Changing child’s surname

[Cr22345678990]

Myself and child’s father are no longer together, child has fathers surname which I now regret and wish I had double barrelled it from the start. I want to be able to take my child abroad without any problems and feel like it’s fair if he has both our surnames now. I’ve asked the father and he had said no - If I got a court order what chance would I have of being successful? I’m not trying to remove his surname just double barrel.

Is the father involved with the child?

Yes they see each other very regularly.

So crazy. I was actually going to start a thread about this today to see if anyone’s had any experience of changing their child’s surname.

It makes it much more difficult when one parent doesn’t consent to changing the child’s name. If the dad doesn’t consent then the court will have to decide if changing the child’s surname is in their best interests. I don’t have much advice as I’ve only started looking into changing one of my kid’s names, but I’ll attach a link to a useful site that I was looking at today. Hope that helps. There’s more information on Gov too

childlawadvice.org.uk/changing-a-childs-surname/

Sorry here’s the GOV link

www.gov.uk/change-name-deed-poll/change-a-childs-name

Most of the time, in my experience, the court would direct a change to double barrel both names, reflecting the child’s identity from both parents. Much less likely if it was a change from one surname to the other, but there’s little to argue against double barrelling.

Despite spending a fair amount of £ the court refused to double barrel; they said it was unfair to change his identity.

This wasn’t helped by the fact we’d already discussed double barrelling and decided against it, as then DS would have to choose which to drop when/if he got married, especially if his partner was also a double-barrel-ee.

In hindsight I wish I’d kept my surname as my married name, or my maiden name on marriage, but that’s hindsight!