using the "dad" term

One of several interesting and warm-hearted threads on the Choice Mom discussion board this week was started by a woman who mentioned that her child, not quite 3, was starting to refer to a male family friend as "dad." She wondered what to do about it.

She's been getting great advice from the Choice Mom community -- largely related to offering simple, non-fussy correction.

But it's a common stage for Choice Moms to start wondering, as our kids begin talking, about how much we should worry about what they are thinking and to what extent we need to do something about it....and what that step should be. We tend to be afraid that each moment is important enough to have a lasting effect. I remember being very concerned when my daughter started to take a huge interest in princess-and-prince stories when she was 3/4 that it was a reflection on her need for a father....

It took awhile before I discovered that roughly 98 percent of girls that age love princess-and-prince stories.

Now that I have a little hindsight -- my daughter is 9 -- I can reflect better on another stage she had. Once upon a time she used to say she had 3 daddies -- her donor dad, my ex-husband (who we're close with but who I divorced 6 years before she was born), and, after I married a second time, her stepdad.

Now that she's 9 and knows what the term "dad" really means, she doesn't use that for any of them. She simply calls them by their first names.

I think it's fine for kids to play around with the terminology, as long as you very simply let them know it's not real. In my case, I used to tell my daughter only, "wow, you're lucky to have THREE dads." And within a few months she was past that stage.

When I was about 7, I knew about the brother I had who died at birth before I was born. Somehow this took on great meaning for me -- I longed for a big brother at that time, since I was having some issues I was afraid to tell my parents about. It was around the time of the Vietnam War, and I started telling classmates that I had a brother in the war...and eventually that he died there.

I grew out of this stage about a year later (and my parents didn't know about it, so they never corrected me). To this day, I do recognize in me, in times of greater emotional stress, that longing for a big brother to put his arm around me and say everything will be all right.

Sometimes our kids will long for a dad...or a sibling...or a dog...or a Wii. Longing is okay, especially if they feel comfortable letting us know about it in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. And I don't think, when we look at it in the long run, that it is something for us to feel guilty about. Unless we tell them not to long for anything.

-- Mikki