My Son the Poo-Poo Head

I'm not sure exactly when my five-year-old's blossoming vocabulary was replaced with an embryonic version of Chris Rock’s stand-up, but the evidence can’t be denied. Visit my house lately and you’d think every word in English were derived from “bum” or “poo.”

If Julian’s sudden fondness for vulgarity is mildly upsetting to me, it’s positively horrifying to his mother. Stephanie is in the unfortunate position of having a doctorate in educational psychology, which in lay terms means she’s way smarter than I am but in this particular context means she’s worried her first-born is going to end up a philistine. I assure her this is just what boys do and that within a few years he’ll hop off the bus ready to discuss the finer points of quantum mechanics.

I’m lying, of course. He might accumulate degrees like bottlecaps, but around his friends he’ll still be a boor. How do I know this? I’m a boy. The dressing-room repartee prior to my weekly hockey games would make Steph think we’ve barely evolved beyond spermatozoa. The smell of the arena alone makes me revert to juvenility faster than you can say “Nice save, dickhead.” We trade insults with the merriment of preschoolers and try to out-degrade one another as a matter of course.

Even knowing this, I still find it troublesome when I greet Julian after school with the words, “Hey, Superchamp!” and he responds, “You’re a poo-poo!”

“Did you have music today?” I ask.

“Daddy’s a poo-poo!” he tells three-year-old Oliver, who naturally worships his older brother.

“You a poo-poo, Daddy!” Oliver shouts.

I squat to hug Julian. “I missed you, buddy.”

“Daddy, do you have to pee-pee because your head is in your bum? HAHAHAHAHA!”

“Daddy has to pee-pee because his head is in his bum!” Oliver says.

“Riiight,” I say, turning to Steph in abject apology for passing on male genes. “You know, mister, I’d like it if you tried to stop saying that. Calling other people names is — ”

“Guess what we had today, poo-poo! Cupcakes!”

I don’t feel I’ve done anything to influence this loutish behaviour, but of course dads encourage immaturity even when we don’t mean to. My mind returns to the moment last month when Julian jumped on me, accidentally kneeing me in the groin, and I cried, “You squared me!” sending him into spasms of laughter and causing Oliver to squeal, “Juju thqwaiwed Daddy!”

Only one thing helps when I’m concerned my children are deviants: reminding myself other children are, too. Under the guise of research I e-mail my friends asking if any of their kids display a penchant for bathroom humour. Within minutes I receive a stream of responses depicting an emergent generation of unbridled gutter-mouths. Stephen tells me his son not only tells potty jokes compulsively but supplements them with elaborate gestures. Adam reports that, every time he asks his boys what they’d like for breakfast, they name some form of human waste. Elan, after inadvertently downloading a profanity-laced version of Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend,” has made his 6-year-old the world’s youngest fan of a word that rhymes with “brothertrucker.”

It isn’t just boys; girls seem to be even more disgusting. Laura’s daughter leaves preschool every day by saying, “Bye-bye, poo-poo!” in response to which her classmates chorus, “BYE-BYE, POO-POO!” like some twisted version of Norm in Cheers. Jen, singing along to Annie, unwittingly tripped her six- and three-year-old daughters’ funny bones with the lyric, “Bet your bottom dollar,” which they now riff on endlessly. Sandra’s two girls, after discovering their baby brother’s male parts, have come to bookend every sentence with “penis” — as in, “Penis, have you seen my doll, Penis?”

Though heartened to learn Julian isn’t the only offender, I’d still like to know where the instinct comes from. I call Penny Pexman, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary who studies the development of humour. “It starts with using the wrong words for things as a way of exploring irony and sarcasm,” she tells me. “In the same way dressing up in different clothes or hanging upside down is funny, this is funny. They’re trying to create as much incongruity as possible, and toilet humour offers the best material.”

That seems to make sense. It even kind of explains why my teammates and I like to joke about having sex with each other’s mothers. But it doesn’t make me feel any better about the fact that, when I hang up, Julian is pressing his head into my rear end and saying to Oliver, “Let’s play poo-poo with daddy’s bum!”

“I have to help mommy make dinner, guys,” I say.

By the end of the day, I’m drained. The boys have scrambled upstairs, no doubt to take turns throwing things in the toilet or mount a puppet show in which one stuffed animal will beat the tar out of another. I head up to summon them for dinner, expecting another scatological barrage.

At the top of the stairs I stop, then retreat. Julian is reading Oliver a Curious George book in his bed, pillows propped around them both. He can’t read all the words yet but knows the plot well enough to construct his own version. Oliver is engrossed.

“The end,” says Julian, closing the book.

Oliver looks up and says, “I love you, Juju,” then throws his arms around Julian’s torso.

“I love you, too!” Julian replies with a giggle. “Do you want to play castle now?”

You know, he might just turn out okay.

Today's Parent 

Back to article listing

I.J. Schecter
43 Park Hill Road
Toronto, ON M6C 3N2
(416) 803-9847

© I.J. Schecter 2003