Wa ‘alaikum Salaam,

 

I am glad she is 6 and not 16 – I got scared when I misread your question! Ok, I am with your friends, nip it in the bud. However, how is the very serious and hard to answer question. When one of my client’s daughters was 5 years old, the child came in the house from playing outside and used the “f” cuss word. The mother asked her where she had heard that word and found out. The mother educated her right then and there about the real meaning of that word, i.e., she taught her 5 year old about marital relations/sex – to teach her about the beauty of the life-giving process and why she should not corrupt that word in that way.

 

Now, I am not sure that that is how I would have solved that problem….but the mother made one good point about why she did that: if my child is going to hear it anyway, I want her to hear it from me in its clean and right context, not from others who are strangers to her and who us it in an ugly and wrong way – from friends (or whatever you call those playmates). So, that radical solution is at the one end of the spectrum of possible ways in which you could address this issue.

 

A less radical way would be a partial lesson on privacy versus public life, i.e., how our bodies, including our lips, are for our private world, not our public world. Then, there is the complete other end of the spectrum, which may be appropriate for your child – tell her not to do it, that it is not what we, i.e., Muslims do, even though the non-Muslims who we live around do it. If your child is very sensitive to not displeasing you, this may be all you need to do to “nip it in the bud”.

 

Beyond this, you can use your own imagination to find out where on the continuum between spilling all the beans and only a few of them you and your husband fall in terms of the education of your six year old. My contribution is small – find what you are comfortable with in terms of how much information you are willing to share. I tend to err on the side of too much info. Others err on the side of too little… May Allah Guide you to the balance that is “right” for you and your little girl. Bottom line, you do need to say something….I hope this helps, inShaAllah.

 

And May Allah Make it easy for you, inShaAllah