Like, if you have two dads, but need the attention of one specifically, do you say “Dad Jeff!” to get Jeff’s attention or “Dad Carl!” to get the other one’s attention?
Or if you have two moms, and you’re talking to a third person about one of them, do you say “Mom Kate…” and “Mom Beth…”
I have heard some kids have different names for each - for instance, one would be “dad” and the other would be “poppa” (papa?) - or one would be “mom” and the other “mama”.
It’s handled by each family individually. I suspect the most common, and the method I will probably take if I ever have kids, is to use two different forms: Ma and mom or dad and daddy.
My friends are “Mummy Name” and “Mummy Name”. But the kid can’t talk yet and he may end up naming them himself. My kids call their grandparents “Granny and Grampa” as we taught them but my elder niece called them NitNit and Papa and it stuck and passed to the younger niece too.
In all the families I’ve seen personally, the kid just says dad or mom, and if the wrong one responds it’s like, “No, the other one!” But mostly it works.
Guess we know which one is responsible for going to the kid in times of trouble, mm?
And, yeah, even straight couples have lots of different options (Mom and Dad, Mother and Father, Mamma and Papa, Mom and Pop, Ma and Pa, Ma and Da, Mommy and Daddy, etc), so there’s plenty of options to draw from even before appending the parents’ first names, or borrowing from another language (another possibility I’ve never seen personally, but have heard of).
I’ll be fine with whatever my child wants to call me and my (hopefully one day) husband. Dad is my personal favorite (it’s what I call my father). But if my child wants to call me Drew, I’m cool with that too :D, haha. Uh oh. Does that make me a hippy?
Well, that’s what I and my younger brother did to distinguish between my grandparents; so I’m sure that at least one gay/lesbian family has come up with the same solution.
One that I’ve heard that I’m not particularly fond of, but don’t have any kind of dog in the fight so I just kept my mouth shut, is that in the town where I grew up, kids with two moms have taken to calling bio-mom some form of traditional “mom,” “mommy,” etc., and their other mom, auntie.