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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I consider anyone raising a child as their parents, I honestly could care less who's physical bodies were involved.

It's interesting to me that anyone raising a child wouldn't want to be considered a parent. Is the use of this term by request of people actually in this position, or wasn't created by third parties in an assumption that we shouldn't call them parents?

Caretaker and legal guardian have different and more specific meaning than parent. Those terms are needed to more clearly describe a person's situation and involvement with someone else. Again its interesting to me that one would prefer not to be called a parent when they have taken on the responsibility and roles of being a parent to a child.

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The first coworker who comes to mind for me is a guy I worked with whose sister and brother-in-law died in a car accident. As next of kin, he took the kids and eventually adopted them, but as far as I'm aware, at no point did he ever call himself their parent and I think that would have seemed oddly distasteful to do so. Uncle still works even when you're raising them.

Yep I can definitely see that, I could see myself making the same decision in that situation. I would probably reach for uncle, caretaker, or guardian. I'm still lost as to when "child-raiser" would ever be needed though, and personally feel like avoiding saying parent would be more offensive to more people than the other way around.

I.e. I could see your coworker correcting someone and saying they aren't the father or parent with little or no offense taken. Though I could see referring to someone with adopted children as "child-raiser" as being really offensive to the person, as though I effectively took away the term "parent" and everything that goes along with it.

some kids are raised by other relatives or even non-relatives. will they at some point say "my real mommy was aunt xyz"? possibly. but still in no world auntie is a parent, in all worlds she is the caretaker.

> I consider anyone raising a child as their parents

As do I. Parents are the ones doing parenting. Whether or not they are the biological parents isn't relevant to that.

My only caveat is that if someone shares with me that they don't refer to themselves as a parent I'd respect that. I just would expect that to be a pretty rare outlier all things considered, and benign if I incorrectly refer to them as a parent initially.

As a father to both biological and adopted children, I couldn't agree more. I'm Dad to all of them.

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