has your child's name caused problems in their life?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Names don’t “cause problems”. People who use your name to judge and shun you are the problem.

Yes, people who do that are a problem, I agree. But some names do cause problems, by being easily misspelled, easily mistaken for another name, hard for people where you live to pronounce, having vulgar meanings in another language, etc.

For instance, the name Beatrice was on our short list. I love the name, its history, and I especially love the Italian pronunciation (BAY-ah-TREE-chay -- we are both 2nd generation Italian Americans and both have Italian first and last names). But I knew if we used it, living in the US, it would be a pain to use the Italian pronunciation -- everyone is either going to pronounce with with English/American pronunciation (BEE-ah-tris), or some Spanish-speakers might pronounce it like Beatriz (BAY-ah-trees). People would find the Italian pronunciation either annoyingly foreign or just counterintuitive. So she would have been called by the Italian pronunciation at home and by family, and then one of two other pronunciation elsewhere, and she'd have to decide when and if to correct people as she got older.

I still love that name, and when I meet people with it, I have warm feelings. No judgment or shunning! But I viewed it as a name that could "cause problems" for my kid, so decided against it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Names don’t “cause problems”. People who use your name to judge and shun you are the problem.

Yes, people who do that are a problem, I agree. But some names do cause problems, by being easily misspelled, easily mistaken for another name, hard for people where you live to pronounce, having vulgar meanings in another language, etc.

For instance, the name Beatrice was on our short list. I love the name, its history, and I especially love the Italian pronunciation (BAY-ah-TREE-chay -- we are both 2nd generation Italian Americans and both have Italian first and last names). But I knew if we used it, living in the US, it would be a pain to use the Italian pronunciation -- everyone is either going to pronounce with with English/American pronunciation (BEE-ah-tris), or some Spanish-speakers might pronounce it like Beatriz (BAY-ah-trees). People would find the Italian pronunciation either annoyingly foreign or just counterintuitive. So she would have been called by the Italian pronunciation at home and by family, and then one of two other pronunciation elsewhere, and she'd have to decide when and if to correct people as she got older.

I still love that name, and when I meet people with it, I have warm feelings. No judgment or shunning! But I viewed it as a name that could "cause problems" for my kid, so decided against it.

I have a friend whose husband is from Italy and she named her daughter Beatrice. It was such a pain having to tell people how to pronounce it that they started calling her by the middle name and eventually actually legally changed her name to the middle name. I love it when the husband would pronounce the name- it sounded so pretty in Italian. But even people who knew the pronunciation never made it sound as good, unfortunately

[Anonymous]

My mother gave me what she thought was a unique name. I hated it because it was always mispronounced and misspelled. My husband has a foreign name that got him picked on in school.

We gave our son one of the top 20 most common American boys names of all time. He doesn't seem to dislike it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My mother gave me what she thought was a unique name. I hated it because it was always mispronounced and misspelled. My husband has a foreign name that got him picked on in school.

We gave our son one of the top 20 most common American boys names of all time. He doesn't seem to dislike it.

They are classics for a reason!

Also, a lot of people tend to prefer classics for boys’ names and go for goofy names when it comes to girls. As a woman, I don’t like this. My DH was into frilly names when it came to naming our girls and I told him to picture them with these names in the board room at work, not just toddling around being adorable.