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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).

I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.

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We will probably find out very soon why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.

Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).

Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.

To me, it's very clear GP was writing in support of traditional values, of which nuclear family is one.

Yes, same here. But i should admit that i hold somewhat conservative values compared to modern 2016+ societies values.

I consider my values to be very centrist and common sense, however every year i learn more and more that what i consider to be common sense isnt very common.

Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.

The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens (census-taking, tax collecting, etc.).

The idea of being named after your father (or your husband for that matter) is much older than surnames. Don't know exactly how old, because written history is only available for strong centralized states, but at least biblical times.

Yes, but the context of this thread is about taking your father's surname specifically. Even "modern societies" where wives might have the option to not take their husband's surname aren't moving away from naming sons after their fathers, as far as their given name goes.

I meant the "John son of Jack" thing. It was extremely common for thousands of years across pretty much every European culture, and Jews (likely other people too but IDK). Eventually it transformed into surnames by Jackson. The important part is that surnames didn't introduce the idea of father's name being part of your name even if you're not named after him. This was already widely practiced, surnames just streamlined the process and made ancestry more trackable (though some countries still use the old rules to this day. Spain I think, and Iceland maybe?)

Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.

That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.

So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.

Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.

So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.

But then if a child succeeds despite whatever failure his father was he is stuck with that looser name.

Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?

Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.

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