When Grandparents Want a Say in Naming Their Grandchildren

The expectant parents spend weeks deciding on their new baby’s name. Then the grandparents weigh in.

Rachel Templeton felt honored when her father-in-law invited her out to dinner on Long Island, just six weeks after the birth of her first child. Expecting a celebratory event, she dressed with care for what would be her first real postpartum outing.

The restaurant was lovely, but “the light banter quickly turned serious,” Ms. Templeton recalled. Her father-in-law announced that she and her husband should change the name they had carefully chosen for their son, Isaiah.

Growing up in Philadelphia, he explained, he had encountered anti-Semitic sneers and discrimination; now he feared that a biblical name would make his new grandson a target. To protect the child, the family should use his middle name instead.

Startled and hurt, Ms. Templeton coolly replied, “If I ever feel he’s being harmed by his name, I’ll consider it. But in exchange, I never want to hear about this again.” Isaiah is 9 now, and she and her father-in-law had not discussed the matter in all those years, until they told me the story.

But Ms. Templeton, 45, a radio reporter in San Juan, P.R., clearly hadn’t forgotten the conversation. And her father-in-law, who asked to remain anonymous, insisted, “I still agree with my original premise,” reasoning that “there was a lot of anti-Semitism when I grew up and there’s a lot now.”

Other parents remember tangling with grandparents over baby names, too. An accountant in suburban Phoenix, a newlywed when she met her husband’s maternal grandmother, warmed to her instantly and vowed to name her first daughter in the grandmother’s honor: Colleen. “We didn’t think there would be any drama,” she said.

Wrong. Her in-laws had divorced years before her marriage, and her father-in-law was upset that they wanted to name the baby after his ex-wife’s side of the family.

The new parents felt whipsawed, wanting to keep everyone happy while also defending their independence. “Telling someone what you can or can’t name your child is so controlling,” the accountant said. She told her husband, “I didn’t marry your dad.” After considerable back and forth, they went with Colleen.

What’s in a name? Maybe more than we think or anticipate when our expectant children are kicking around the possibilities.

Maybe we grandparents want a family name carried on, or one that reflects our religious or ethnic identity. If our children have other ideas — these days, they often do — “the link to their ancestry is broken,” Ms. Redmond pointed out.

Plus, we have our own notions of appropriateness and a probably misguided sense that our grandchildren’s names reflect on us. So when our children creatively come up with Nevaeh (it’s “heaven,” backward) or use the city where the baby was conceived (like Nashua), we bridle.

“If you’re the conservative who named your kids Tom and Emily, and they’re naming their daughter Miles and their son Freedom, it’s like showing up at the country club with blue hair and tattoos,” Ms. Redmond said.

Being different is often the point, though. Young parents face a vastly wider assortment of choices than older generations ever considered. New parents may gravitate toward gender-neutral names, for instance. Older generations’ notions about playground taunts have become outdated when kids have such diverse names that a plain vanilla Linda or a mundane Mike may yearn for something more distinctive.

But that doesn’t prevent some grandparents from wading into the fray. Sometimes, since more spouses now keep their own names when they marry, differences arise not over the newcomer’s first name but the surname.

A personal example: My then-husband and I gave our daughter my last name, with his as a middle name. It caused no discernible problems.

My feminist hopes for a matrilineal naming tradition lasted one generation; my daughter’s daughter has her father’s last name, with her mother’s in the middle. I felt mildly disappointed, but not argumentative.

On the other hand, Mary Lou Ciolfi got an earful from her mother about her children’s last names. Ms. Ciolfi kept her name when she married in 1984, and she and her husband reflexively gave their son his father’s last name. Four years later, pregnant with a daughter, Ms. Ciolfi thought, “Why should he get all the names?” Her whole family is Italian and “very ethnic in our traditions.”

When she told her mother that her daughter would have her last name, “she was annoyed and angry with me and tried to talk me out of it,” said Ms. Ciolfi, 60, who teaches public health at the University of New England. “She said silly things like, my children wouldn’t know they were siblings. I was just rolling my eyes.”

As it happens, Ms. Ciolfi’s two sons (surnamed Vorhees) and her daughter (named Ciolfi) know perfectly well that they’re siblings. As for her late mother, “she was totally in love with all her grandchildren and moved past it.”

That tends to happen, said Sally Tannen, who has directed parenting workshops at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for nearly 20 years, and grandparenting workshops for four.

The discussions can get intense, said Ms. Tannen, whose youngest grandchildren are twins named Cedar and Shepard. “This is the first stage in grandparents’ realizing that this is not their kid and they don’t have control,” she continued. “They have to step back, and some are good at that and some are terrible.”

Sometimes, parents find face-saving solutions, like giving children middle names they will never use to placate one grandparent or another.

But clashes over names can backfire, Ms. Tannen pointed out, if they make new parents angry enough to withdraw. Parents serve as the gatekeepers to their children and, as I learned from my conversations, they remember feeling pummeled, even decades later.

Fortunately, as Ms. Ciolfi discovered, these conflicts tend to fade after the grandchildren actually arrive. “As soon as you’re pregnant, everyone has an opinion” about names, Ms. Tannen has observed. “Once there’s a baby, it would be pretty silly to hold onto that.”

Even Ellen Robin, a math teacher in Sebastopol, Calif., and her late father-in-law got past their antagonism.

She still keeps a file of enraged letters he sent after she and her husband somewhat impulsively decided to call their new son Ivan. “He completely flipped out over naming our child after ‘the worst anti-Semite ever,’” she recalled 36 years later, referring to the terrorizing Russian czar, Ivan the Terrible. “He said, ‘You have cursed this baby.’ He went completely berserk.” Her mother-in-law helpfully sent a list of names they deemed acceptable.

“I had never been bullied like that,” said Ms. Robin, 69. As a compromise, she and her husband renamed their son Jesse Ivan. But they always called him Ivan and, to her surprise, her in-laws soon did, too. “After a few months, it was as if nothing had happened,” she said. She and her three sons all developed warm relationships with her father-in-law.

Rachel Templeton’s two boys are also close to their paternal grandfather.

But she has noticed this: She and her husband initially nicknamed her elder son Zay, until he said that he preferred his proper name. Then, everyone knew him as Isaiah — except his grandfather who, in nine years, never used his grandson’s full name.

He will now, though. It’s taken a while but, he told me, “I’m happy to call him whatever he wants to be called.”

source: https://smotherer2010.medium.com/is-america-ungovernable-now-6f3589f9b3dd