A Parent By Any Other Name

I’ve been delighted and fascinated by your great responses to yesterday’s unscientific survey on what our kids call us—so much so, that I’m going to encourage readers again to participate, if you haven’t already. (Please click the link to submit your answers to the spreadsheet; don’t just leave a comment.) So far, we’ve got lots of “Mommy” and “Mama,” but also “Baba,” “Eema,” “Lala,” “Maman,” “MaPa,” “Mutti,” and others.

The whole spreadsheet is here, so you can see how others have responded. Please do not reproduce it or use it for commercial purposes.

13 thoughts on “A Parent By Any Other Name”

  1. Hello! We are two chicks with 1 cute chickadee (girl). She is 2.5 yrs old and she calls us Mommy & Mom Mom!

  2. We’re a 2 mom family with an almost 3 year old boy. He came up with Mimi for me, and my partner is Mommy.

  3. Wow, thanks for putting this together. I was stunned at how few adoptive families there were (3 out of 102)!

  4. This is great! Though I think we as lesbians put too much emphasis on who is the bio versus non-bio mom in general. Why does it matter?

  5. Good question, Lydia–that’s why I made the bio/non-bio indication optional. But I do think that for some couples, it brings up certain concerns and/or challenges (see Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All, ed. Harlyn Aizley, for a collection of good essays on the topic. (I donated an egg to my spouse, so we don’t split down the standard bio/non-bio divide ourselves.)

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  8. OK, I know I’m very late to the party… but then, what drag queen wouldn’t be? Or maybe it’s just the senility kicking in that I didn’t see this post before now. Grandchildren will do that to you, ya know.
    The girls are of Portuguese decent, and I’ve always been “Papi” – the 5 heathens they’ve sprung on me were another story. From the oldest, Mikey (don’t ever call him that, I’m the only one who gets away with it unscathed) 13, to the youngest, Blake – 4, I’m Grama.

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  10. My son was 1 when he met my fiance. He then begin to call her “mom” but refers to me as “mommy”. I think its amazing that he came up with the name himself. Now that he is 4, When other’s tell him go tell Renee (which is her name) he says “No! That’s mom”. We absolutely LOVE it!

  11. I was reading this book about a wolf shifter community, and the dominant parent – whether it be man or female – are called, ‘pater’. I don’t know why, but I kind of like it. So I’m guessing I’ll be mummy, and my future wife will be pater, if she agrees to that :)

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