Recently my daughter has stopped calling me mummy, preferring instead to shorten it to mum. My sentimental pangs aside, to me this is another way in which she is asserting her independence and her ownership of the world. She’s assigning the names she feels fit, and thus making things her own, rather than parroting names she learned as a baby. I guess she’s also picking up on the fact that as adults, we often shorten one another’s names to more familiar, easier to say, names. And it’s not just me. She’s doing the same with her nannies (now Nan) and sometimes refers to herself in the third person using variations of her own name which she has made up herself.

This has led to her shortening Grandad to Dad. I can absolutely see her logic. She also knows that her grandad is not her father. She calls her father daddy.

I talked with her about this when I first heard her call him dad, and explained that dad is short for daddy, not grandad. And I offered some alternatives (gramps & his first name), but my daughter has decided she’s going to call him dad.

To be honest, I’m not really bothered what she calls anyone (so long as it’s respectful, and the person she is addressing is ok with it), and I think that if I push too hard against this, it’s going to make it a disproportionally big issue. I don’t want to make her feel as though she’s wrong, because I don’t want to knock her confidence in taking ownership of her world, and I want her to feel free to express herself without constraint. And I don’t think it will last. Of all the shortened forms she uses, she uses dad the least frequently.

It also feels less weird for me than perhaps it ought to, because I never called my dad Dad. We’re a first name family so he’s never been “Dad” to me. I don’t have the emotional attachment most people have to that particular word. Because he’s never been “dad”, he doesn’t respond to it, so I don’t think it will stick for long because it’s not really an effective way for her to get his attention!

For me, it’s my daughter’s way of making her grandad her own by giving him his own personal term of address that’s come from her, and nobody else. So I think we’ll all just have to accept that this is happening for a while, not make a big deal out of it, and watch and see how things evolve.

EDIT: I’d written this post all ready to go… and then we spent time with grandad, whose non response to “Dad” is now bordering on comical, so I guess this is one particular nickname that won’t be sticking for long. Though knowing my daughter, she is a little wind up merchant, and may just continue out of sheer devilment!