Why Do Children Feel The Need to Look Bad to Fit in?

 

Few days back, my ten-year-old daughter showed me a WhatsApp group of her friends. Its name: ‘Badies’. I smiled and then paused. These are the same girls who greet every teacher in the corridor, who touch elders’ feet at festivals and who wish the neighbours every now and then. Why would such sincere children want to be called ‘Badies’?

18 and more years in classroom, and I have learnt that children rarely mean what the dictionary means.

I don’t remember the name, but first time I came across the word ‘NERD’ in a film. The ‘Nerdy’ character: the one with the big spectacles, the studious boy who spends more time in the library, who doesn’t waste his time, but who is good for nothing but books. He is the butt of every joke. That one character taught a whole generation that being sincere is boring. Today, I see the same lesson in a new dress. To be ‘bad’ is to be cool, and ‘Badie’ is not a confession, it is a badge.

Walk in our corridors and you will hear it. The F-word and the S-word come out as easily as ‘okay’ and ‘bro’. They are not abuses any more; they are just commas and full stops. And the child who speaks clean, proper English, without a single swear word: teachers respect him, but somehow he is not a part of the gang. A bad persona, it seems, has become the entry pass.

Pune saw this in public this year. During Ganeshotsav, Vidyanand Bapat spoke against DJs and loud sound systems in pure, standardised Marathi, with beautiful Sanskrit quotes. The media was impressed. Even the Chief Minister joked that he would need tuition to speak like him. And then? Within days, social media turned his language into memes and AI videos of him dancing on the same DJ beats he was opposing. Nobody discussed his argument; everybody laughed at his vocabulary.

But language has always travelled like this. Take the ‘backhand’. On a tennis court it is a shot played across the body, and we clap when a champion plays it well. The word left the court. A ‘backhanded comment’ became a remark that comes from the side, and a ‘backhanded compliment’, praise with a hidden sting. Nobody passed a rule for this; people used it, and it stayed.

So, should we panic? I don’t think so. But we must pay attention. Every generation takes the language and makes it its own. ‘Bad’ once meant bad; in my college days it meant brilliant; today ‘Badie’ means bold, confident, one of us. The words are not the problem. The problem starts when the price of belonging is giving up good language.

As teachers and parents, our job is not to police every new word. Our job is to make sure no child feels ashamed of speaking well. And to remind our little ‘Badies’ that being kind and sincere, the way they already are, is the coolest thing of all.