agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Carolyn: My partner and I are expecting our first child in a few months. We are on the same page about most of the big aspects of child rearing but have a couple of minor disagreements. One that’s not so minor is about what the child will call us.

My partner calls his parents by their first names, which was a decision made decades ago in the spirit of egalitarianism. I call my parents Mom and Dad. I understand the philosophy that went into my in-laws’ choice, but I don’t especially agree with it and don’t really want to continue that custom. This seems like an area where it won’t work for each of us to do it our own way, i.e., calling us “Mom and Ben” (seems more confusing than anything else). So what do we do?

— "Mom and Ben”

"Mom and Ben”: I actually like Mom and Ben. Why not? Seems to me that if “confusing” is an issue, then we’re all living in the wrong millennium.

Plus, like so many of these parental things you decide in advance, reality will come in with its vote, which has a way of wiping out certainties that you can only hope someday to laugh about. Reality’s changes are often upgrades, too, because they’re collaborative in ways that preconceived notions can never be.

Not to say you’re wrong to talk about it — that part’s good, especially if this is the tip of a major-philosophical-disagreementberg. In fact, the more I think about it, the more urgent it feels that authoritative-you and laid-back Ben work out a general approach for when your parenting styles clash.

Just understand that any parenting plans you make ahead of time are more like an opening gambit with life than a last word. And kids can roll happily along with parents of different styles, but not when the parents themselves can't.

Readers’ thoughts:

· Our oldest insisted on calling me “Ben” for the first four years of his life, including saying things like, “my Ben told me to come home now,” etc. My wife hated this, but she did not interfere. By 5, he decided to call me “Dad.” You may think you’re deciding this, but like many other things in life, your kids are the ones who make the decisions.

· When my niece and nephew were in elementary school, they tried to call me by my first name, no “Aunt.” I quietly told them they were the only people in the world who could call me “Aunt [Name],” and that gave them special powers. They were momentarily stunned and resumed calling me Aunt [Name]. Now in their 30s and parents themselves, they still call me that.

· If your real (underlying) concern is what strangers will think when they hear your child call you Mom and Ben, please dig into that, because that’s worth questioning the importance of that in relation to your husband’s preference to be called by his name.

· We always referred to ourselves as Mom and Dad, but, for whatever reason, our toddler child started calling us “Mommy Maria” and “Daddy Captain” after watching “The Sound of Music” and then transitioned to our names at some point, “Joe and Jane,” for a couple years, and then switched to “Mom and Dad.” It was weird for me to be “Mom” after all those years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2023/06/24/carolyn-hax-expectant-parents-name/

Threaded | Flat

Well, this is relatively easy to handle. Let each parent do their own thing, and stop overthinking it. In fact, "stop overthinking it" is really good advice to all new parents. In 15 years, you'll look back at everything you were really concerned about, and realize you hardly care about any of it.

The comments, predictably, have many people asserting that if you let your kids call you by the first name that means that they don't really respect you, or that you're more interested in being the friend than the parent, and all sorts of similar bits of garbage. None of this is true, of course. Literally none of it.

As soon as the kid is old enough to notice and copy what other kids do, they will probably start calling Ben "dad" anyway.

This kind of reminds me of the beginning of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where among the various litany of sins ascribed to Eustace and his family -- such ~horrid~ things like "vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open." and Eustace liking non-fiction -- one was "He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother,” but Harold and Alberta."

I'd been amused by this letter, because my parents were "Mom" and "Pete" (and still are, it's just my father has been dead for 30+ years of that.)

My father was a very formal sort of human in basically every other circumstance but when I was tiny, my much older brother and sister (who were in late high school at that point) started calling him Pete to tease him. I got away with it, as pet of the family, and then it stuck.

(I actually don't know what my siblings called him when they were little, now I think about it. It just never came up.)

I occasionally had to pause and explain, and it amused my friends who met him, because he was other wise Very Formal (and it definitely amused the college students and grad students who watched me do that.) But he loved it, and I loved it, and he was clear about who else he'd accept it from.

(And my mom has a fine line in raising an eyebrow and quelling bad behavior with almost no words, but Pete had her beat hands down in terms of respect and knocking off what I was doing when that was needed.)

Just understand that any parenting plans you make ahead of time are more like an opening gambit with life than a last word. And kids can roll happily along with parents of different styles, but not when the parents themselves can't.

Word.

My friends worried a lot about whether they were going to be Mom and Mama or Mama and Mommy or Mama Name1 and Mama Name2 and then their kid came along and made up an entirely new word for mother previously unknown in any human language and calls them both that, with first names to distinguish when she needs to.

And it's awesome actually.