Spelling things out
There are certain things that seem so connected with parenting in our collective conscious that they become cliche. They're so over-worked in sit-coms and stand-up routines and movies in which parents inexplicably let Vin Diesel babysit their children that they seem unreal, a tv trope rather than a reality. One of these, for me at least, is parents spelling things out so their kids don't know what they're talking about. The classic, of course, is the elaborate and raised eye-brow accompanied spelling out of 'sex'. This is usually followed by the tv child not only understanding what the parents are talking about but also displaying a humorously abundant knowledge of the subject. Laugh track, go to commercial. TV parenting rather than reality.
Except, of course, it isn't. Now, I've never had the need to spell out 'sex' in front of my children. I like to think of myself being as red-blooded, beer drinking, pie eating, car-wheel kicking, blokie-bloke man's man as the next manly man (well...as manly as the next manly man with a semi-humorous blog mostly about parenting, I guess). And I don't shy away from talking about sex if the need arises but I've never found myself in a situation where I'm surrounded by children and yet somehow the need to discuss sex is so pressing that I'm forced to spell out the word, rather than wait for the children to smash and burn their way off into another room. But perhaps that's just because I'm middle class and repressed.
What I do find myself spelling out are words that I know are going to start chain reactions. Words that, due to their innate hilarity or connection to desirable things, are going to cause more trouble for me than they are worth actually saying. Saying the word 'bum', for example would cause such a spectacular bum-storm...Spectacular bum-storm...Where do I know that phrase from? Buggrit, I'm going to have to Google it, now. Ah, of course, Spectacular Bum Storm won best and fairest in the 1994 German Adult Movie Industry Awards (GAMIA) joining other such seminal works as Das Tits and Nice Frankfurt. Anyway. Saying a word like 'bum' would have it echoed back to you in greater and greater gales of hilarity for a number of hours. As the madness mounted you'd forget the reason for human speech let alone the reason why you mentioned the word in the first place. So you spell it out.
Codes can be useful too but only for a short period of time. Rather than have our children explode from the pressure of just the idea of a couple of McDonalds chips, my wife and I referred to it as "the Scottish restaurant". Coz it's got Mc at the front, see? Scottish...Whatever. Anyway, it took our kids about two days to bust that particular enigma and even less for "the place with the big yellow letter" and "the clown shop". So now we just refer to it as "McDon...NO YOU CANNOT HAVE CHIPS!". Parenting: You have to be adaptable.
