The moments that make parenting worth it. Historians, scientists and legal scholars offer some explanation. But only 2 percent choose to retain their maiden names as their sole surnames. Given the numbers, one might assume that choosing a child's surname is not exactly a hot button issue in the domestic arena. But it is.
Modern couples do sit down and hash out what to call their babies.
It's one of the many emotional calisthenics performed in the name of intentional parenting. As soon as I became pregnant, I became entangled in the surname debate. If my interrogator was a mother, she'd usually reply to my answer with her own creation tale of her child's surname. Often there were aesthetic critiques of various phonemes. Of course, patrilineal naming assuages both marital conventions and male egos.