Actress Tori Spelling, who is expecting her second child in June, believes that swearing in front of children is fine as long as it is done correctly. Apparently, it's all about the tone of your voice. Angry and loud F-bombs are bad, sweet little baby-talk F bombs are okay.

"I'm kind of a little girl potty mouth because I say it with such vulnerability. I don't have to censor myself in front of my son, it's not that bad."

I am not following Tori's logic here. I think the main reason most parents don't swear in front of their children is because they don't want them learning and repeating those words. If you say an offensive word in a cute way, isn't the child more likely to repeat it? Or maybe Tori's one of those parents who think cursing kids are cute?

She was nearly four-years-old and my daughter was ready to blow. She was furious at me for hurrying her out the door when clearly she didn't want to be hurried. She was sitting at the top of the stairs, face pinched in fury, while I stood at the front door with my coat and shoes on waiting for her. She shouted at me, "You're....you're...." I braced myself, ready to be called a name for the first time by my firstborn child, then finally she exploded with rage:

"You're.....READY TO GO!"

My kids, thus far, don't swear. I'm surprised, because --though we try to keep things G-rated -- sometimes those kinds of words slip out. But it's perfectly normal for young children to pick up swear words and even to use them, often in the most embarrassing way possible.

When young children swear, it's usually just a language learning issue. They have no concept of a "bad" word -- why would words be bad? Later, say experts, peers influence kids far more than parents, and even if you've never spoken a bad word out loud, they may still come home swearing. Teens use cursing as a rite of passage, just one more thing to make them feel closer to the adults they are becoming.

Yesterday, it was learning to play the guitar. Today, it's learning a foreign language. It seems there is no end to the educational opportunities available on the internet. Here are ten places to learn to speak a foreign language online, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the BBC, and the Foreign Service Institute.

The languages available aren't limited to one or two popular ones, either. Sure, I could brush up on my very rusty French, or expand my Spanish to more than just "Uno burrito lengua con queso, por favor". I could, however, learn Swahili, Thai, Hebrew, and even Gaelic. The only question is which one to start with?

Whether you want to be able to converse with your kids in the language they're learning in school or they want to supplement what they're getting in class, these are some cool resources for the aspiring polyglot.

I've noticed lately that Ellie has taken a phrase that I say often and made it her own. I actually didn't realize I was beginning many sentences with "I'm guessing" until she started doing it. As in, "I'm guessing you aren't going to let me have ice cream for breakfast." Or, "I'm guessing I can't wear flip-flops to school today."

Fortunately, I don't say what I consider to be 'bad words' in front her. It's not that I never use questionable language - I do. But I must have some internal switch that turns them off when she's around because I can't recall a single time I have slipped and said something I didn't mean to in front her. Well, except that one time when I wrecked my car.

I'm guessing (ha ha) that either Courteney Cox or her husband David Arquette has a faulty internal cuss-word switch. According to sources close to the Dirt star, Cox's three year old daughter Coco has picked up some no-no words and isn't afraid to use them. "She's only 3, but Coco's somehow learned to cuss like a sailor," says the source. "Coco thinks it's funny and goes right on swearing. Courtney's just hoping she'll outgrow it."

She may not outgrow it. Some of us never do. And it won't be all that cute or funny when she starts cussing at her teacher and expanding the vocabulary of her classmates.

Even if you never, ever swear, chances are, your kids will hear the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" soon after they enter school. That, I understand and even expected. What I didn't expect was something that is, in my opinion, far, far worse -- "mine's".

I don't know where they picked it up, but Jared and Sara have gotten into the habit of saying "mine's", as in "that's mine's!". This forces me to channel my mother the English major and correct them. "It's mine, not mine's!" With Jared, I explain that "mine" is intrinsically possessive so there is no need to add the apostrophe-s. For Sara, I just leave it at "it's mine, not mine's."

Jared is much better about it, but I'm still working on Sara. I think it's important to nip these things in the bud before they become ingrained and a permanent part of their speech habits. I'm sure there will be plenty of other grammatical errors forthcoming and I, as a card-carrying member of the grammar police, will be there to stomp them out.

My husband and I have not done a very good job when it comes to helping Ellie learn to be bilingual. Despite the fact that my husband speaks fluent Spanish, most of what Ellie has learned has come from school, not him. He does reinforce what she is taught at school, but teaching a child to speak two languages requires a lot more effort than that.

Evan Longoria and her new husband Tony Parker have even grander plans for language in their home. Longoria tells People that if she and Parker do have children, they want them to be trilingual. As in speaking English, Spanish and French. Longoria is fluent in both English and Spanish while Parker is a native of France and presumably speaks the language.

She spoke of her trilingual goals at a fundraiser for Padres Contra El Cancer (Parents Against Cancer), which took place at the premiere of Go, Diego, Go Live! The Great Jaguar Rescue at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.

Of her own childhood, she says bilingual cartoons characters were hard to come by. "Speedy Gonzales was the [only] bilingual character growing up and all he said was 'Arriba! Arriba!'"

I think it's great she wants her kids to be trilingual. I just don't have a clue how you would do it. We couldn't manage two languages, mostly because I only speak one. How do you teach a kid to speak in three languages?

In a new study, researchers have found that videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series may delay language development in toddlers. For every hour of watching the videos, children learned six to eight fewer words than children who did not watch any videos. The effect was most pronounced with infants eight to sixteen months old, when language skills begin to form.

Findings such as this led to the American Academy of Pediatrics making the recommendation that no child under two watch any television at all. Dr. Dimitri Christakis of the University of Washington who co-led the study noted that "the majority of the videos don't try to promote language; they have rapid scene changes and quick edits, and no appearance of the 'parent-ese' type of speaking that parents use when talking to their babies." Parents, however, incorrectly assume that the videos will improve language skills, but it seems that may not be the case.

Certainly, no television is better than any television, but I have to wonder how these compare to other television, especially shows not intended for small children. How do they stack up, for example, against shows like Spongebob or even MTV or CNN? While my kids watched the Baby Einstein videos and, I feel, benefited from them, my first choice would have been to have them watch no telly at all; given that that was not an option, I think these sorts of videos are the best second choice.

Reader Stephanie wrote to ask about movie ratings, specifically the G rating given to Ratatouille, the latest animated film from Pixar. She writes:

We took our young son to see Ratatouille this weekend. Most of the content was ok, except a scene in the beginning where a woman starts shooting at a colony of rats. She even needs to stop to reload. My son is now obsessed with "shooting." He has turned about four different objects into a gun. I have tried to explain how we do not play guns in our house, but he doesn't seem to understand. I am at a loss for what to do! I want to know how the movie industry can rate a movie featuring guns be rated G?

The movie ratings are assigned by the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) which is a ten to thirteen member board comprised of parents. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which operates the ratings system, "there are no special qualifications for Board membership, except that the members must have a shared parenthood experience, must be possessed of an intelligent maturity, and most of all, have the capacity to put themselves in the role of most American parents so they can view a film and apply a rating that most parents would find suitable and helpful in aiding their decisions about their children and what movies they see."

How extensive is your vocabulary? How about your children's vocabulary? Words paint pictures and just as there are many shades of blue, so too are there many shades of meanings. Big, huge, humongous, enormous, gigantic -- they all mean about the same thing, but each offers a slightly different connotation.

A copious vocabulary gives you the ability to be more precise and more eloquent in your communication with others. It also means you are less likely to be misled or fooled. Consider the case of P.T. Barnum and his American Museum. It was so popular that people did not want to leave, preventing Barnum from selling additional admissions. So he posted a sign that read "This way to the egress." Unfamiliar with the word "egress", customers followed the sign, only to find themselves outside. Egress, of course, is just another word for Exit.

Over at the American Heritage dictionaries, the editors have come up with a list of one hundred words that every high school graduate should know. I must admit, I can only lay claim to fully knowing about two-thirds of them. There are more, of course, that I've heard, but that I can't say for sure that I would be able to use them correctly or accurately.

According to senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "The words we suggest are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language." I think it's high time I brushed off my dictionary and started brushing up on my vocabulary.

Scientist studying babies have learned that even though they can't speak, babies are born with amazing language capabilities. They already knew that very young babies could tell languages apart by sound, but a new study has found that they can also distinguish different languages using visual information only.

Scientists from the University of British Columbia tested five groups of infants from both monolingual English homes and bilingual English-French homes. Researchers showed infants four to eight months old silent video clips of people speaking in French and English. They found that the babies could tell the difference between the two and that even the youngest would pay closer attention when the speaker changed languages.

Although it appears that they are born with this ability, only those living in bilingual homes retain it after about 8 months of age. Researcher Whitney Weikum says this is due to the fact that babies who hear and see only one language don't need this sensitivity to visual differences in language and therefore the ability diminishes.

I had always heard that young children could easily learn a language other than their own, but I had not idea they were born ready to do it. Fascinating!

In my day, there was BASIC -- the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a purportedly easy-to-learn, general purpose programming language. When microcomputers started to become available, it was often included as a way to let new owners -- and their kids -- do something with the computer. Then there was LOGO with its "turtle graphics". Designed for kids, it was meant to teach the basics of programming and was heavily used in schools, thanks in large part to the version distributed by Apple Computer.

While both of those languages are still in use, there's a new kid on the block in the educational programming world. It's called Scratch and was designed at the MIT's Media Lab. One of it's developers, Professor Mitchel Resnick, was also responsible for the Lego Mindstorms robotics toolkit. Speaking of Legos, this new language works much like building with the little bricks. "Kids make programs by snapping blocks together," said Professor Resnick, whose position is in part supported by the toy company.

Each block contains a single command such as "move" or "change colour" which can then be stacked together to create the program. Blocks can only be stacked in ways that make sense, programmatically. Kids "don't have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax common in most programming languages," according to Resnick.

Scratch is available for free for Mac OS X and Windows and a Linux version is coming soon. Kids can also share their work on the Scratch website. This looks like a fun introduction to programming, especially in today's graphics-rich world.

I was looking around online tonight when I saw something that reminded me of childhood. I can't remember how many times I would ask what a certain word meant, only to hear "look it up."

I hated hearing that phrase. Why look it up when you could tell me what it meant right there? Of course, I understand now that part of it is the whole "you'll remember it better if you do it yourself," but that didn't help me at the time.

In fact, I'm pretty darn sure that I only "looked it up" once or twice.

Now that I'm a parent, I'm curious as to how I'll answer this question. Eventually, my child will move past the "what are you doing" questions and onto "what does this mean" questions and well, do I just give her the answer?

For me, one of my worries for parenting is that I'll fall into an old family habit without questioning if that's what I really want to do.

An article on the London Times website today suggested that your baby's babble is straight from the textbook of our universal grammar. According to the author, Anjana Ahuja, she planned on teaching her toddler, now 4, a second language. She discovered that she may be four years too late. According to one linguist, babies are born with the capacity to learn any language, but this plasticity withers as they concentrate on their mother tongue. Charles Yang, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues in a new book that babies are born with the templates for all languages in their brains, and that the underused templates are gradually discarded. According to Yang, "nature proposes, and nurture disposes".

Most intriguing is Yang's observation that seemingly grammatically incorrect baby babble will usually be grammatically correct in another language. Baby babble, he infers, is the infant trying out various templates to see which one "works" (by eliciting claps, hugs and other signs of approval). So a sentence that seems to be a jumble of verbs and nouns when spoken in English, may well be correctly ordered in another language. Yang's theory takes, as its starting point, Noam Chomsky's enduring idea that there is a universal grammar embedded in the infant brain. Yang suggests that mixed-up baby talk is the toddler tossing out different variations of that universal grammar.

That explains everything: we all have brilliant babblers. They are just speaking to you in Chinese or Russian!

I think I'm pretty funny, but my kids seem to be about the only ones who agree with me. They probably just don't yet know any better. Well, there is hope for me, thanks to some computer scientists in Scotland. The scientists didn't actually have me in mind when they started their research, focusing instead on children who need to use computerised speech aids.

The theory is that making it possible for non-speaking children to use puns and other jokes will improve their language and communication skills. According to the BBC article, "the researchers admitted some of the computer-generated puns were terrible, but said the children who had tried the technology loved them." It sounds like it's perfect for me. It also sounds like the software generated its own name: The System to Augment Non-speakers Dialogue Using Puns or, wait for it, "Standup".

The software works by having the children pick a word or compound word to be used in the punchline. The program then builds the joke using phonetically or conceptually similar words and a template. Dr. Annalu Waller, one of the researchers at the University of Dundee, said "Basically, the computer comes up with novel jokes - many of which are terrible." She notes, however, that "Children who are developing on a typical development track actually tell very unfunny jokes, so we have provided that facility for non-speaking children as well."

Humour and other sorts of language play are thought to have a positive impact on a child's developing language and communication skills. It can have other benefits as well, according to Dr. Waller. It seems to have boosted their confidence as well as their language skills, she said. "It gives these kids the ability to control conversations, perhaps for the first time, it gives them the ability to entertain other people. And their self-image improves too." The plan is to have the software can be integrated into computerised-speech aids for children.

Like every other parent on the planet, Rachel and I used to spell things to each other. "Do you think they should get some i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m?" "Do you want to take them to the t-o-y-s-t-o-r-e?" Unfortunately, Jared has gotten pretty good at reading and can now decipher our "coded" messages. This, of course, makes it difficult to discuss things with the kids around that we don't necessarily want them to know about.

When I was younger, my mother and I would converse in French over the phone, especially while I was at work. It gave me a modicum of privacy in an open office as well as allowing me to practice it. In America, French has the dubious advantage of being an uncommon language -- the few people who studied it in school, for the most part, promptly forgot it upon graduation. In my case -- with a mother who spoke French and attending a church where masses were said in French -- it was a good choice for my first foreign language. The rest of the country, however, rightly saw it as being not as valuable as other, more popular languages such as Spanish.

My wife speaks Spanish, a skill that has served her well as a teacher, since many of her students' parents' first language is Spanish. She has plenty of opportunities to practice and expand her Spanish speaking ability. My Spanish is pretty much limited to ordering a lengua burrito con queso. Her knowledge of French is even less than my knowledge of Spanish. So, short of the two of us heading back to school to study Welsh, what options do we have to communicate in such a way that the kids don't know what we're talking about? Surely, we're not the first parents to face this dilemma? How do you talk in front of your kids so that they don't understand?