Humper Humper

On the way home from school yesterday my son told a dirty joke that he heard at school. He did say that there was S-E-X in the joke, and I wondered if I should tell him it wasn't appropriate, or listen to find out what he was learning at school.

A boy named Humper, he began, and I had a feeling I knew where this one was going. And a girl, he continued, were talking, and Humper asked the girl if she would kiss him. No, she said. Will you do it for a cookie, Humper asked, my son, using a crazy voice to ask the question, clearly imitating the original joke teller. Yes, she say.

Later, they are at the pool, and Humper asks the girl if she wants to take of all her clothes and go swimming with him. No she says. Will you do it for a cookie, Humper asks, again my son laughing as he says this line in the same crazy voice. Yes, she says.

Humper takes it to the next level. Do you want to go into the van and sex, he asks, my son clearly not having a strong level of sexual diction. No, she answers. In the same silly voice, he says, Will you do it for a cookie. Yes she answers. He is laughing now. He loves the cookie line, told in the special voice.

He is very vague on the last line of the joke, probably because he doesn't understand it, when his mother is yelling Humper Humper.

As I am writing this, I wonder what kind of jokes we told in fourth grade. I clearly remember the racist jokes that peppered eighth and ninth grade, The space shuttle jokes from seventh grade, and I am speculating more than remembering, that in fourth grade we probably heard and told a lot of polack jokes. Probably equally racist to the jokes we leanred in eighth and ninth grade, but different, too, because even though they poked fun at an entire country's people, they weren't mean-spirited, and we didn't see too many polish people walking the street. You could have substituted any nationality for polack and gotten the same laugh, which wasn't the case with the black jokes from late elementary and early high school.

When he finished the joke I told him I thought it was inappropriate, and I didn't want to hear him repeating it. I might have different concerns if he didn't know what sex was, but Veev gave him the talk two or three years ago, so he isn't learning new things out there.

As a parent, you want to shelter and protect your kids, and my first thought was to forbid him from telling dirty jokes. But even more important than sheltering and protecting them from information, you want your kids to learn how to handle things that they learn and hear. I can't control who his friends are or who he talks to or a good many things in his life. But I can try to teach him how to process the things he hears. There are going to be many things he learns that will make me cringe and feel uncomfortable.

I know the day will come when he does an innocent search on the Internet in a place that doesn't have the same protections we have at our house, and everything we try to hide from him will be right there on the screen in front of him. My challenge, as his parent, is to teach him when that pops up on screen, or in the school yard, or anywhere else that he happens to be, how he needs to behave.