peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (09/13/84)
Showing the children that the love and respect the parents have for each
other counts far more than any legal or religious labelling may well be an
excellent way of impressing upon them the need to examine relationships
(and other things) for their specific qualities and not assume they
conform to some stereotypical image conjured by their label. I can also
appreciate a desire to avoid church or state interference in one's
emotional life (though I'm not sure that was the reason Paul Bonneau had
in mind when he objected to legal marriage).
However, there are other ways of teaching the first lesson (and, indeed,
I doubt one example, albeit an important one, would suffice) and the
insecurity induced in the child by their uncertainty over the parents'
status would, for me, outweigh any benefit from not having the state
intervene. It seems that there are many many benefits to a secure home
life for a child and doing a reasonably small thing such as formalizing
a commitment that you've made anyway seems to be worthwhile, for me.
But the naming question is an interesting one; I like hyphenation, in
principle, and it's even easily explained to children ("we both love you
very much, so we both wanted to give you our last names"). But there can
be problems of name length (and aesthetics!), particularly when people
with hyphenated last names have children (and which parent does one offend by
dropping *their* last name??).
If one believes that commonality of (or a clear relationship between) child
and parent surnames is primarily to allow the child to feel secure by
identifying with the parents, then hyphenation is nice because it allows
them to identify with both parents more readily. On the other hand, if
one wants to preach the lesson of the opening sentence, the name is not
nearly as important as the relationships in the family, so perhaps one should
choose whichever last name is aesthetically more pleasing, or toss a coin.
p. rowley, U. Torontoscot@dartvax.UUCP (Scot Drysdale) (09/27/84)
<Does the bug really exist?> My wife kept her name when we married. We did not like the idea of hyphenating our names when our daughter was born. We had considered combining names somehow, but the only combinations of Drysdale and Higgins that seemed natural were Drygins and Higdale. Neither appealed to us (although the first might interest martini drinkers). We named our daughter Helen Higgins Drysdale, using my wife's last name for Helen's middle name. Scot Drysdale (scot@dartmouth)