Introduction: What is IYD?
"If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" is a common aphorism in American English that perhaps originated in or was popularized by the 1942 American animated film Bambi. In Bambi, an anthropomorphic rabbit named Thumper emphasizes, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all." Versions of this phrase are popular in the United States, but few trustworthy resources exist online which describe it. As a result, I defer to Wikipedia, which states the expression is known as "Thumper's rule". We refer to what might be called the modern version of Thumper's rule, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all...", as IYD, its first three initials.1
If you already know IYD by heart, feel free to skip to the next section. For those unacquainted, IYD serves as a quick, often curt, way to inform someone that they should be quiet. The recipient of IYD is often a child or other underling, such as a student, who stands low on the social ladder. The applier of IYD, such as a parent, teacher, or policymaker, deems the recipient to have either spoken something "not nice"2 or to have alluded to doing so.
A real-world example of IYD's use is Wiktionary's "Interacting with other users" policy. These policies write: "Try not to make any offensive comments; like the old saying, if you can't say anything nice, please don’t say anything at all." In this example, we see the policy-makers of Wiktionary, who exert authority over individual editors, establishing a IYD-positive policy, referring to IYD as the "old saying". And although IYD can be an open-minded commentary or opinion, it usually functions more like a command: "Don't say anything...", as in "Stop speaking".
IYD's Best Use-Case
To clearly illustrate that IYD is not effective, I will describe the best scenario in which it could be used. If it fails in this best case, then it fails in any worse case as well.
The best case occurs when a parent uses IYD to respond to their own child's concerning remarks. Children are less likely to grasp nuance and theoretically greater beneficiares of easy-to-remember aphorisms like IYD. IYD can serve as a useful heuristic tool in the their toolbox so they avoid hurting others or their own reputation later.
Pretend that you are a parent and that your child speaks one of the following three lines:
- "Old people are ugly."
- "White people act so stupid."
- "I don't like black people."
For a majority of individuals reading this, at least one (or all) of the above phrases is highly offensive to them. Imagine that, as an example, your child loudly proclaimed the first line ("Old people are ugly") while you were at your family's large Thanksgiving get-together. What should you do? Not only did your child just remind your old family members of their lack of youth and demonstrate a lack of empathy for its family, your child's speech also maybe gave your family the impression that you are a bad parent. You might fear that your parents believe that your child's opinions are a reflection of yours.
In the aforementioned scenario, you have two major problems that need to be addressed: your child's development and your reputation. If left unaddressed, you can experience a range of negative social outcomes. Perhaps you have a more awkward holiday meal or lose credibility as a parent. Perhaps your child becomes socially deviant, unaware of how they isolate themselves from others through their use of language; or they receive suspensions at school for misbehavior and have less success in the workplace.
A short and memorable phrase like IYD seems perefect: In seconds you can establish to others that you are not in agreement with your child's remarks, your child presumably heeds the command and ends their inappropriate commentary, and you continue on with your day. After a few more instances of this corrective application of IYD, your child may even learn to stop altogether. This sounds great, and it may seem like you solved the issue, but in reality, you plainly did not. You took a relatively small problem and transformed it into a much larger problem, a problem that damages your child and yourself far more.
The New Problem; Or, Why IYD Still Fails
IYD does not work because IYD does not teach your child to recognize negative social outcomes except insofar as seeing that you (or others like you) will react in a mildly condemnatory way; your child does not actually see cause and effect for themself. They do not experience direct negative reactions or social ramifications. More importantly, they are unlikely to learn nuance.
While it is pleasant to believe your child meditates on the meaning of their words, your child, unless you strive to always inculcate a philosophy of deep critical thinking, adopts simple, heuristic rules. If your child uses simple, heuristic rules, when you use IYD, they do not glean insight about their words' effects. Instead, when you use IYD, they learn: "If I say thoughts my parent finds offensive, then I will be punished, and that's not fun." Your child can listen well to you and can avoid ever saying "Old people are ugly", and yet that does not change their core thought process; without further thought or conversation, they still believe that your parents are ugly.
And because you can not easily differentiate between a child following the rules for rules-following's sake and a child following the rules for true belief in them, you can not answer the following questions for a child who has responded well to IYD and no longer misbehaves:
- Is it thinking bigger-picture about the value (or lack thereof) of empathizing?
- Has it considered the upsides or downsides of being disagreeable?
- Does it wonder or understand what qualifies certain thoughts as unspeakable by society but others speakable?
To understand these complicated, nuanced topics, it requires that you not use short-cut, truistic rules when building a child's judgement; it requires that you have patient, engaged conversation with your child in a non-condescending manner.
IYD is the opposite of this. It is the epitome of a short-cut solution. It forgoes nuance in favor of resolving awkward moments in a pinch and with a bowtie. While you may understand the nuance, if you use IYD, you are not teaching the nuance, and your child is not learning the nuance. In other words, nuance becomes deprioritized, and your child becomes dumbed-down.
Something Even More Insiduous is Also Happening
Having a less prodigious child may seem to be an acceptable tradeoff for resolving awkward moments more quickly. But this true upside if offset further by an even greater downside: If you use IYD, you are also limiting yourself. You are not learning anything about your child; you are remaining as unaware about their thought processes as you ever were before.
Returning to our hypothetical scenario, you would not truly know why your child thinks your older family members are of a distasteful appearance. Is it their aged skin which has succumbed to gravity's toll? Is it that your child fears aging? Is it that your child does not realize that they too will become aged soon? Is your child's recognition of old people being "ugly" actually a poorly worded articulation of some truth that older adults are generally less fertile?
IYD loses you the opportunity to learn more about your child's inner thought processes.
Other Failure Points & The Worst Case
Many readers may have less of an aversion to tolerating the line "Old people are ugly" than something like the following examples. So now that we have been eased into a less offensive example, we can tackle the logically redundant but emotionally novel case of lines two and three and solidify our argument.
Let us entertain that your child uttered in a public setting, "White people act so stupid" or "I don't like black people." You very well may have a, at least temporarily, racist child on your hands. Again, the logic holds: If you choose to reflexively use IYD, you will again fail to impart true wisdom and fail to learn about your child. Did your child say what they said it because they had a negative experience with the few white or few black individuals they have interacted with? Are they over-extrapolating as underdeveloped (and fully developed) humans tend to do? Is it because others in their classes mocked whites or mocked blacks and impressed upon your child that whites or blacks were worse people?
All of these questions are important, and it is on you as a parent to conduct investigative due-diligence. This due-diligence occurs through non-judgemental, curious conversation; that is, conversation which does not end in, "don't say anything at all". If you can avoid using IYD, you invite yourself to learn about your child, and you invite your child to learn more about the world. You even counterintuitively become less judgemental yourself, remain curious, and build skills of persuasian rather than skills in authoritarianism.
The Worst Case
Being that the above section described the best-case scenario, you may wonder what the worst-case scenario is. The worst-case scenario occurs when two or more adults communicate IYD amongst each other, be it in the workplace, the education system, in media, in politics, or otherwise. If IYD fails both the parent and child, how can IYD succeed in an adult-adult scenario? The adults here have had years and years, often decades, to think on their beliefs, and their thought processes are much more complex. How much would they be convinced to change their views after hearing IYD? The answer: Not at all.
What if one criticizes a family member for what are poor life choices such as unchecked gambling? What if one disagrees with their manager's biased treatment of coworkers on the basis of their identity? Should they not be in a position to speak?
If one says "Donald Trump's election is the death knell of democracy," is that unkind to the majority of Americans who voted for him in 2024? Conversely, if one says "Trump's election is positive for society," is that unkind to the seventy-plus millions of Americans who voted for Kamala Harris instead? Millions of Trump's supporters would find the first statement offensive. Millions of Harris's supporters would find the second statement offensive.
Any list of examples as the four above could go on infinitely, because the number of times people have conflicting opinions and should be allowed to communicate their opinions nonetheless is also infinite. As in these four examples, what might be considered not nice from one perspective is very often nice from another perspective. Using IYD sets yourself up to have the IYD-written script turned on you at any point.
Parting Words
This article could be described by some as not nice. And if I said something rude, I hope someone will write me their perspective in a non-condemnatory manner. I maintain that statements that risk being not nice must be said, whether these statements be a less-than-stellar performance review or a political rally which protests against tyranny. To apply IYD to others, particularly developing children and students, is harmful and diminishes curiousity, conversation, and collective learning.
Everywhere in America, IYD plays a role in thought-policing of our society. Rather than use IYD in the event that you are offended by an offensive remark, I encourage you to instead dive deeper, ask questions, and offer your perspective on the matter. If you were never one to use IYD in the first place, then I encourage you to consider contesting its logic the next time you are witness to its use. If we as a society can forget the phrase, we will have a more thoughtful society populated by more thoughtful children, students, and adults.