More children than ever are being born outside marriage or to single parents, and more women are choosing not to take their spouse’s name.Īdditionally, “even our systems are now better set up to include more naming options than in the past”, says Michelle Janning, a professor of sociology at Whitman College in Washington, US, with a specialisation in family and gender studies. However, the changing landscape of families is increasingly disrupting this ‘default’ setting. “I doubt that every child that has their father’s surname does so because their parents carefully considered the action – they simply did what was cognitively easiest.” “Defaults are powerful,” says Matt Wallaert, an applied behavioural scientist, who studies how pressures like identity change people’s behaviour. But the fact most people still choose to follow the patriarchal tradition suggests how deeply rooted this social norm is. But these creative approaches are not always without hiccups.įor most of Western history, parents didn’t have to give much thought to a child’s surname – women would take their male partner’s name when they married, and this would then be passed onto their offspring. Some parents are taking new routes – whether that means hyphenating parents’ surnames, naming a child after just one of the parents or coming up with a new name altogether.
Still, there’s no longer a wholly default option when it comes to picking a surname. A reported 96% of heterosexual married couples in the US still give their child the father’s name, and in the UK – where Safari lives – around 90% of straight women still take their husband’s name when they marry, many of whom pass it onto their child. Her own surname was also created for her she feels having a different surname from her parents gives her a strong sense of identity.Īlthough Safari is far from the only parent going against convention in this way, her decision is still something of a rarity. Within her family, she adds, the decision wasn’t a particularly strange one.
Her partner was relaxed about the idea, and she feels strongly that as society changes, so too should the way we think about what we pass on to our children.
Safari, who is British but has Kenyan heritage, says the name was a perfect way of honouring her family history she loved the fact that the word means ‘warrior’. She ended up choosing the surname ‘Kimani’, which has Kenyan origins. “So, I decided to use one of the names as a surname.”įor Safari, the decision to create a new surname was an easy one. “There were two first names that I really liked, and I couldn’t choose between them when looking to name my youngest daughter,” she said. But she had other ideas for her new-born daughter. Her first child, by then a teenager, took their father’s last name. When Nerea Safari, 38, became a parent for the second time, she knew she wanted to do things differently.
0 kommentar(er)
