XIV. Moving in With You: The Honeymoon, Page 3

What about Re-Naming Your Child?

Names are enormously important parts of our identities. Your child comes with a name already, just as he comes with a skin colour and his basic personality. Very few cultures are as casual in the names they bestow on children as are we are in Western Europe. Names are usually full of significance and chosen carefully, and your child’s name may contain an important meaning or message from his parents about their hopes for their child or the circumstances of his birth. Investigate the possible meaning of any non-obvious or non-European name. Think very seriously before you change it. If you do change his name, you need to do it carefully.

There are special considerations in naming an adopted child. If your child already knows his own name you need a very good reason to change it. If you really want to, and the child understands and consents, all well and good. Some children want a new name to symbolize their new life, and the old name may carry bad associations for them. If you already have a child with that first name, you could add some extra bit to distinguish them (Mary Ann and Mary Jane) or use a diminutive for one of them (Dafydd and Dai, or Elisabeth and Betty). If you really need to change the first name completely, such as in an adoption from overseas where the child has a name which sounds like a vulgar word in English, you can make the transition easier for a young child by using both names in tandem for a while, then more and more often dropping the original name (so Phuc becomes Phuc Sunny and gradually just Sunny). Even so, give serious thought to keeping the original name as a second name. A child who bears a given name which is a variant of a name in your own language might have the spelling changed (so Mary becomes Mari, Mikhail becomes Michael, Jorge becomes George).

Our son Christian had been severely abused for years by his birth family. When he came to us he demanded to change his name. Not only that, but he would have violent tantrums if anyone used “Christian” or “Chris” around him for years, even it was nothing to do with him. He first wanted to be called Little Kitten, and I was Mother Cat, and it was several years before he was able to tolerate a “real” name again. The kitten-cat relationship symbolized for him the relationship of love and care he had missed out on with his birth family.

If your child is older and wants to keep his original surname, there is no legal reason why he shouldn’t do so. As a compromise he might consent to add yours on before or after.

It is quite in order for an adopted child to develop an interest in his original names; this can become quite an issue later in life. He may go through a period of wanting to be called by his original name. Why not? The less of an issue you make of it, the sooner it will blow over. It’s part of exploring the past, and also part of the perfectly normal experimenting with different identities that all children do as some stage. Rarely, a child will be adopted who was apparently never named by his birth mother, and when this happens it can be quite devastating; it’s as if he meant so little to her that he almost didn’t exist.

If you adopt a child from another culture you should almost certainly give him a name from that culture, even if it isn’t the name you use routinely. Investigate names you like the sound of, though, because unfortunate choices can happen. It could mean something inappropriate, be for the wrong sex, have bad historical connections, etc. And you also don’t want to choose a name for a child from a different culture that sounds quite all right in your own culture but which has bad associations in the child’s original culture. For example, I like the name Winston, but I would not name an American boy that, because in the USA it is not used as a name; it is a brand of cigarette. Choose a “foreign” name which can be pronounced and spelled in English without too much difficulty or distortion, or it will cause endless nuisance and possibly embarrassment for your child. This all is on top of the usual precautions that the resulting initials don’t spell out something vulgar, etc.!

I loved the Maaori name Taawhao, which I knew only from a tape recording. Unfortunately one of its several meanings is “refuse, rubbish”, inappropriate for an adoptee. It was discarded in favour of Taane, the god of the forests, which also means “man”. Similarly I found a name from an African language which I wanted for our Afro-Caribbean daughter, but the only recorded use I could find for it was a child in a National Geographic article whose mother had abandoned her, so I didn’t feel I could use it.

If you do want to change the child’s name, there is a place on the court adoption application form for the new name to be entered, and the change takes effect at the same time as the adoption order.

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