Reply to Why do American women call themselves "mums."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's better than "mama"[/quote]

Really, my 4 year old still calls me this once in a while.  I've never encouraged it one way or the other.  I think it's sweet.[/quote]

It's fine if your 4-year old calls you that.  It's annoying when women call themselves "mama."  Has a man ever called himself a "dada"?[/quote]

Just FYI, the male equivalent to mama is papa, not dada.

We use those words in our family because I am German and those are the customary terms there. I haven't encountered a purely American family who uses them. And I only refer to myself as "mama" when speaking to my kids, not to other parents.[/quote]

Thanks for the "FYI" but I'm not sure that there is some official documentation that states that papa is the male equivalent of mama.  All of my kids called us mama and dada when they were babies.  My dad (their grandfather) was papa.[/quote]

Your family's usage notwithstanding, mama and papa is absolutely a traditional pairing in many languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

I don't think the same can be documented for mama and dada.[/quote]

Wow, thank you, I definitely consider Wikipedia as official documentation.  I guess I just live in a strange bizarro world, in that not one family I know refers to the father as Papa except those from other countries.  Every single American-born kid in my circle calls their father Daddy and many of them started out as Dada.  Several call their grandfathers Papa or Poppy.

But the point of this is what people refer to themselves, so I will also add that I have never heard men refer to themselves as Papa when talking to other adults.[/quote]

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