We'll Skip the Flashcards for This Lesson, Thanks

My daughter's speech therapy spun out in a whole new direction this week: Her therapist is teaching her dirty words.

That's the kind of thing I bet we'd never get written into her IEP. But oddly and uncomfortably enough, it's what she needs right now. I didn't know it at the time, but it's the kind of thing I had in mind when we withdrew her from school speech and set out on our own to get private therapy on whatever terms we chose, without school interference.

My girl's articulation isn't perfect, but it's understandable. Her academic language is good enough that she made the honor roll this year. But social speech? Oh my gosh. Social speech is an endless land mine of misunderstandings and heartache. She doesn't get body language and tone of voice and figures of speech and sarcasm and slang. She doesn't understand why people don't just say what they mean, and she generally, wrongly, assumes that they do.

Social speech is the focus of her speech therapy right now, and for better or worse, creative words for sexual body parts and activities are a big part of social speech for adolescents. Not knowing those words -- and not having the natural radar for what words you probably don't want to admit you don't know in public -- puts a teen at risk for teasing, and maybe worse.

This summer, my daughter's been working at a day camp run by a church. Nice safe place, you'd think. But every day, she'd come home with stories about the counselors teasing her and playing pranks, and always it would include a question of "Mom, what does this word mean? And why don't I know it?" I won't tell you what any of the "this word"s were, because there are some Google searches I don't want to be a part of. Suffice it to say that after four weeks, my hair's a little grayer.

How do kids learn this stuff? I've had the sex talk with my kids, but not the sex-talk talk. I've shielded them from music and movies with obscene banter, at least in part because I don't want them using that language. But I'm starting to realize that when they hear it, they need to know what it means. And whatever social osmosis conveys that information to average kids without language impairments, it's not working with my girl, along with so much else.

She's got to be taught, and her speech therapist, God bless her, offered to do that after hearing the camp stories. It makes for a heck of an interesting vocabulary list, I'll tell you. And I'm not looking forward to my job of reinforcing those lessons at home. Maybe I'll just have her sit with me through episodes of John from Cincinnati -- I think she'd hear just about everything there.

Has your child had trouble with lack of understanding of obscene speech? How have you handled that?