“Boy Meets World” Stars Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, And Will Friedle Just Had A Fascinating Parenting Debate, And I Need To Know Whose Side Your On

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For reference, the whole thing kicked off when 45-year-old Danielle revealed that her and her husband, Jensen Karp’s, 7-year-old son, Adler, had cursed in front of them for the first time. The two are also mom and dad to 5-year-old Keaton.

Meanwhile, 46-year-old Rider shares 11-year-old Indigo, aka Indy, with his wife, Alex Barreto.

Will, 50, doesn't have children with his wife, Susan Friedle, but Will reflected on how his parents raised him and his siblings in the conversation, where he clashed with Rider.

Kicking off the latest episode of their podcast, Danielle told her longtime friends: “I’ve entered a new era of parenting that Rider will be able to help me with; Adler, for the first time ever, said the F word. He’s 7, he said it as if he’s been saying it his whole life.”

“I think that’s when Indy started saying it,” Rider mused, with him and Will asking Danielle how she’d responded.

“Well, first of all, it was a little embarrassing because it wasn't just with us, we were with other people, including another young person, a child,” she explained, adding that Adler had said: “Oh, fuck,” when he made a mistake. Danielle continued: “We don’t- he’s never heard us say it. I will say it when I think it’s going to get a good laugh, or if I’m really upset about something, but in front of our kids, we do not do it. We’ve never said it, he’s never heard us say it.”

“I swear so much, so Indy just took it up like a pro,” Rider joked in response. “I love it, he’s so good at it. He’s so good at swearing, it’s great. I don't know how you dealt with it, but our whole thing is, like… When we started reacting, when people started reacting, it only [encourages], so then it was just like: ‘You can do this as much as you want around us, because we don't care, we're not going to police your language. But, you know, you can't do it in front of other adults, you can’t do it in front of other kids, can’t do it at school.'”

Will was audibly horrified by this, gasping: “Man, we were raised way differently. We got soap in the mouth — we got a bar of soap.” To which Rider replied: “Oh my god, that’s ridiculous.”

“I was never a swearer; my brother Greg would have Ivory soap in his mouth once a week, at least. Swearing was not tolerated; we were actively discouraged from swearing,” Will went on, with Rider quipping back in response to the soap: “Why not an electric shock? Why not just zap your child?”

He then questioned if the soap worked, considering Will’s brother did it weekly, and Will replied: “I didn’t swear around my parents anymore, I can tell you that!" He then added: "Greg also did it because Greg was a little asshole, and he’s the first one to tell you that."

Recounting what had happened with Adler, Danielle went on: “Jensen and I were both there; Adler was to my right, Jensen was to my left. And he went: ‘Oh, F!’ And we went [gasps], and Jensen and I looked at each other, and then I looked at the other people I was with, and I said: ‘He’s never said that before.’”

“Then you could tell Adler was… He had that nervous energy around him, like: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever done that,’ and I just said: ‘Oh wow, I’ve never heard you say that before,’” she continued, adding that they’d been playing with shaving cream and she advised him to go rinse it off, which he did. Danielle said: “He rinsed off his hands and then came back, but didn't go back to participating with us. Just kind of like, stayed off to the side, and I could tell, honestly, if he wasn't so worried about being in front of other people, he probably would have burst into tears just at the thought that, like, he had done something wrong. He’s a real perfectionist, so knowing he had done something that we were not going to be happy with was already like: ‘Oh man, I really just screwed up,’ so I immediately knew he was beating himself up, and I didn't need to go hard on him.”

“When we left, he got immediately very close to me, and he put his head into my stomach, and he was like: ‘Are you mad at me?’” she shared. “And I said: ‘I’m not mad, I’m a little confused because I don't know where you heard that.’ So I'm just like: ‘Where did you hear it?’ And he was like: ‘I don't want to talk about it,' and I said: ‘OK, we don't have to talk about it right now, but at some point I do want to just have a general idea of… Because your dad and I don't talk like that, and so I'm just kind of curious,’ we also don't really let him watch things where they talk like that.”

“When we got home, he ended up saying: ‘OK, I'm ready to talk about it now,’ and he said: ‘I learned it at school,’” Danielle explained. “He plays soccer every lunch with the fifth graders, and they're running around and kicking balls, and yeah.”

Sharing how she dealt with the situation, Danielle told her cohosts: “It wasn't that I said: ‘You just can't say this,’ what I did tell him is, we had just mentioned that somebody else, something that we thought that they had done, that it was tacky. And he was like: ‘What's tacky?’ and so I had just explained to him what my definition of the word ‘tacky’ was, and I said there are some people who will be bothered by you saying that word. And so, it is tacky to think that whatever you want to do at any point in time is totally fine, no matter what the circumstances are; that is tacky. To not think about other people in situations.”

“So that was kind of the perfect situation, where I was like: ‘It is not that the word is so bad, or that you are bad for saying it, or any of that, but there is a time and a place for everything, and you were in a situation with people you had just met, and one of them was another kid, and you had no reason to think that it was an acceptable place to blurt that word,’” Danielle concluded. “And so that was the conversation. For me, it’s recognizing other people have different thoughts and feelings, and you have to take those into consideration as part of being a good member of society.”

“Indy went through a phase when he was really interested in swearing, we just kind of let it peter out,” Rider added elsewhere in the conversation, with he and Will also clashing again when Rider made the case: “I'd say if you police it too much, it becomes more powerful, you know?”

Will countered: “I guess it's also a generational thing; when we were kids, we were just… You were told not to swear. You didn't have the idea of, like… I don't think I had a single one of my friends in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, that were like: ‘Yeah, my parents let me swear,’ it was bad language, you just didn’t. You didn't swear.”

“You also didn't call any of your [friends’] parents by their first name?” Rider asked, and Will was equally horrified by this concept. He said: “It was always Mr., Mrs., or Dr., or Attorney, or whatever. That's how we were, and that was everybody; that wasn’t, like, a thing with my parents. That was everybody.”

While Rider is incredibly lax about swearing, he did say that he is determined that his son will not have his own cellphone until he is 16, with kids his age currently keeping in touch through Apple Watches instead. He shared: “They all got Apple Watches as, like, the gateway drug to the phone. And now, at 11, his friends are starting… I’m holding out ’til 16. I know I'm going to cave, but I'm fighting as much as I can. I'm not gonna cave until my wife threatens to leave me, basically… Until he's driving, until he’s literally on his own somewhere [he doesn’t need a phone].”

Well then! What are your thoughts on young kids swearing? Let me know in the comments below!

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