Parents in Australia are apparently fired up over the language Gordon Ramsay uses in his show Kitchen Nightmares, which airs twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays on Channel 9. For those who aren’t familiar with Mr. Ramsay, he is a very successful and talented chef who happens to drop a lot of F-bombs; I believe one show tallied up approximately 80 according to some group interested in counting those types of things. It seems some children are picking up some of Mr. Ramsay’s bad linguistic habits after viewing the show or possibly listening in on their parents viewing the show.

Now maybe I came from an old fashioned home, or maybe my parents were somehow superior specimens of child rearing, but if they had an objection to language in a movie or show we were watching they would either turn off the TV, send me out of the room, or tell me they’d best never hear that word from my mouth or hear of that word coming from my mouth unless I had a serious hankering for the taste of soap, and they weren’t joking about the soap; I’ll just add here that my father’s swearing would put Gordon Ramsay’s to shame.  To their credit I was never in trouble at school for swearing, as I was well into adolescence before I uttered my first swear word, and I think I was well into adulthood before they ever actually heard me swear, and still I feared for the soap.

Call me simple, but I can’t understand why the responsibility for censoring what children see and hear falls squarely on everyone but the parents of said children. They seemingly don’t have the self control to turn off offensive programming, but they’re complaining about the example being set for their children by a television personality.  In my view quite a few complainers need to grow a pair and either learn to vote with their thumbs and turn the TV off, or take the time to let their children know that while they’re reliant on their parents for food and a roof over their heads, Ramsay style diatribes won’t be tolerated.

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