Do your children call your friends by first names or aunt and uncle?

[TwentytoTwelve]

What do you expect/what do your children call your friends ie if they’re called Mark is it Uncle Mark or Aunt Rachel or just Mark?

Same! I have never called an aunt or uncle by that title 😅

What's the harm in thinking you have an extra aunt?

In many families, it isn't only your parent's siblings that you refer to as aunt and uncle. Could be their cousins and great aunts and uncles, too.

I dont think it is a cause if the breakdown of society, but I do think things like this are indicative of wider issues we have with the youth of today. Like why so many of them are totally unemployable as well as frankly unlikeable.

im Irish and I know no one who does this…

My best friends are Auntie April and Auntie Jo (also their godmothers) but that’s it. My oldest is 19 now and has dropped the “auntie”. DH’s friends have always just been John, Ben etc. Not “uncle”.

I thought calling everyone aunty was a Jamaican thing! Grew up in a very Jamaican area of London and everyone over 30 was 'aunty',

It's just a bit weird to not know enough about your own immediate family to know which people are your parents' siblings and which aren't (whether they're your parents' friends, cousins etc) by your late teens!

Aunts and uncles are family relatives - either by blood or marriage. Friends are not so it’s first names unless your friends vehemently object!

As a child I knew who my real aunts and uncles were, but we still called friends of our parents aunt or uncle. Everybody did when I was a kid.

Mine and DH’s friends would have been ‘Aunt Susan’, ‘Uncle John’, but his own friends parents were just first names, and they called me by my first name.

No one said harmful

but it is unusual for a late teen to be taken by surprise to learn that someone he’s been calling auntie his entire life isn’t actually his mum’s sister, and that his “cousins” are actually his cousins

Did his grandparents never talk about their children’s childhoods?? Family Christmas and birthday celebrations… this non-aunt joined?

First names only here even for real aunts and uncles. I try to stop friends’ kids from calling me auntie because I don’t like it but sometimes the parents tell them to say it so I just let it drop so as not to confuse the children.

It is shame that the young people you know are so unlikeable and unemployable. I can see how that would taint your view of a whole generation but honestly, there are lovely young people out there.

Just first names, but they call their aunties and uncles by their first names too without the auntie / uncle bit (well actually they do that on my side because that’s how we did it, but my DH side uses auntie/ uncle for the relations, though there aren’t as many of them).

Mine always called friends by their Christian names.

All my friends are first names to my children but I did always picture them being aunties. as ot happened, the first of us to have children went with just first names as her sisters had the same names as a couple of us, so would’ve been two auntie Sarah’s and two auntie beckys for example, so that set the precedent I think.

Some very close friends are aunt/uncle

apparently this is common 😁 I read it on MN

@Lexibletheflexible how did your husband find out in his late teens that someone he’d been calling auntie / uncle was actually not one of his parents sibling?

Exactly the same here, except that I'm the Indian one and DH is English.

Everybody, including actual relatives by their first names

Always been just first names. Calling them eg. Mr Jones seems really archaic to me, as does Uncle Nigel etc. To be honest, I called my parents’ friends by their first names & that was back in the 60s & 70s.

My kids call my best friends auntie

My aunties told be to stop calling them auntie once I was an adult.

My sister always insisted her daughter's friends called her Mrs XXX. Now my kids are in their 30s she still insists on them calling them Auntie and Uncle and will even correct them in front of people.

He never thought it was his parent's sibling. He found out when someone died and she wasn't going to the funeral because they arent related. He assumed she was his mother's cousin and so she would also be related to the deceased and also be heading North for the funeral.