Shutterstock
Should your boyfriend discipline your kids? “Hell, no!” says my aunt, commenting about a recent article I wrote. Never one to hold back her opinion, she tells me that it reminds her of women who let their kids call their boyfriends ‘daddy.’ “If that ain’t your real dad, don’t call him that,” she says, adding that she’s seen women with so many boyfriends/daddies that the kids don’t know who their real father is. She’s got a point. You can’t just give that title away.
Feeling super chatty and thoughtful this particular evening, we try to come up with reasons as to why some women do it. She says that it probably feeds a mom’s desperation to have a ‘family.’
If the kid starts calling the boyfriend dad, maybe he’ll start acting like one. I speculate that the mom doesn’t want to break the kid’s heart by saying, “That’s not your father!” especially, if the real dad isn’t around. I mean, what kid doesn’t want a daddy?
It’s tricky for me because I never had a daddy. I mean, I did have a man whose sperm helped create me, but we only saw each other a few times a year, and I only called him by his first name. Daddy? No way. That title is special.
But still, we can’t say that it’s never appropriate for a boyfriend, can we? I decided to get off the phone with my aunt and go directly to a source, the daughter of my BFF. She’s in her mid-twenties and has a two-year-old son that calls her boyfriend daddy. I was curious to see what she had to say.
“I never told my son to call my boyfriend daddy, he just started doing it,” explains T. “Da-Da was the first words out of his mouth.”
Okay, but what about his father?
That’s a long story that has to be made short. Basically, she met her son’s father while broken up with her boyfriend of 10 years. The friendship quickly turned sexual, and before she could figure out that he wasn’t about sh*t, she was already pregnant with his eighth kid.
From there, things fell completely apart.
