Strollerderby : mama

Not Every Kid With a Mother Has a "Mommy"

Miriam Axel-Lute — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I was at Music Together with my daughter. We were singing a song where a typical verse went like this:

"Who's that tapping at the window? /Who's that knocking at the door?
Mommy's tapping at the window?/Daddy's knocking at the door."

(Makes you think of the toddlers who lock their parents out, doesn't it?)

After it was over, my daughter turned to me and said "That's song's silly."

"Why?" I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.

"It doesn't have a Mama in it."

And indeed it didn't. Though most of the world thinks of "Mommy" and "Mama" as interchangable, for children like her who have both, they're not exactly. She's been told, and basically understands, that they are just "parent names" and that all mothers and fathers get to choose a specific ones like "mommy" or "mama," and that doesn't mean they have different roles as parents. Nonetheless, she likes them to be in balance—from early on she would assign various unnamed mothers in her books, human and animal, one or the other and stick to her designations firmly, and she's quite concerned to know which one the various parents-to-be in her life are going to pick.

Now clearly it's no revelation that kids from anything other than a one mother-one father family don't see their family structures reflected in stories, songs, school exercises, etc. very often, and they feel it.

But what struck me about this exchange was that the parent names angle provides a fairly easy way to be a lot more inclusive without interrupting things with extended awkward clauses like "except some kids instead have two moms or two dads . . ." Not that kids shouldn't be explicitly presented with the idea of family structure variety—they should—but in passing cases like this music class, it can get a little silly. In those cases, perhaps just adding more parent names to our patter could go a long way. Nothing PC and obsessive. Just mixing it up a little.

In fact, it has the extra benefit of being a little more comfy to those from a het two-parent family who have a mama or papa. I've heard from one grown woman who had a papa who says that she was fairly annoyed by the "daddy" hegemony. Meanwhile, for the kids for whom they are interchangable, it likely won't even register.

I mentioned the idea to the music teacher, who acknowledged that she'd had concerns about those mommy/daddy songs too. This session, she's been singing a different song that mentions parents by name, and she's given it four verses—Mommy, Mama, Daddy, and Papa. It doesn't cover everyone, certainly, but I think those are far and away the top choices, so they should cover a lot of ground. It was simple and non disruptive and my daughter doesn't think that song is "silly."

What do you think? Would your kids notice? Would they care?

Photo CC license, YatesLaberge, via Flickr.

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