Baby girl wants attention—decides to call dad by his ‘full government name’

A baby girl has gone viral for deciding she would be calling her father by his real name, instead of Dad, Daddy or Dada.

“She called me Da or Dada for a very little bit, but then about two weeks before this video she very clearly started referring to me by my name,” Matt, 34, who gave his first name only, told Newsweek.

Darcy, now 16 months, was 14 months old when a video of her trying to get her dad’s attention went viral.

Because, as Matt described it: “My 1 year old has completely skipped calling me daddy and gone right to calling me by my government name.”

In the clip, shared to his TikTok account @theshanes on May 14, Darcy sits on her mom, Charlotte’s, lap, and calls out “Mama.”

Then, to get her dad’s attention, she looks at the camera and begins calling his name—”Matt.”

She loudly repeats his name, over and over, throwing in a “Mama” for good measure, before going straight back to “Matt”—and as her mom tells her to “say Dada,” Darcy simply smiles.

“How do you tell a 1 year old it’s disrespectful?,” he joked in the caption.

Matt explained to Newsweek that he and wife Charlotte have a blended family, with five kids in total, and “my daughter definitely picked this up from the kids, not my wife.”

“With three of four other kids calling me Matt, and screaming it across the house all the time, she picked up on them and what gets me to come to them!”

TikTok users loved the sweet video, watching it more than 1.7 million times and awarding it more than 260,000 likes, as one commenter shared their own story: “My nieces and nephews call me by my childhood nickname that they weren’t even around for! I don’t even get an ‘aunt so and so’ anymore, it’s just my nickname my aunts always called me.”

“My 2-year-old calls my dad Rebecca (my mom’s name) they’re divorced,” another said, as another admitted: “If it helps, my 2-year-old son calls me baby. Has never once called me momma. However, he calls the cat momma.”

Babies begin babbling by around six months, stringing sounds together in preparation for speech, and generally say their first words between nine and 12 months of age, although this can vary from each individual person, according to a medically-reviewed report from The Bump.

First words tend to be something important to the baby that they encounter commonly—like Mama, Dada, a pet or sibling’s name, or food items.

This isn’t the first time baby Darcy has gone viral, Matt added, as millions of people saw the day she was born, revealing a shock of dark hair just like her father’s, after Charlotte’s other children were all born blond.

Another clip showing a comparison between Matt as a baby, and Darcy at the same age, the father and daughter looking identical to each other, also proved popular online.

“It’s crazy, she is my viral baby,” proud dad Matt said.

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