Son Learning to Insult

Its just natural and of no concern, you did the right thing!! He is speaking with the terms and knowldge he was born with NOTHING more. If you want to raise him with an open mind, you seem to be doing the right thing. You will also find as he starts to learn colors and stuff he will refer to people as "human color" "brown person" and similar annoyances. Rest assured, no one taught him that, he is just limited in his expressions!!

Keep up the good work!! We could use more parents like you in this world!!!

Kids learn these things from us. Even if when we said it we were talking about the smooshed banna on the kitchen floor. That is where he learned the words. The concept is different. Perhaps you could have said that she was not yucky, but different. She was injured and that she might get better.
Either way, your son learned the words and basic concepts from some one he has spent time with. Even if it was just a few hours. Children are very impressionable.

It doesn't sound like your son was insulting, it sounds like your son was bothered by what he saw. At such young ages, shows like that should not be viewed when the child is awake, IMO. I don't think the question should be of where he's learning to say "Ewww, gross" ( Which, I'm sorry, but a woman's face blown off *IS* gross!! ), but why that type of thing was on when he was awake or in the room.

Just my .02

I think that she probably did look yucky so that is why your son said that. He doesn't know any better at this age, so your response was appropriate. However, this does bring up another concern. Sometimes as adults we don't realize that the things we may watch on TV may be inappropriate for little eyes. It's not that there was anything wrong with the show from an adult standpoint, but maybe your son is too young to be seeing shows with disfigured people on them? Talking about being shot and almost killed? It is just a little unpleasant and I don't think I would like to watch something like that with my son in the room. He said what he said because this was above his comprehension. He is still very little. Maybe next time sesame street?

It is most likely that he was not insulting her just stating what appeared obvous to him and this is an opportune time for you to teach him about peopple with injuries and disabilities. To her she must have looked very strange and at his age they pretty much say what they see. If someone is large then they are fat to a 2-4 year old. Use this opportunity to tell him that people look different for different reasons and that all people are beautiful in thier own way.
Good luck.

V.- This is totally normal and he did nothing wrong. He is 2 1/2 and his intentions were NOT to insult. He stated what to him was obvious fact. It IS "yucky" to see something like that no matter how tragic. We all think it, it's just that children don't have that stop sign between their head and their mouths. Expecting a 2 year old to have that much tact, insight, compassion, understanding, cognitive ability and vocabulary to express anything besides what he did... is completly unreasonable at this age. I'm sure he is a very sweet boy and very loving and i'm glad that you want him to be empathic. That dosent happen overnight and it is learned. Keep up the good work and don't worry that theres something wrong with him. I have a son who just turned 3 and the other suggestion I would make is not to let him watch something like that at his age. It can be scary and how do you explain it to him so that he understands?

V., your son is just being honest. "that's yucky" is true. He is not saying the woman is yucky. Her injury and the appearance of her face is yucky. That is all that he said. Even if he did say she was yucky he is too young to distinguish the difference between a person's appearance and their spirit.

Even when he gets older he needs to be able to describe his feelings about people and things. Some people are actually yucky. I think that we need to teach our children the difference between a person's outward appearance and their inside heart. But we cannot do that at 2 1/2. His mind isn't able to grasp abstract ideas. He can't see the inside and so he doesn't understand. But we can start the process by suggesting that even tho she is ugly on the outside she may be beautiful on the inside without fearing that he's not showing respect. He's telling you what he can see and as much as he can understand.

My next question, tho, is do you know that she is beautiful on the inside? Not everyone is. I'm a retired police officer and I can tell you from personal experience that there are yucky and then even more seriously ugly people who appear to be beautiful on the outside. We want our children to know that there are ugly people so that they can protect themselves. But 2 1/2 is too early for him to grasp this complicated truth. In the meantime we don't want to discourage our child's expression of feelings or to teach him not to trust his intuition.

Telling him that although this woman does look yucky but she may also be pretty on the inside is a good idea. But being fearful that he's learning to say that people are ugly or gross is not reasonable. He will accept your attitudes and if you don't feel that people are ugly or gross he won't either. He just stated the truth. That woman's face is yucky. Saying so is not disrespectful. If you could ask her she would say the same.

I also question the advisibility of letting a 2 1/2 yo watch and hear such a story. Someone shot this woman in the face. I think this is too early to learn about the ugliness and fear in the world. He needs to trust that his world is safe and he's secure.

Perhaps he learned it from some other TV show you had on? Kids are sponges and pick stuff up when you think they're not paying attention. If you're letting him watch violence and shows about people being shot in the face, perhaps he's also watching shows where people are rude and cruel. After all, shooting someone is pretty much an extreme of rudeness and cruelty.

Keep in mind that even innocuous-seeming sitcoms are full of rude, mean people saying all kinds of insults to each other. Even some news networks are filled with rude pundits shouting at each other, telling each other to "shut up", and being generally disrespectful. These examples almost never have any kind of reprisals for the bad behaviour, and in some cases it's encouraged or even glorified.

If you have any kind of TV on that's not suitable for kids, you can expect your child to pick up on inappropriate habits.

Also, you need to find out why he said the face was yucky. The fact is, whether it's politically correct to say it or not, humans have an inborn sense of beauty and studies show that it's largely based on symmetry. An asymmetrical face - especially due to injury - is less appealing. As civilized people we learn to not be rude about such things, but admit it...if you were walking down the street and saw someone with a severely injured face, you'd think, "Oh, poor person, that's awful," but you wouldn't think, "How wonderful that that person is empowered and above lookism to be able to go out in public like that." The latter statement is what political correctness would say, but it's nobody's gut reaction.

So the thing to do is to teach your son how to be polite and civil in such cases, not necessarily to deny his observation.

V.-
I have a almost 3 year old son who also says things sometimes that I have no idea where he picked them up...besides other family members, friends and TV. I don't think your son meant to be mean, they're just so stinking honest at this age. I think you did great by changing his viewpoint.

In this case I think it has little to do with your son respecting "differences". A two and a half year-old is merely observant, which is the first step towards accepting a difference in the first place, and something that many of us try to ignore to avoid seeming rude and inappropriate. If I saw someone with half of a face, I would probably be just as disgusted. The problem is not with acknowledging this; the problem is whether or not you allow yourself to see past the physical attributes. In your son's case, he's much too young to be able to distinguish honesty and rudeness, and he's not picking this up from anyone in particular, he just hasn't yet learned to suppress the truth in favor of more socially acceptable "non-truths." The truth doesn't hurt anyone; it's how we deal with it. I doubt that anyone that looking at a person with half of a face would say, "Wow, now that's a beautiful person." This is mostly because people are entended to have an entire face. What you should teach your son is not that he must feel that he has to fake his own emotions to please other people, but that he should feel obligated to give someone who isn't beautiful (on the outside) a chance to express their inner beauty. And why is your son watching shows where a person has lost half of their face through an act of sheer violence? I doubt that the moral gist of this episode was to teach other people about accepting others.