to think adult males should not call their mothers "Mummy"

[MamaLaMoo]

Brother and sister both professionals in their 30s call their mother Mummy to her in conversation, in letters and emails and between each other, this is said with a certain awkward little boy/girl voice.

Mother calls them by childhood pet names, daughter is "Honey Bunny". She buys them chocolate advent calendars every December, I could go on but you get the gist...

DH is the son, it all makes me want to yell "Eeeuuuuwwww! just stop now!"

Is this actually odd or is this because they are middle class English and I'm not?

My 12 year old stil calls me Mummy,Mum with his friends.

My 7 year old ,the same :)

My little girl calls me Mommy (we are in the US)

I don't mind at all.

Oh,and Daddy is still that name.

I call mine Mam.

I call mine Mumm-ra

Saying Mummy and Daddy is also the norm for West Africans - no matter what your age or class. Even husbands and wives call each other Mummy and Daddy once babies have arrived.

bathykolpian that is fantastic. I may steal that for my future offspring.

(also, as a fellow lady of large norkage I love your name)

I'm Irish too and nearly everyone I know says either mummy and daddy or ma and da. I don't get the idea that you change the word you use as you get older, surely if he called his mother mummy when he was a child, rather than mum, he would still say mummy now.

Oh this is nice, my first time on AIBU and I was a bit uncertain what would happen! A good selection of opinions, I take your point about the cultural differences and it is interesting to hear about different ways of saying mum in different cultures.

BUT

It is the Mummy in question who won't let her kids grow up, her use of language and manner with them is enforcing a parent-child relationship beyond their childhood, surely there comes a point where it is more psychologically appropriate to have an adult-adult relationship with your adult children and have that reflected in a change of language and behaviours?

Also she is soooo not upper middle class, her father was a builder and she worked as a pharmacist, married a university lecturer and lived in a 3 bed house in Birmingham. Although she acts to the manor born there is more than a touch of the Hyacinth Bucket's methinks.

My brother and I still call our parents mummy and daddy. We're not tied to the apron strings, we live independent lives with our own families blah blah. It's just who they are to us and frankly no one else's business.

Im just wondering if when his mother does this, he drops dead or perhaps gets violently ill or anything that is actually worthy worrying about. A mother who loves her son and still sees him as her little boy.

Not that strange at all as I suspect most of you will suffer a similar affliction when your DC grow up. So easy to sit and judge when yours are still at home and under your wing. Wait, because the wonderful thing about life is we will all be our parents - like it or not.

I could never bear to say mum or dad, so once I was too old for mummy and daddy I called my father fat-one and my mother- nothing.

My own (grown up) children call us either mummy and daddy or ma and pa either of which I much prefer to mum and dad. One tries to call me muuummm because he knows it winds me up. It is just such a horrible word.

I think you need to focus on the other aspects of the relationship which cause you to worry - things like what they call each other, and her buying them advent calendars etc don't automatically mean there is a problem.

But if there is a problem in bigger ways, that's what you need to try to address. Does he behave like an adult when he is not with her? Does he take his share of responsibility in your relationship, in making decisions, raising children, paying bills. Those are the things that make the difference, if he reverts to being "her little boy" but it's only while she's in the same room, then you probably just have to grit your teeth, and/or let him visit without you.

I don't like being called Mummy now and DD is 9.
I prefer Mum.

I cringe when adults refer to themselves as Mummy, you know, "Hi, I'm David's Mummy".

I know of other forums where they say such things as "ooh, I was talking to another Mummy, and then blah, and then I had to tell X I was Z's Mummy"

Can I ask why? (if you don't like being called Mummy)

:) I have never thought about it till now.

I know it can be considered babyish by kids in front of their peers,but why don't some adults like it?

An adult referrng to parents as Mummy or Daddy makes my skin scrawl. It tends to be sweaty slightly odd middle aged men that are most prone to it in my experience.

Are women allowed to say it?

This post has reminded me of the Vernon Kay advert that's really winding me up at the moment - the one where his 'mum' is cooking him a stirfry with that weird oil stuff and announces that, even though he's 36, he's still her 'baby'. All delivered in a really nauseating 'mumsy' voice. Never though I'd feel sorry for Tess Daly but, if that's his real mum, I do!

i call my parents mummy and daddy.
i think my brothers do when emotional.

why not?

and I am definitely 'Mummy' to my tots.
the day of 'Mum' is yet to come.

i think some people just can't stand it when other people have better relationships with their parents than they do. some people make a virtue out of emotional distance. some people think it is soppy.

the people i know who objected to my use of the word Mummy did so because they saw it as 'posh' and had chips on their shoulders. Actually that made me want to do it more.

i think it is charming when people are fond towards their parents. i hope my kids are nice to me in the future.

why, thank you Tye.

People who object on grounds of making their skin crawl and thinking it's creepy are rather pathetic tbh. I mean, think about it. Someone calls their mother 'mummy' and someone skin crawls?? FFS, how weird.

You're spot on Eggy and I think it says more about them than the people they are criticising.

I call my parents Mummy and Daddy. I am over 30 and not that posh . And it's got nothing to do with being "babyfied" by my parents - it's just what I've always called them and there was never any reason to change.

All those people who stopped calling their parents Mummy and Daddy and started calling them Mum and Dad instead - what prompted the change? Did your parents sit you down one day, age about 8, and say "it's time you started calling us Mum and Dad now"? Because that, to me, would be really weird.

My brother and I are in our 20s and both still call our parents mummy and daddy. We could never bear to make the change to mum and dad when we hit our teens and it caused much embarrassament when our friends were round as we knew they'd take the piss if we said mummy or daddy. It was made worse by the fact that we would watch each other with eagle eyes to see if we used mum or dad to avoid embarrassment and tear pieces off each other for doing so once our friends had gone.

Personally I am going to make sure my kids use mum/mummy interchangeably so they don't suffer the agonies that my brother and I did

FWIW I think for us it's down to excessive middleclassness and the fact that the apron strings probably are still a little too tight

Or you could buy him a big pair of scissors so he can cut the cord.

Damn you magnificent I snorted with laughter and woke my ds up!