“Oh, suck,” my 5-year-old said when he found out that my husband and I were going out for dinner.

I glared at him and opened my mouth to begin my lecture. But I was beaten to the punch.

“Josh,” my 7-year-old said with authority, “you’re not even saying it right. It’s ‘that sucks.’ Not ‘oh, suck.'” Thanks for the brotherly clarification.

“Using language such as ‘that sucks’ shows that your English language skills are so weak that you can’t even properly express yourself,” I explained.

They looked at me blankly.

As experienced parents have probably figured out by now, my sons have recently become friendly with boys that have older brothers and sisters. But I’m not the only one noticing an increase of inappropriate language.

“You wouldn’t believe what some of these kids say at school,” a teacher at Grace Church School said. “I think because this generation of parents is older, they try harder to appear younger to their children. They condone or even sometimes use inappropriate language themselves as a way of making their children think they’re cool. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.”

A retired public school teacher thinks that children’s language today reflects popular culture. “Try watching any movie, listening to some of those rap songs, even turning on the television,” he said. “There is cursing everywhere. The mainstream networks have to stay pretty clean, but MTV is littered with vulgar language and so are so many other cable channels.”

According to the Parents Television Council, American children watch four hours of television a day on average. Forty-four percent of children say they watch something different when they’re alone than when they’re with their parents – and 25% choose MTV.

“Parents of young children are taught to ignore their children’s outbursts, because the attention foul language receives just reinforces the behavior,” an Upper East Side psychologist said. “But no one tells those same parents in 10 years that repeated foul language is grounds for punishment. Charge your kids a quarter or $1 each time they swear. Take something they want away from them. Do something. So many parents just keep ignoring the language.”

One school administrator complained that his hands are tied because of parents’ apathy. “I’ve had conversations with several sets of parents, and they almost all uniformly asked me why I didn’t have something bigger to worry about. I explained to them why I felt the inappropriate language was a problem, and basically they just told me that with drugs and alcohol, academic pressure, and pressure to get into a good college, if I didn’t have bigger problems to worry about, they certainly did.”

A parent of two teenagers says she sees such apathy in the parents of her children’s friends. “I’m known as the strict one because I won’t allow any cursing in our house. The other kids say their parents don’t care. And when I’ve raised the issue with them, they say that there are only so many battles you can pick with your teenagers. I don’t really view this as a battle. I didn’t curse around my parents when I was a teenager. I don’t know anyone who did. Why should my children curse around me?”

It is hard to know when to make an issue of inappropriate language and when to ignore it. It’s clear that a toddler’s outburst should be ignored and a 17-year-old telling you to “f*** off” should be addressed. While it seemed unthinkable for most of us to curse to our own parents, after just a few hours in front of Cartoon Network, our own children might feel differently.

In a Scrabble match last week, my 7-year-old put down the F word. The F was hooked on below an I. The K was on a triple letter score. Twenty-eight points, he announced triumphantly.

“Do you mean funk?” I asked. “Because that word is not acceptable.” I was trying not to overreact.

“Look it up,” he said. “I wanna see if it’s in there,” he said knowingly, with an impish smile on his face. We play Scrabble with an open dictionary and at this point in the game we had already looked up several words that he was convinced would be in the dictionary: blano, jal, filin, quacko.

“It makes no difference to me if that word is in the dictionary,” I said with a slight edge in my voice. “It is not an acceptable word.”

“Okay,” he said begrudgingly. “Funk. Twenty-six points is still pretty good.”

sarasberman@aol.com