Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. My name has no common nicknames, buy my brother’s does. Once he got to be ten or eleven, he didn’t want to be called Vinnie any more since, to quote him, “I’m not a damn gangster.” I adapted, and call him Vynce (which is how he spells it), but our aunts and uncles still call him Vinnie most of the time, and our parent do on occasion too. He grins and bears it, because really, what good would it do to tell Uncle Joey off now?
My older brother doesn’t like the ‘official’ form of his name, either. I tried it once, as in, “Wholename, will you do me a favor?” He responded with, “Sure, if you don’t call me that again.”
I think the name change worked pretty well for both brothers partly because the ‘grownup’ versions of their names were common and the ‘y’ ending ones were less so for adults.
I thought the whole point of a nickname, even if it’s a short verison of your given name, is people call you that. It’s not a “I DEMAND TO BE CALLED…” type of system. At least I hope it’s not.
Add this to the ever growing reasons why I don’t want children
I think I was at least 10 before I figured out my dad’s name wasn’t ‘Scott’. Wasn’t anything resembling it, either. He picked up the name in the AirForce and voila…nobody except his mother has EVER called him anything but. Which is good, as ‘Leighton’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
In other words, if she sticks with it, it’ll stick, and nobody except her family will probably remember that it was anything else. 
Edit to add: I’ve dated Michaels and Mikes. Each was insistent that they weren’t the other. Same with Davids and Daves, for that matter. Hrm.
Whatever you do, don’t get huffy and angry and overly defensive with peers and teachers. I speak from experience.
I’m a grown man who still gets called “Tony,” on a nearly weekly basis, and educators who supposedly have some sensitivities with a child’s name butchered that ROUTINELY. I hope things work out better for your daughter than they did for me.
Heh I’ve been lucky in that due to my unusual nicknames people almost always ask me what I prefer to go by. Whereas I don’t really even notice consciously what anyone calls me.
My friend in high school preferred to be called by his given name Matthew rather than Matt. He politely corrected people. Most people eventually took the hint.
My parents named me “Jennifer” and I DESPISED it. To me it sounds like fingernails scraping down a blackboard when I’m called that. I think I began the change in Grade 2 (age 7) - introducing myself as “Jenny”, signing things “Jenny”, people just called me “Jenny” from then on. Every first day of school the teacher would call out “Jennifer” and I’d politely say “It’s Jenny” and they’d correct it on the attendance and that would be it. Eventually the only things that said “Jennifer” were my Birth Certificate, Passport and Health Card. I finally changed my name legally to Jenny in 2009 when I got together with my now-husband because we travel and I wanted all my ID to say the same name.
Changing my birth name was actually pretty simple.
Grandparents can be tough. My cousin’s name is Alisa, not Alyssa like Milano, it’s pronounced Uh-Lisa which always seemed like a strange choice to me but I digress.
My grandmother hated the name and spent well over a decade calling the kid Beau. She just pulled a name out of her ass and couldn’t be convinced to call the kid anything else.
I find this thread very amusing. I go by ‘Dee’ which is the first letter of my given name. In a work context, I use my full name. However, the idea that I could get my immediate family to change what they call me is a bit foreign.
My mother calls me ‘Diddles’
My sister calls me ‘Nerd’ or ‘Luigi’
My dad calls me ‘Bean’
All are terms of endearment (yes, even Nerd) . I tried at one point to get them to stop but it was fruitless. Now that I am older, I actually appreciate them (again, even Nerd).
I changed my name. My family still calls me by my old name, which can be a diminutive of my new name. I’m trying to teach the great-grandsons to call me by my name. The one can’t really talk yet, the other doesn’t pronounce either name correctly yet (but he’s four, so…) I don’t think my family will ever call me by my own name. I wonder if I got married, they would change (I changed my first, middle, and last name, and kept my parents name as a second middle name).
How do you think Alyssa Milano pronounces it?
Isn’t it “Uh-lissa”?
A lot of it will fall on her. Fang, my oldest, is a Nicholas. He does not like “Nick.” When people call him Nick, he will tell them that he prefers “Nicholas.”
My father, a Robert, wishes he had done that, since he’s now doomed to the dreaded “Bob,” which he hates.
There have been several male-line last name changes in my family. In fact, along the male line there have been at least three last names used since the mid-1800’s, with at least one male ancestor adopting a different last name in adulthood but then going back to the old name before he died, and he was buried under the old name. That was a lot easier to do back then - there is no known name change order either way. His son (also my ancestor) has at least one record under both names as well but the son eventually picked dad’s birth name too to die under. It’s not actually that complex in real life but it does complicate things a little.
I spent a large amount of my childhood fighting against this. My first name is Daniel and it seemed like half the people I met wanted to call me Dan (an exaggeration, but as a kid, it seemed to come all the time). Now that I’m in my 20s, I’m much more laid back about it. I still introduce myself as Daniel, but if somebody takes it upon themselves to shorten it to Dan, I don’t really mind. I can’t stand being called Danny, though.
Huh? You don’t want children because some people prefer to be called by different versions of their given name? I bet you know at least one “Dave” or “Mike” or “Chris” who would be at least mildly annoyed if people started calling them by their “real” name all the time. It’s different from a nickname, and while I know there are some in this thread suggesting she corrects people until it takes, nobody is advocating that she be a jerk about it. While I fully respect your not wanting kids, I can’t fathom what this has to do with your nondesire to parent?
It’s great that you are willing to let your daughter “pick” her name, at least what she wants to be called. I have never liked my first name, because I’ve always been called by the one-syllable nickname, which I hate the sound of. If your name is 3 or more syllables, a lot of people assume you “must” go by the “standard” nickname, and if you say you don’t like it, they interpret it as “putting on airs” or something like that. There is no 2-syllable nickname for my first name, or at least almost no one uses it because it sounds ridiculous. But personally, I think 1-syllable nicknames do not sound pretty or feminine - after all, most men’s nicknames are 1-syllable (Mike, Tom, Sam, Dan, Bill, Bob, etc.). Pat’s an exception, but it’s unisex, and doesn’t sound as pretty and feminine as “Patty”.
It took me decades to find an alternative that I liked (someone suggested adding the diminutive “-ie” to my middle name, and it sounds feminine and pretty to me, so I adopted it). It took at least another decade to get my family to use it on a regular basis (and some old school “friends” still refuse to even try). Although, my Dad has on occasion been heard to mumble “or whatever you’re calling yourself these days…”
Anyway, the other issue is that everything “official” is in my first name, so I get called by that nickname I hate all the time by strangers. I’m seriously considering getting it legally changed, but I’d have to go through fingerprinting, background check, etc. (at my own expense) in addition to the filing fee, which someone told me was $10 a letter for the new name!
I hope your daughter has no difficulty getting people to honor her request. It sounds like she shouldn’t, since she has your support AND since it’s a version of her “full” first name. Names are important; they’ve been shown over and over again to affect how we see ourselves AND how others see us. Best wishes to her!
What Elret said, Alyssa = Uh-Lis-uh. My cousin, Alisa, is Uh-Lee-Suh.
Also, me Tarzan, you Jane. Grunt grunt.
If I gave birth to something and it told me that the name I picked out for him/her wasn’t good enough, I’d well… Not take it as good as you are. It’s this type of nonsense that honestly makes me think ‘they still make those?’ when I see babies. Like I said, it’s not my only reason but it just confirms having kids is not for me.
Your name is your name. I think adults have the right to want to change it legally, but a pushy kid, and your kid sounds kinda pushy, insisting on a babyish nickname is just obnoxious. It also sounds to me, she’s jealous her brother has a nickname and she doesn’t, or didn’t I guess at this point. I think you’re giving into entilted behavior.
But back to nicknames, I think it’s one thing to not one and correct people if nicknames annoy you. I think there’s something “off” and socially awkward about demanding to have a nickname.
Heh, I also dislike the name Jennifer based on the stupid 70’s song I think. But I like Genny/Jenny so we name our lovely child Genevieve (it went well with our last name too). We mainly called her Genny or Gen. The most annoying thing was adults who hear heard her called Gen or Genny and assumed her “real” name was Jennifer. I can’t count the number of times I heard adults scolding her “Jennifer, Jennifer, I’m talking to you!” It didn’t help that her best friend was named Jennifer.
Now she is Gen or Genny to friends and family and most officiously Genevieve in her professional life.