Using the correct names for your children's body parts

We all love to teach our children to talk. Teaching them a new word can be fun. I know someone out there is probably thinking to themselves, "True, but it depends on the word." Your right, it's just not the word, but how you teach it to the child.

My parents could not say the word to me for penis.  My father, whenever he  had to say the word...wait, come to think of it , he never said the word. He would just roll his eyes and give me that look like I knew what he meant.  Needless to say, I could never figure out what he was looking at. My mother would try to ease the situation for him by using the word, wiener. Like that made anything better for me.  At that point I went around thinking that my father carried a pack of hot dogs in his pants. I felt sorry for him because I knew that must be cold for him, but maybe it felt good in the summer time.

My mother taught me the word for breasts as boobies. That worked for me until I saw that there was a flock of birds that lived on Lord Howle  Island off the northern coast of New South Wales. Great. My father walked around with a pack of wieners in his pants and my mother had a flock of Boobies under her blouse.

When I had children I knew that I was not going to warp my children's minds with the same words that I had been taught by my parents. I made it a point to teach them the proper words for all their body parts.  Both of my children took to the words very well. At least I thought they did.  My son could be very  verbal in school. A nicer way of saying that he  was disruptive in the classroom with his incessant  talking.  One day I get a call from the teacher asking for an emergency conference  after school.  With my son,  I never knew what I was going in for, but I knew that this wasn't good.

The teacher had a very serious look on her face. She first praised me for teaching my son the proper name for his penis, but could I please ask him not to yell it out in the classroom or to interject it into a song. It seems as if in music class that day, my son was learning the song, "This Old Man". For those of you that are familiar with the song, let me get to the punch line here. The line in the song that went, ..."he played knickie-knack on his thumb". Well, you can guess where my son interjected the word penis.

It was so hard for me to keep a straight face. I was very upset with my son for throwing the word around the way he was. I knew though that it was my fault for teaching him the word. Not that the word was wrong, but that I had forgotten to remind him that even though it was just a word, it was one of those words that you do not yell out in public or use in a song. It's a word that is only used at home or with a medical professional.

I still had the problem of trying to change the word without reverting back to the slang terms. My husband came up with the solution. His mother was from Kyoto, Japan. He remembers that the word for penis in japanese was "chimpo".  We told our son that he was never to yell that word out  in the classroom or use in in a song or sentence with his friends, but if he did he was to use the word chimpo instead. Luckily, there were no children of asian or japanese descent in his classroom. He still was a disruptive talker that year, but I was never called into the school to talk over what my son was saying.

DCMerkle