I’ve referred to my husband as “dad”, “daddy” and “your father” at various times. It all depended on context. But the issue doesn’t come up only with parents- do you have the same problem using “grandma” when talking to your kids about your mother , or “Aunt Jean” when talking about your sister. I ask because if it’s only a spouse thing, maybe the vision of grown men calling their wives “Mother” when speaking to people who are not their children is part of the reason.
To the kids, I call her “Mommy.”
If a little kid around here mentioned his “papa” there are better than 90% odds he’s talking about his grandfather. Maybe he’s run into that too.
I would say “your grandma” or “my mom” or just “mom” for her.
For my sister, I would say just “Jean” or “your aunt Jean.” If I am talking to my kids and refer to “aunt Nedra,” I think they know that it’s MY aunt Nedra.
So I’ve learned from this thread that it’s not uncommon for people to refer to their spouse as “dad” or “mom” when talking to their kids. I guess it’s just an idiom that I wasn’t raised with, so to me it seems weird. I can kinda see, for toddlers, that people may do this because the kid doesn’t think of that person’s name. Once a kid starts kindergarten, though, I think you’re well past the point of when you can expect them to figure out the relationships, like adults do.
I refer to my wife as “mom” or sometimes “your mom” to my kids. I refer to my parents as “grandma and grandpa” to them.
What’s odd to me is adults calling their parents mommy and daddy. I’ve encountered it once and that person was a weirdo.
When talking to my daughter, I refer to my husband, her dad, as dad or your dad. She’s a teenager, so obviously she knows our first names. I’m really not sure how else I would refer to him. I’m not sure I get the OP. Does his wife call him dad or only when referencing him to the kids? I think it would be very bizarre if I called my husband dad instead of by name, but our daughter doesn’t call us by first names, so yeah, we refer to each other as mom or dad when speaking to her.
I refer to my partner as “Daddy” when talking about him with the children.
I refer to my parents as Nanny and Pa when talking about them with the children, and also when talking about them with my partner if it’s in connection with the children.
Normal conversation segment “Pa called and said the kids can stay over this weekend. Oh, and Dad also said that the situation at his workplace is resolved.”
I’ve also switched to calling my own grandmother “Nanny Jean”, which was never a thing until there was another Nanny on the scene to require a distinction. Again, when talking about taking the kids to visit her, I’ll say “Nanny Jean”; when talking about her health woes I’ll say “Nan”.
My parents always used Mommy and Daddy or Mom and Dad. As we got older my father, for some reason, would sometimes refer to my mother by her first name around my brothers and I. I would correct him, “If by Barbara, you mean Mom…” It’s hard for me to imagine parents who do it any other way. Although, I have met one person who’s mother insisted my friend call her by her first name.
I don’t have kids, but my wife and I use Mommy and Daddy around our dogs.
“Mommy.”
The thing I’m trying to kick is referring to myself in the third person, as in “Who wants to go to the store with daddy?” My kids are 6 & 8, so I don’t know why I still do this; hope I’ve got it beat before their teenage years.
In Spain we tend to only use the familiar mamá when speaking directly to that person, so in most families it would be “tu madre” in normal circumstances. When (mock) exasperated, not by the child but by the adult, the name may be “esa madre tuya”, akin to how the common children go from having personal names when they’re behaving properly to being “tu hijo” (your child) or “ese hijo tuyo” (that child of yours, which indicates a higher degree of irritation) when not.
So, early in the morning on the day of a trip: ¿Se ha levantado ya tu madre? Is your mother out of bed yet?
When the car is already loaded and the only one missing is her and where the hell is she now, please don’t tell me she’s decided to redo her whole makeup (ehr, sorry, having flashbacks to my own family vacations): ¿Pero dónde se ha metido ahora esa madre tuya? But where has that mother of yours gone off to now?
I’m surprised that anyone would find this unusual, let alone “creepy.” IME, it is completely unexceptional for English speaking parents to refer to each other as Mom and Dad when speaking to their children. Though saying “your dad” or “your mom” sounds fine to me too.
In my other language, it is also completely normal to just use the words mama or papa when speaking to any child, e.g., you could say, “Give this to Papa” even when talking to someone else’s child. You wouldn’t have to say “your papa.” I guess the idea is that to a child there is only one mom or dad so it isn’t necessary to specify further.
Same as above … just wanted to:
<slight hijack>
I always attach the honorifics to my siblings names … Uncle and Aunt … even when I’m talking to them directly and to their kids … and my own mother thought is completely hilarious that I referred to her as “Grandma Moneybags” …
</slight hijack>
How do same-sex parents handle this? It could lead to confusion having two parents who answer to Dad, for example. Does one father call himself Dad and the other father call himself Pop?
My mother being a lesbian, I’ve seen various choices in this regard. In most of the families I have known where same sex couples have children each parent uses something distinct. There probably are some families where both use Dad or both use Mom, but I just haven’t met them.
One couple used Mama Ann and Mama Betty to distinguish which parent with the honorific and first name. I’ve seen Daddy vs Dad. And I knew one granola hippy progressive type couple where it was just first names with no honorifics, Sunshine or Rainbow.
It is not so different to how some families use differing honorifics to distinguish which set of grandparents they are referring to. You’re going to grandpa’s for the weekend vs we’re eating dinner at Pop-Pop’s. Look what Nana sent you for your birthday vs Mamaw makes the best biscuits.
Whatever works, go with it.
Agreed and speaking to my kids about their mother I refer to her with their name for her: “Mom”.
The odd thing is that my kids never have called me “Daddy”, only “Dad”, but my wife speaking of me to them says “Daddy”. Which of course was what she had called her father growing up. Her deceased father is referred to as “Daddy” when speaking to her mother (who also says that speaking to her), “Dad” when speaking to her brother, “Gran’pa” when speaking to our kids, and “my father” when speaking to me.
Mine are teenagers and I still haven’t cured myself 100% of doing this yet. It doesn’t seem to bug them but I feel like it makes me sound just a weentsy bit batshit crazy.
Without having given it any thought, I always refer to my wife as “Moom” (based on email typo that went viral inside the family; otherwise it would be “Mom”), even to my 51 year old daughter. And she refers to me as “Daddy”. It seems perfectly obvious to me and not in any way weird. And when talking with our grandchildren, we are “Nana” and “Pop-pop”.
When my mother died (my dad died years prior) I realized that I was an orphan. In addition, because my parents each had zero siblings, I was struck by the fact that I was now the eldest in the family! For some reason, I announced at a family get together that I should thereafter be referred to as “Pappy”.
My nephews and their wives/girlfriends took my demand seriously (even though I was inebriated), so now they all, with a straight face, refer to me as Pappy. To my kids I gues I’ll always be “dad” (my son) and “daddy” (my daughter).
I do not have children. But, when my nephew was born, my dad started referring to his wife (my stepmom) as “Grandma”, even when talking to me, and totally out of context. As in, “Grandma is going to the supermarket.”
Since I had four *actual *grandmothers due to divorced and remarried family, and they are all long-deceased, this can be really confusing.
When I was a kid, post-divorce, my parents referred to each other as “your Mom/Mother” or “your Dad/Father”, or, when I got older, by name. My stepparents were called by their first name. Grandmothers would get surnames to ease confusion, except my maternal grandmother, who was always called Nana.