Well, why not say Mom and Dad in a stranger adoption of an infant? You’re becoming the child’s legal and emotional parent, you don’t have any other familial relationship that’s being supplanted by your role as parent, and the child has no previous emotional bonds to other parental figures that might make it upsetting to them to call you Mom or Dad. So why tapdance around making the kid feel conspicuous as a flagpole by avoiding the standard terms for one’s parents? Where is the benefit to the child or the parent? And if it makes it harder for someone who doesn’t want to be around “illegitimate” children or those who have had contact with them to exercise their beliefs–why should the family in question give a shit about those people?
Now, adopting kids old enough to remember their bio parents is a whole different kettle of fish, namewise. I’ve never seen kids in that situation go straight to Mom and Dad right off the bat, both because it stirs up thorny emotional issues about “replacing” their birth parents and because the older you are the longer it takes to form that sort of bond. And I have never seen people who adopted kids who were old enough to talk who ever once pushed the issue of what the kid called them.
How names are handled in adopting children related to you seems to mostly hinge on how old the child is at the time of adoption. I have a handful of friends who were brought home from the hospital by their grandparents or other relatives, and every one of them calls the relatives who raised them Mom and Dad or some variation thereof. And that makes sense, because at that point it’s very much like adopting an unrelated infant–assuming a legal and emotional role as parent, no previous familial bonds to supplant, etc.
People who are adopted by family at an age where they remember their birth parents, however, rarely call their adoptive parents Mom and Dad ime. There are the reasons unrelated adoptees have about “replacing” their birth parents, and adding to that there’s an existing family relationship that feels like it’s being replaced too. I mean, if my brother and sil were to die tomorrow and I wound up adopting my niece she would probably never call me and DoctorJ Mom and Dad, and it would never occur to me to ask her to. She already has a Mommy and Daddy who she’s deeply bonded to and would be missing badly enough without feeling like we’re trying to replace them, and besides, we’re all used to her calling us Aunt CrazyCat and Uncle Doc. I would think she would follow the pattern most people in such situations have ime, telling people she lives with (or when she’s grown, was raised by) her aunt and uncle.
So I’m quite frankly not getting what the OP is on about–most the arguments made by the “wise woman” don’t fit at all with what I’ve actually seen in the real world.
The other thing I’d like to point out is that names like Mom, Dad, Grandma, etc., are often considered very differently than names that are also biological designations like Mother, Father, Grandmother, etc. They’re seen as totally describing emotional bonds rather than having anything to do with biology and as such are as elastic as the notion of family itself. A great deal of the time these names overlap with biological relationships, yes, but in a lot of families they don’t for various reasons. It’s just the way the world works.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just more comfortable with fluid definitions of family relationships than a lot of people are because of my family history–my grandfather was widowed twice and each time married a woman who already had kids from a previous marriage, and all the kids from all those marriages are my aunts and uncles with absolutely no qualifiers. Dad was also partly raised by relatives of his first stepmother, because she was a psychotic bitch. (He called her Mommy once when he was about 4, and she slapped him across the face and told him she was NOT his mother.) I sometimes explain the exact history to third parties to clarify family politics, but those times are few and far between.
