I read the aeries_talk yahoo listserv about the contact name disappears if only mailing name is used.
I shared it with my sites so that they will be sure to enter the last name and first name instead of just entering mailing name.

I would like to suggest that the mailing name field is grayed out and not editable.

One of the sites contacted me to ask if parents can be doing the same thing when they update their contact info in Parent Portal.
I emulated a parent account to see if I can do that. I would usually go to the Data Confirmation page to see if I can test this but I saw that the Contacts page had the edit button and I can make the change there directly.
I tested this and was able to emulate updating a contact name by clearing the last and first name and only used the mailing name and it resulted in clearing the contact name when saved.
I am concerned that when parents make changes in the contacts directly instead of going through the Data Confirmation, the sites won’t receive a change notification. Shouldn’t they be able to do it through Data Confirmation only?