My Daughter Caught Me. I'm Glad She Did

What happened when my 8-year-old reported my own behaviour back to me in front of everyone

Okay, so for the last decade, I’ve been using a word (here and there) that I didn’t really quite understand myself, and I didn’t use it in like anger or anything, just casually.

You know, it’s like when people say things like, damn it, like, shit, I spilled my coffee. You’re like, oh, come on, man, really? When someone cuts them off in traffic.

For me, it was a Jamaican word called bumbaclut. And over the last few months I was using it A LOT.

I picked it up at work back when I worked at a car rental company, and I never looked it up. To me it sounded kind of funny and you could say it in a way like oomph - kind of like “the F***” but not the same amount of horror from others.

Then someone told me it was bad.

So I googled it.

Oh.

But by that point, my eight-year-old had already downloaded, installed, and had it on her hard drive.

Kids are like sponges, man.

They literally will take in everything.

And us as parents, especially as dads, they really pay attention to that.

So, Ramadan dinner at my family friend’s house. Food was great. The conversation was fantastic. It was like the kind of night where you reminisce with old buddies, and we’re just chilling talking about games.

Now, all the guys were in the basement, and because I’m the only one with kids, they came to the basement with me.

My oldest comes downstairs with this stuffed octopus, and she was told that they can play downstairs.

So you have the four of us friends and you’ve got my kids running around, yelling, doing what kids do, you know.

Then they decided to play a game with the octopus.

They chose monkey in the middle.

Now this octopus is flying here and there.

My oldest reaches it and grabs it just a second before my son does.

My son, unfortunately, clearly didn’t win, goes back to the middle, begrudgingly.

My oldest stands over him, and she’s full on beaming and her lungs are full, and all you hear is…

“BUMBACLUT!”

And the room goes silent.

And all the guys are wearing the exact same expression, you know, that like quiet, polite, like, oh shit, it’s about to be real.

And they’re all looking at me like, how are you gonna do this? And waiting for me to respond.

And I sat there for about a half a second.

I thought to myself, oh shit.

“Baby, we’re not gonna use that word, okay? It’s not a good word”.

Now she looked at me and said, she’s calm, but she’s half smiling.

“But Baba, you use that word all the time”.

There it is.

“Like, you know when someone’s being silly or when you’re upset”.

Now, to be fair, she wasn’t being defiant and she wasn’t testing me. She was just reporting what happened, like a small little news reporter who spent the last three months looking at how I act and feel and how I dealt with my emotions.

And now she did it all in front of my friends.

“Yes, I know. And baby, now I’m saying that we’re not gonna use that word, okay? It’s not a nice thing to say”.

And then came the question, the one that every parent has to eventually face.

You know, the one that you can actually sidestep or you meet.

“Well Baba, what does it mean?”

Now the easy answer is because I said so.

You see, I grew up with that answer and I get it. Sometimes it’s the right call, but like, I also remember what it did to my curiosity as a kid. And to be frank, it didn’t kill it.

If anything, it just sent me underground and I’d go Google it anyways. I’d find out whether it’s through other kids or the internet. I’d piece it together and I’d find out a less careful way than should have been.

And I didn’t wanna give her that.

“Baby, Baba just found out recently that it’s not a nice word to call anyone. And you know what? We’re gonna stop saying it, both of us”.

“In fact, all of us. Going forward, it’s gonna be one of those words where if you say it, there are gonna be consequences”.

And I paused.

“Including for Baba”.

And she looked at me.

“So Baba, if you say the word, you’re gonna do the up and down like 10 times, 20 times?”.

She’s talking about the stairs. See, we have this thing at home, when someone gets super overwhelmed, losing it, spinning out of control, we walk up and down the stairs.

Sometimes it’s 10, sometimes it’s 20, but it’s physical movement to interrupt the emotional spiral that is happening. And it honestly started as a reset for the kids, but somewhere along the way, I started doing it too, and they noticed.

“Yes, Jaani. If anybody in this family says that word, they will do the stairs. 10 times, 20 times. Okay?”

Now she looks at me at the moment. And not the type where she’s looking like, oh, well, maybe I should get out of this.

It’s the other one. That’s when she’s trying to figure out if she needs to decide if she’s gonna trust it or not.

“Okay, Baba”.

“Thank you, Meri Jaan (my love)”.

And that’s the moment.

It wasn’t the yelling. There was no confrontation. No clever parenting move or hack you know?

Just two words spoken quietly by an eight-year-old who decided to take me at my word. Just like the words she took before.

Okay, Baba.

And honestly, I didn’t handle this perfectly, but I’ve been using this word for months without thinking. Like, this whole thing was my fault, but something shifted in that exchange, you know?

And one of those friends named it right after that conversation. And he said

“You know what I respect? That you said you’d have the consequence too. Because growing up it was always like one-sided, like, you took the time to explain at a level for her to understand, and then you held yourself to that same rule”.

And that’s it. That’s exactly it. You see, she accepted the boundary not because I pulled rank on her, because I was older than her or because I said so.

She accepted it because the rule applied to me too. And the consequence I’d be held to was one she already knew, the one we built together, and the one that already existed in our house before that night. So it wasn’t invented to control her, it was just extended to include her and me.

Kids feel it immediately.

Now, I’m not writing this as someone who’s figured out parenting, I really don’t. I still catch myself mid-pattern making repairs in public and hoping my kids remember the repair more than the mess, right?

Sometimes that steady hand of gentle parenting, it feels, hella shaky, but for now, here’s what I keep coming back to.

Rules that only go one way, they feel like control. But if the rule flows both ways, then it feels like a family thing.

Baba doesn’t have to always be right, okay? She needs to see me when I’m wrong. And then she needs to see me do something about it, not some sort of speech, not a lesson, just the thing itself.

You gotta be accountable in front of your kid. You gotta model it loudly in front of everybody.

So the moment I said, “you know, including for Baba”, I stopped being the authority in the room, and I became the same level as her and that rule applied to me. And then it settled.

OK, Baba.

And that’s the win.

Small, loud, and it was completely mine.

Y’all ever have a moment like this when your kid mirrored exactly what you do and the reflection wasn’t the best thing?

Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to hear how you navigated it.

— Shahmeran