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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality

Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encounter any actual issues with this.

Sometimes people will assume we aren't married and/or divorced, and people will often call me by my wife's last name and vice versa, but it has never caused any actual problem. Never had any system that assumes we have the same last name. So many people live in blended families anyway, that very few systems/people make these assumptions any more.

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Looking at it from the other way, your mom probably didn't change her name because it's not a big deal where you live ?

People getting the issues live in different systems and/or have different needs, and it also changes with our world getting more digital. One part that doesn't much depend on locality this days would be international travel and money.

For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them (proving you're a parent not being enough). Depending on how it goes your plane could be gone by that time.

Money is the same, there;s a lot less check if you send to yourself or family than to a random stranger. Having a different name can mean your transfer getting stuck for days of back and forth.

Then again, if you're just staying in your town never dealing with anything outside of it, you might never have to think about your name in your whole life.

I mean the comment they replied to specifically mentioned moving to America. I cannot fathom this being an actual issue in the USA.

To your point(and parent's), it won't be if you're never getting out of the USA nor deal with the rest of the world.

But most people moving in don't cut all ties with their home country nor never touch their passport again I think.

We travelled internationally as a family when I was a kid. No one ever mentioned our names being different.

Again, a huge percentage of the population has divorced parents, plus all the kids born out of wedlock. That is like half the population that already don’t have the same last name as at least one of their parents. Everyone who deals with the population is going to encounter this situation every day. They aren’t going to be surprised or confused by a kid with a different name as their parent.

Did you ever travel internationally along with only one of your parents? I know of many cases around the world where authorities will definitely cause you some trouble if you try to do that, even more if somehow "expected" naming conventions don't match up. At least that's how it's been in the last 2 decades.

I travel multiple times a year internationally with my toddler. She has a different last name than me. No issues whatsoever. Yes, i bring a birth cert and a letter from her mother that we can travel, but no one has ever asked for these.

My wife doesn’t share my name or the name of our kids. We travel a lot. This has literally never been an issue ever, anywhere.

I can’t fathom this being an issue in 2025 where you can have digitized versions of your kid’s birth certificate on your phone, which indicate that you are their parent.

The kidnapping thing has nothing to do with names, if you only have one parent every country has their rules and you should check them out ahead of time.

We did it with every kid/parent and name combination. The only time we where ever asked to show papers was when the names didn't match. It shouldn't be that way, but IME it's a factor.

As you point out, being the parent doesn't really matter in that case, it needs to be proven that both parent agree on the kid leaving the country.

My mom got married in the 70s in the US. It wasn't a huge issue, but people did think she was strange.

I never experienced any of what you say as a child. We travelled internationally a number of times, never had anyone tell us she wasn't my mom or anything.

I am not sure what you mean about the money thing. My mom was on my accounts when I was a kid (with different last names) so she could send me money. As an adult, I can't see how sending money would be an issue. My mom and I transfer money to each other fairly often still ($70k recently, went through fine).

I did not stay in my home town. Not sure how they would be relevant.

Again, most people would assume (if they assumed anything) that my parents were divorced, which is incredibly common. Half my friends had different last names from their siblings and/or parent. Blended families are incredibly common.

I am now a dad of two. They have my last name, while my wife (their mom) has a different name. Again, never a problem at doctors or school or anything. They always make you fill out your full name and relationship. Again, super common to have different last names here im California.

This happened to my grandparents a few times going back and forth to Canada with me when I was a kid (before 9/11). Even with the birth certificate and whatever else, they can arbitrarily decide to waste your entire day. Better safe than sorry.

I think part of it was because the hospital I was born at was renamed just before I was born, and then demolished not too long after. I've had it trip things up before remembering to mention the original hospital name. Everyone seems generally familiar with the bullshit now, just a matter of remembering to bring it up because they're expecting it.

> For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them

Passports have your parents name, this might cause the clerk to do a double check to make sure but unless losing you or your children documents you will never run into this. Or if you are travelling without passports (which is okay between some countries) and using documents (like birth certificates) in different languages

I have heard that others have had problems with picking up children from school and with visiting their partners in the hospital. The one and only time my wife has had an issue was at a car rental company (at SFO of all places), where they insisted that she couldn't be a co-driver because we must not be married, and only married couples or employees could be co-drivers (without an additional fee).

I was eventually able to sort this out with the manager but it made me laugh that in San Francisco of all places, they would judge my wife for not changing her last name.

That’s crazy with the car rental, I wonder if that was just a rogue employee.

As for picking up kids, every place I take my kids to (school, camps, daycare, etc) require you to specifically list who is allowed to pick up their kid, no matter what their last name is. Even if you have the same last name, they aren’t going to hand the kid over unless you are on the list.

It would be crazy to let anyone pick up any kid with the same last name. Think about all the Garcias and Smiths and Kims in the world… they could pick up so many kids! Plus, most kidnappings are done by family members; any institution who hands over a kid just because the name is the same is going to open themselves up to so much liability.

The employee was a young female, which made it even a bit more ironic IMO. I don't know exactly why she believed their policy was that my wife had to have the same last name as me, but she was very apologetic when the manager corrected her.

As someone who has a different last name to my child, I constantly encounter really weird issues where people assume that I don't exist since "First name, Childs last name" doesn't exist in the database.

Really? I am curious to hear an example, because I am struggling to imagine when this would be something they would try to find you by your kids last name.

At the kid’s school, or sports team, or anything where the kid is the primary agent.

For me, it's mostly been in medical settings. I've had particular trouble with public health programs automatically signing me up under my child's last name.

I don't know if my local healthcare catchment just has their software setup wrong, but it's a continual annoyance.

Even the assumption that people have (something that can be used as) a last name is incorrect.

Currently I'm living in Indonesia, where a surprisingly large number of people have just one name (plus, when they have many, they're more often than not completely arbitrary).

This was very common practice up to the '90s. If you have a single name, they duplicate it in your passport, and you end up like "Soekarno Soekarno". Which STILL raises eyebrows in several western countries' ignorant airline employees (and sometime even immigration officers, though they're admittedly more well educated about such issues).

Nowadays they proactively give at least two names to their children to match the western(-ized) system assumptions.

I have experienced visa issues due to name differences in papers while traveling between Belarus and Russia. Monetary arguments were necessary to get through.

But this was also over a decade ago.

If the border guards are just looking for an excuse to take a bribe then it doesn't really matter what you do, they'll surely find something anyways.

Differences between your name on your passport and your name on your visa? That is completely separate thing.

If you mean different last names as your travel partner, I don’t understand why you having different last names would matter? Doesn’t each person have their own visa?

It sounds like you were just being shaken down. It didn’t matter what your name was, they just picked something bullshit to shake you down with.

> Differences between your name on your passport and your name on your visa?

It's not precisely stated in the GP, but most probably that one. Background: Russian and Belarusian spelling of names are slightly different, the latter being orthographically closer to the phonetic value. (The current Belarusian president-for-life is globally known as "Alexander Lukashenko", which is a transliteration from Russian; the Belarusian spelling, again transliterated, is "Alyaksandar Lukashenka". For the originals, see his Wikipedia page.)

N.B. I'm writing this as a non-expert in either of the languages, but I can read Russian.

Oh, it's not a problem, until you're a Kuznetsov-father trying to get on a plane with your Kuznetsova-daughter, and you become a suspect of kidnapping until you don't prove it's actually your daughter. After you get your mortally scared daughter back from authorities, you probably start thinking that having the same surname is something you actually need.

And no, US authorities won't make it easy for you or her.

I'm not fully following. Are your last names extremely similar but different, and are you also maintaining citizenship in a foreign country that uses gendered last names? Because that's the crux of the issue. Otherwise it sounds like you might be discussing a tangentially related but different point.

I had a Greek friend born in America who was assigned her father's masculine gendered surname. Her birth was not registered in Greece. When she went to register in Greece as an adult, it created loads of issues due to her surname being incorrect from a Greek perspective. It required a lot of paperwork and fees be cause the Greek system was not set up at the time to handle that correctly.

On the flip side, her mother had a number of issues in the US having an almost identical yet different surname as her husband and daughter. Less extreme but frequently people would mess up the mom or the child's surname when entering records because they'd give the surnames a quick glance and incorrectly assume they were identical. She said there were often times where systems were designed with the faulty assumption that the child would have the same name as a parent.

Now, she effectively has two surnames depending on which passport she uses. Because it's easier for her to maintain names that correspond with the different systems.

I think the gist of your argument is "they should have just kept their separate, original, gendered surnames", and I agree, that is generally the path of least resistance.

Nevertheless, the issue is real in the sense that many countries will e.g. "anglicize" your name when issueing you documentation, e.g. if your name includes characters they do not know how to handle. Having a single person with mismatching documentation _can_ cause issues. E.g. consider having two passports, with different names in them, and it's easy to see how this can cause problems.

My wife and child are regularly stopped at the border if I’m not with them, because they don’t have the same surname. I live in the UK.

I remember it being a problem in the US in the 2000s when airlines would group families together and if you have different last names, they wouldn't do it. I guess now they don't group or go by tickets instead of considering last names.

This doesn’t check out - If you had a common last name would you be grouped with a rando ?

It makes more sense to group by ticket group: buy 4 tickets then this keep them grouped

As far as I know, it's always been grouped by reservation / record locator. Like... the airlines do know how to sell more than one ticket at a time and remember that fact.

These days they're more likely to a splitting groups up on purpose to encourage juicy "known seat" upgrades.

A 20 euro-plus per seat each-way tax on people with insecure partners.

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