which was that we talked, like you were saying, I have kids that are a little provocative. They’re the kinds of kids that if you don’t touch the red button, they’re going to touch the red button. And this is a bit of a generalization, but I do think this might be pretty common, especially for those kids that are a bit like pushing of boundaries, especially when it comes to authority and being told what to do and what not to do, making that be a little more tempting for them. I think when you invite a child into a conversation and help them understand the why versus starting with the no, even if you start with the no and then explain the why, that can activate a little bit of defiance because it just touches the part of them that doesn’t like to be controlled.

(18:38):

And so if you have a kid, especially a kid who’s a little vulnerable to becoming provocative or challenging boundaries for the sake of challenging boundaries, which to me says something about they’re trying to figure out their relationship to their own power and when they have it and when they don’t, and it’s sensitive topic for them. But starting with the why, because you were saying Rebecca, tone matters. But I think tone and timing matter and looking for an opportunity to have this conversation when you are in a really unequal footing connected place where you’re not going to activate power struggles of any kind, even really subtle ones, me telling you you’re not allowed to do something, whether it’s totally legitimate boundary for me to set can activate a power struggle. And so I think starting with that connection and that why, oh, we’re connecting. We’re having good time.

(19:36):

Maybe we’re even listening to some of this music together, and I say, this part right here, what do you know about this? Or How does this make you feel? Do you have any questions about this, first of all? And then if the kid is like, I have no idea what you’re talking about, then you say, oh, let me explain a little bit about what this word means and where it comes from and how it’s been used before to hurt people. And you’re activating the part of them that cares, not the part of them that wants to not be controlled. And all kids have these parts, right? All kids have parts of them that don’t want to be controlled, and all kids have parts of them that care. It’s like, which one are you inviting to the conversation? And so if you’re really thinking about, especially for the kids that are a bit of a red button pusher, right? Don’t push the red button. They got to push the red button. I think starting with the why in a connected way, really helping invite them to be a participant in the conversation and be critical figures rather than it being framed as a, this is bad, don’t do it. Now, let me explain why. I just think it’s an approach for these more sensitive kids that might be a helpful place to start if you’re worried like, oh, if I bring this up, they’re going to do it more.

Dr. Emily (20:50):

I also think one thing I can’t, what you said reminded me of that I just don’t want to get away from is it’s also okay if your kid makes a mistake. I feel like there’s such a cancel culture. We’re really punitive. And so kids are hesitant to, the best thing your kid can do is make a mistake and come and tell you about it. I think I just want to encourage, and there’s so much shame with some of these, especially if it doesn’t align with your family values, and you yourself as a parent feel so sensitive about that and really don’t want that to represent to your family. I just want to say it’s also okay to say, okay, what was that about? I’m not just going to cancel you. What happened? What were you feeling in that moment? And it just sort of invite more opening of the conversation than going back to that, not inviting that why, right? And before you go to no, even after sort of an error or a mistake or an impulsive moment or trying to fit in or there’s so much nuance to that. That I just want to be mindful of.

Dr. Rebecca (21:54):

Yeah, that’s a great point, Emily.

Dr. Sarah (21:57):

Yeah. Well, this was helpful also. Now as we’re talking about this, I’m remembering too, I did an interview, actually, Rebecca, she’s a friend of yours, but Dr. Dana Crawford came on the show and did a really helpful episode around bias and talking about race and racism. And so I just want to orient people to that episode two. It was episode 180 2, so that would be a good episode to go back and listen to just to get even more depth into these kinds of questions. It was a really good episode, so thank you, Rebecca, for putting me in touch with her.

Dr. Rebecca (22:31):

Yeah, well, no, it’s funny. I’ve been thinking about Dana this whole time because she talks about with her kids, and she’s black with the N word in particular. She’s just like, I’d need them to hear it from me first. The risk is that they hear it from someone who’s trying to break their heart, and I’m always going to hold their heart gently. And again, this is what, I don’t have to experience that with the N word as a black mother of black kids. But there’s other things where, again, if there are things out there that will hurt your kids in ways that are just too big to fathom, always better for you to be the one to share that information.

Dr. Sarah (23:11):

It creates a shield. It does. I got children said that too. I like, oof. Yeah. Well, thank you both of you. I love your wisdom.

Dr. Rebecca (23:24):

Pleasure as always. What a good question.

Dr. Sarah (23:28):

Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.