I've come to realize over the years that if there is a bad habit or bad language anywhere in a one-mile radius of a child, he or she will home in on it, almost as a reflex. A friend of mine recently told me that her 2-year-old sweetly looked at her and said the s-word and then smiled proudly, at which point she realized that she and her husband needed to edit what they say around their child.
Thankfully, curse words are something I've managed to keep out of our house. But my son, who is about to go into fourth grade in a couple of weeks, has certainly heard his fair share of blue words outside in the world. (Once, when he was in first grade, he came home and said, "Mommy, I learned a bad word today. "Puck!")
This morning, my now much-more-worldly 9-year-old put on a mini "play" for me using his hands for puppets. The plot involved two friends, a time machine, and an existential sort of questioning of the meaning of friendship and trust. I'm not kidding.
The script was full of lively banter, and my son explained beforehand that he was going to insert some bleeps -- even though he knows that cursing is bad -- because these two tough guys would just talk that way.
I told him that I was glad that he knew that cursing was bad and I asked him if it was absolutely necessary (he said yes, and that he would only use the bleeps even though he knows the real words because he would never say the real words). He reiterated again the importance of the bleeps for the characters in his play and I said okay.
My son never hears bad language at home (I've managed to avoid cursing in front of my child and can count two times when he heard me drop the "s-bomb" -- once when I fell down the stairs and nearly twisted my ankle and another time when I was talking to a friend and forgot for a second that he was in the room).
But since we don't live in a bubble (far from it -- we live in New York City where you can hardly walk down the street without hearing a curse word), I do what I can to filter what he hears and sees. And I'm really glad that for the time being, he is asking my permission to insert bleeps into his stories and scripts.